Abstract
In the wake of recent debates about “Soviet subjectivity”, the dissidents known as “rights defenders” (pravozashchitniki) would appear to be among the few remaining candidates for the role of liberals in Soviet history. Their version of liberalism, however, can be understood only when situated in the specificities of the late Soviet setting. Rather than regarding liberal ideas as an import product, this chapter suggests that rights defenders developed an indigenous version of liberalism that creatively deployed Soviet constitutional norms – themselves a reworking of Western rights discourse – while remaining wholly detached from such traditional liberal values as private property and market relations. In the relentlessly politicized circumstances of Soviet life, the dissidents’ most radically liberal gesture was to insist on the non-political nature of their work.
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Notes
- 1.
For some key moments in the debate, see Jochen Hellbeck and Igal Halfin, “Rethinking the Stalinist Subject: Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain and the State of Soviet Historical Studies”, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 44, no. 3, 1996, pp. 456–463; Anna Krylova, “The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies”, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 1, 2000, pp. 119–146; Eric Naiman, “On Soviet Subjects and the Scholars Who Make Them”, Russian Review 60, no. 3, July 2001, pp.: 307–315; Alexander Etkind, “Soviet Subjectivity: Torture for the Sake of Salvation?”, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 1, 2005, pp. 171–186; Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Andrew Zimmerman, “Foucault in Berkeley and Magnitogorsk: Totalitarianism and the Limits of Liberal Critique”, Contemporary European History 23, May 2014, pp. 225–236.
- 2.
For three post-Soviet histories of the movement, see Aleksandr Shubin, Dissidenty, neformaly i svoboda v SSSR (Moskva: Veche, 2008); Marco Clementi, Storia del dissenso sovietico (Roma: Odradek, 2007); and Cécile Vaissié, Pour votre liberté et pour la nôtre. Le Combat des dissidents de Russie (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1999).
- 3.
Paul Lyons, “Torture in the USSR”, National Review, 16 December 1969.
- 4.
Isaiah Berlin, Affirming: Letters 1975–1997 (London: Chatto & Windus, 2015), pp. 81–82.
- 5.
Jerzy Szacki, Liberalism After Communism (Budapest-New York: Central European University Press, 1995), p. 25.
- 6.
Alexei Yurchak, Everything was forever until it was no more: the last Soviet generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Benjamin Tromly, “Intelligentsia Self-Fashioning in the Postwar Soviet Union: Revol’t Pimenov’s Political Struggle, 1949–57”, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 13, no. 1, Winter 2012, pp. 151–176; Serguei Oushakine, “The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat”, Public Culture 13, no. 2, Spring 2001, pp. 191–214. For responses, see Kevin Platt and Benjamin Nathans, “Sotsialisticheskaya po forme, neopredelennaya po soderzhaniyu: pozdnesovetskaya kul’tura i kniga Alekseia Iurchaka, ‘Vse bylo navechno, poka ne konchilos’”, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 101, 2010, pp. 167–184, and Benjamin Nathans, “Thawed Selves: A Commentary on the Soviet First Person”, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 13, no. 1, Winter 2012, pp. 177–183.
- 7.
Oushakine, “Terrifying Mimicry”, pp. 195, 203.
- 8.
Yurchak , “Everything Was Forever”, pp. 6, 104, 107, 130.
- 9.
Bolshaia Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya, 2nd edition, vol. 25 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Bolshaia Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya, 1954), p. 73.
- 10.
Benjamin Nathans, “The Dictatorship of Reason: Aleksandr Vol’pin and the Idea of Rights under ‘Developed Socialism’”, Slavic Review 66, no. 4, Winter 2007, pp. 630–663.
- 11.
Donna Bahry, “Society Transformed? Rethinking the Social Roots of Perestroika”, Slavic Review 52, no. 3, Autumn 1993, pp. 512–554.
- 12.
Iurii Orlov, “Vozmozhen li sotsializm ne-totalitarnogo tipa?” signed December 15, 1975, published in Materialy samizdata 11 (1976) [Arkhiv samizdata document no. 2425]; reprinted in Pavel Litvinov, Mikhail Meerson-Aksenov, and Boris Shragin (eds.), Samosoznanie: Sbornik stat’ei (Belmont: Nordland, 1976), pp. 279–303.
- 13.
Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
- 14.
Szacki , “Liberalism After Communism”, pp. 12, 59.
- 15.
