Dissent in the Soviet Union

Under Stalin, Soviet society was effectively atomized by the application over two decades of mass terror. In an important if paradoxical sense, it was depoliticized. Since his death in 1953 a process of incipient repoliticization has begun, affecting both the apparat that rules the country and many groups outside it. The process was encouraged in various deliberate and nondeliberate ways by Khrushchev, but has developed much faster under his successors. This has been partly in reaction to their tendency to try to discourage it and, in important respects, to reverse it. One could also perhaps say that in the absence of a return to mass terror such a process has been inevitable. In any case, most of the groups outside the apparat have developed increasingly dissenting features, a trend that seems sure to continue.

Today the leadership of the apparat possesses enormous power, but probably decreasing authority (at any rate at home). A similar situation existed, we might note in passing, in the last decades of the Czarist period. Today’s leadership cannot, however, try to increase its authority by adopting a new ideology or seriously atoning for the past, as such a course appears to it much more risky—cf. Khrushchev’s partial attempts—than “clinging on.”

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