“It is impossible to explain this by any considerations of expediency” – Weekend
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55 years ago, on August 25, 1968, four days after the Soviet Union sent troops to Prague, eight people – Konstantin Babitsky, Tatyana Baeva, Larisa Bogoraz, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Vadim Delaunay, Vladimir Dremlyuga, Pavel Litvinov and Viktor Fainberg – went to Red Square and unfurled posters in support of the independence of Czechoslovakia. All of them were detained, sentenced or sent for compulsory treatment. This action became the most famous and significant protest in the history of the Soviet dissident movement, but not the only one – hundreds of people in the USSR, risking their freedom, went on pickets, printed and distributed banned literature, and helped political prisoners and their families. We re-read interviews and memoirs of dissidents to understand what made them resist the regime.
1
We didn’t think that Brezhnev would come out of the Kremlin gates, hug us, burst into tears and say: “Oh, thank you, but I, a fool, didn’t understand what I was doing!” We went out for ourselves. We did not think at all that we were someone’s conscience. Everyone had their own work, and this conscience wanted to be clear, so we came out.
Natalia Gorbanevskaya
2
The demonstration of August 25 is not a manifestation of a political struggle… but a manifestation of a moral struggle… Proceed from the premise that truth is needed for the sake of truth, and not for anything else; that the dignity of a person does not allow him to put up with evil, even if he is powerless to prevent this evil.
Anatoly Yakobson
3
There were no specific tasks. There was no task – in ten years to build this and that. There was everyday life, without panache and without posture. But only with the preservation of their moral obligations, foundations. <...> There was no desire to see the dawn of freedom, that’s what we definitely didn’t have. The Decembrists may have had it.
Vera Lashkova
4
When you get into this world, into this clip, it is almost impossible to get out of there. Only giving up very serious things. And that means the future is already predetermined.
Vyacheslav Bakhmin
5
We believed that we should express our opinion and fight for human rights. Few people at that time thought about how to build the future. We decided that there would be freedom – and then everything would come.
Pavel Litvinov
6
Weak perturbations can have gigantic consequences. <...> A well-known Western correspondent, I don’t remember who, asked Andrei Dmitrievich if he expected any changes in the Soviet Union. Thinking, A.D. answered: “In the foreseeable future, it will not.” – “Why are you doing what you are doing?” the correspondent asked. “What can the intelligentsia do? Just build the ideal. Let everyone do what they can.” Then he thought and said: “However, the mole of history digs imperceptibly.”
Sergey Kovalev
7
When I started thinking about it back at MIPT, I understood a thing that many people also talk about: that if you don’t go into politics yourself, then it will take care of you anyway, it will come to your house at the right time. And then you will be surprised: what happened? And you knew nothing about it, you were not interested in it. As long as you are not interested in this, you can get a lot of surprises from the authorities, from politics. So it makes sense to be interested. <...> We wanted people to know the truth. We wanted the information to be different, varied, so that people would have access to this information. That is, we wanted people to consciously determine their behavior, their lives, based on some reality, more or less objective, and not from any one source.
Vyacheslav Bakhmin
8
So I started writing, say, “Black Market Technology” not at all because I wanted to change the system. I wanted – and it worried me, tormented me – I wanted to present the then dominant lie, I wanted to say that this is not what you say, in fact it is not true – what you say, but the truth is this. Here she is, really!
Lev Timofeev
9
We were not involved in politics, but, so to speak, “politics” was engaged in us. And in the USSR, apoliticality and independence, not to mention any defiant behavior, already constituted a crime: “Whoever is not with us is against us.” I suspect that a person has some kind of gene of conformity – or rather, a gene of non-conformity: it happens that in the same families one son willingly compromises, while the other is stubborn, and how many similar cases were predicted in civil wars even in the Gospel… So, perhaps, the Soviet psychiatrist Snezhnevsky, with his diagnosis of “reformist nonsense”, used against dissidents, was not so wrong.
Mikhail Meilakh
10
Our main impulse was not to remake Russia, but simply not to be a participant in the crime. Don’t become part of the regime.
Vladimir Bukovsky
eleven
Dissident thinking is “I am here and now doing this. Why am I doing this? Forgive me, according to Tolstoy, according to Sartre and according to all existentialists – I can’t do otherwise.” This is a purely existential act emanating from a moral impulse, although it is formalized as an act of protecting the right.
Alexander Daniel
12
It must be said that all the people who participated in the public awakening tried to do something – some practically tried, and some just took a stand: they remembered that they are people and that human dignity is not just a sound. The main thing that united them all was that they were people who were tired of being afraid. It was not difficult, looking around, to understand that this should not be so. And only fear forced people to admit that everything is fine.
Sergei Khodorovich
13
It is impossible to explain the dissident mode of action and behavior by any considerations of expediency. <...> They, in fact, did not hope to help those whom they defended by their actions (although they wished this with all their hearts). They were not going to arrange revolutions, to overthrow the Soviet government (no matter how internally they treated it). And they clearly understood that their actions would entail repression against them. But they couldn’t do otherwise.
Leonard Ternovsky
14
I was faced with a choice: protest or remain silent. For me, to remain silent meant to join in the approval of actions that I do not approve of. To remain silent meant to me to lie.
Larisa Bogoraz
15
For the political situation in the country, this or that signature could have no meaning, but for the signatory himself, it could become a kind of catharsis, a break with the system of double thinking in which the “Soviet person” was brought up from childhood. The dissidents did an ingeniously simple thing – in an unfree country they began to behave like free people and thereby change the moral atmosphere and the tradition that governs the country.
Andrei Amalrik
16
I was a normal person. If my friends are judged, then it is quite natural that I was there.
Elena Bonner
17
For the rest of my life, the poetic revelation of a first-year student of the philological faculty of Irkutsk University, written in 1956, has become a textbook for me. “I love my country. This is not a phrase. But how can I combine my love with disbelief, which not immediately, but firmly occupied my whole life … I am gloomier and angrier every day. Every day my unbelief grows stronger than my love. I suffocate in it!” Opening its mouth, the fish did not yawn at all. She was suffocating from the unbelief filling her soul.
Leonid Borodin
18
First of all, it is a form of overcoming political immorality.
Grigory Pomerants
19
The atmosphere of social injustice, economic senselessness, political immorality, which accompanied us all our lives, at some point became unbearable. Crystals are thrown into a saturated solution, and supersaturation occurs, crystallization begins. I didn’t have the strength to be ironic and sigh, I didn’t have the strength to live and work, to look into the eyes of my own children. In addition, there was no sweet opportunity to hide in ignorance and ignorance – you had to be aware of complicity. <...> All the same, it was a blessing – a protest against injustice, protection of the weak, denunciation of abomination.
Felix Svetov
20
After the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel, since 1966, not a single act of arbitrariness and violence of the authorities has passed without a public protest, without a rebuff. This is a precious tradition, the beginning of people’s self-liberation from humiliating fear, from involvement in evil.
Anatoly Yakobson
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