On the Fifth Directorate, see A. Smykalin, “Ideologicheskii’ kontrol’ i Piatoe upravlenie KGB SSSR v 1967–1989 gg”., Voprosy istorii no. 8 (Aug. 2011): 30–40; for an insider’s account, see F. D. Bobkov, KGB i vlast’ (Moscow: Veteran MP, 1995), pp. 190–214.
- 16.
F. D. Bobkov, “Ideologicheskaia diversiia imperializma protiv SSSR i deiatel’nosti organov KGB po bor’be s nei”, report presented at a January 1964 conference at the Dzerzhinskii KGB Higher School in Moscow. See LYA (Lithuanian Special Archive) op. 10, d. 325, ll. 25–36. Bobkov became head of the Fifth Directorate in 1968 and remained in that position for a decade and a half.
- 17.
See Jennifer Amos, “Embracing and Contesting: The Soviet Union and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948–1958”, in Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (ed.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 147–165.
- 18.
See the full text of all four Soviet constitutions (1918, 1924, 1936, and 1977) in Aryeh Unger, Constitutional Development in the USSR: A Guide to the Soviet Constitutions (New York: Pica Press, 1982); quoted passages on pp. 28–9. On Soviet rights discourse more generally, see Benjamin Nathans, “Soviet Rights-Talk in the Post-Stalin Era”, in Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, (ed.), “Human Rights in the Twentieth Century”, pp. 166–190.
- 19.
The supposed motives range from the purely propagandistic (vis-à-vis foreign and/or domestic audiences) to an attempt to realize the full potential of the civil and political rights promised but not delivered by bourgeois liberal states. For fuller analysis and key scholarly works, see Nathans, “Soviet Rights Talk”.
- 20.
Quoted in M. A. Abramov, “Liberalizm v SSSR”, in M. A. Abramov (ed.), Opyt russkogo liberalizma: antologiia (Мoscow: Kanon, 1997), p. 444.
- 21.
NV, “O nekotoryhk nedobrosovestnykh revniteliakh prav sovetskogo cheloveka”, Novoe vremia 1, January 1976, pp. 18–22.
- 22.
See for example the report cards of Andrei Amal’rik from the mid-1950s, in which the “Constitution of the USSR” is listed as a required subject. See Harvard University, Houghton Library, Sakharov Collection, Amal’rik Papers, Box 3, Folder 27. Commemorative postage stamps celebrating various articles of the Soviet Constitution were issued in 1951, on the fifteenth anniversary of its ratification. On the influence more generally of the rights language in the 1936 Constitution, see Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 102–108.
- 23.
Sergej Kowaljow [Sergei Kovalev], Der Flug des weißen Raben. Von Sibirien nach Tschetschenien: Eine Lebensreise (Berlin : Rowohlt, 1997), pp. 19–22. The standard interpretation of Article 125 held that the subordinate clauses “in conformity with the interests of the toilers” and “for the purpose of strengthening the socialist order” were meant to impose limits on the content of the various enumerated freedoms. In Kovalev’s creative (mis)reading, however, they are semantically linked to the phrase “shall be guaranteed by law”, suggesting that it is the singular act of granting civil freedoms to Soviet citizens - rather the ongoing interpretation of their content - that is supposed to conform to the interest of toilers and strengthen the socialist order.
- 24.
Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1856), p. 137.
- 25.
James R. Millar, “The Little Deal: Brezhnev’s Contribution to Acquisitive Socialism”, Slavic Review 44, no. 4, Winter 1985, pp. 694–706. The second saying appears to date back to the tsarist era.
- 26.
Irina Verblovskaia, Moi prekrasnyi strashnyi vek (St. Petersburg: Zhurnal Zvezda, 2011), p. 133.
- 27.
Nikolai Berdiaev, Istoki i smysl russkogo kommunizma (Paris: YMCA Press, 1955), p. 93.
- 28.
On continuities between late Soviet intelligentsia liberalism and that of the post-Soviet era, see Mark Lipovetsky, “The Poetics of ITR Discourse: In the 1960s and Today”, Ab Imperio 1, 2013, pp. 109–31, and the commentaries that follow; Robert Horvath, The Legacy of Soviet Dissent: Dissidents, Democratisation, and Radical Nationalism in Russia (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005).
- 29.
For a view of dissidents as traitors, see for example Filipp Bobkov, Kak gotovili predatelei: Nachal’nik politicheskoi kontrrazvedki svidetel’stvuet (Moscow: Eksmo-Algoritm, 2011).
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Nathans, B. (2019). Human Rights Defenders Within Soviet Politics. In: Cucciolla, R.M. (eds) Dimensions and Challenges of Russian Liberalism. Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05784-8_5
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