Download or read book Dissident Histories in the Soviet Union written by Barbara Martin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-05-16 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How was it possible to write history in the Soviet Union, under strict state control and without access to archives? What methods of research did these 'historians' - be they academic, that is based at formal institutions, or independent - rely on? And how was their work influenced by their complex and shifting relationships with the state? To answer these questions, Barbara Martin here tracks the careers of four bold and important dissidents: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Roy Medvedev, Aleksandr Nekrich and Anton Antonov-Ovseenko. Based on extensive archival research and interviews (with some of the authors themselves, as well as those close to them), the result is a nuanced and very necessary history of Soviet dissident history writing, from the relative liberalisation of de-Stalinisation through increasing repression and persecution in the Brezhnev era to liberalisation once more during perestroika. In the process Martin sheds light onto late Soviet society and its relationship with the state, as well as the ways in which this dissidence participated in weakening the Soviet regime during Perestroika. This is important reading for all scholars working on late Soviet history and society.

Download or read book Dissidents among Dissidents written by Ilya Budraitskis and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2022-01-18 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How have the fall of the USSR and the long dominance of Putin reshaped Russian politics and culture? Ilya Budraitskis, one of the country's most prominent leftist political commentators, explores the strange fusion of free-market ideology and postmodern nationalism that now prevails in Russia, and describes the post-Soviet evolution of its left. He incisively describes the twists and contradictions of the Kremlin's geopolitical fantasies, which blend up-to-date references to "information wars" with nostalgic celebrations of the tsars of Muscovy. Despite the revival of aggressive Cold War rhetoric, he argues, the Putin regime takes its bearings not from any Soviet inheritance, but from reactionary thinkers such as the White émigré Ivan Ilyin. Budraitskis makes an invaluable contribution by reconstructing the forgotten history of the USSR's dissident left, mapping an entire alternative tradition of heterodox Marxist and socialist thought from Khrushchev's Thaw to Gorbachev's perestroika. Doubly outsiders, within an intelligentsia dominated by liberal humanists, they offer a potential way out of the impasse between condemnations of the entire Soviet era and blanket nostalgia for Communist Party rule--suggesting new paths for the left to explore.

Download or read book Dissident for Life written by Koenraad De Wolf and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2013-02-07 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This gripping book tells the largely unknown story of longtime Russian dissident Alexander Ogorodnikov -- from Communist youth to religious dissident, in the Gulag and back again. Ogorodnikov's courage has touched people from every walk of life, including world leaders such as Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher. In the 1970s Ogorodnikov performed a feat without precedent in the Soviet Union: he organized thousands of Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic Christians in an underground group called the Christian Seminar. When the KGB gave him the option to leave the Soviet Union rather than face the Gulag, he firmly declined because he wanted to change "his" Russia from the inside out. His willingness to sacrifice himself and be imprisoned meant leaving behind his wife and newborn child. Ogorodnikov spent nine years in the Gulag, barely surviving the horrors he encountered there. Despite KGB harassment and persecution after his release, he refused to compromise his convictions and went on to found the first free school in the Soviet Union, the first soup kitchen, and the first private shelter for orphans, among other accomplishments. Today this man continues to carry on his struggle against government detainments and atrocities, often alone. Readers will be amazed and inspired by Koenraad De Wolf's authoritative account of Ogorodnikov's life and work.

Download or read book State of Madness written by Rebecca Reich and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What madness meant was a fiercely contested question in Soviet society. State of Madness examines the politically fraught collision between psychiatric and literary discourses in the years after Joseph Stalin's death. State psychiatrists deployed set narratives of mental illness to pathologize dissenting politics and art. Dissidents such as Aleksandr Vol'pin, Vladimir Bukovskii, and Semen Gluzman responded by highlighting a pernicious overlap between those narratives and their life stories. The state, they suggested in their own psychiatrically themed texts, had crafted an idealized view of reality that itself resembled a pathological work of art. In their unsanctioned poetry and prose, the writers Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Siniavskii, and Venedikt Erofeev similarly engaged with psychiatric discourse to probe where creativity ended and insanity began. Together, these dissenters cast themselves as psychiatrists to a sick society. By challenging psychiatry's right to declare them or what they wrote insane, dissenters exposed as a self-serving fiction the state's renewed claims to rationality and modernity in the post-Stalin years. They were, as they observed, like the child who breaks the spell of collective delusion in Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Emperor's New Clothes." In a society where normality means insisting that the naked monarch is clothed, it is the truth-teller who is pathologized. Situating literature's encounter with psychiatry at the center of a wider struggle over authority and power, this bold interdisciplinary study will appeal to literary specialists; historians of culture, science, and medicine; and scholars and students of the Soviet Union and its legacy for Russia today.

Download or read book The Dissidents written by Peter Reddaway and published by . This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nearly forgotten story of Soviet dissidents It has been nearly three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union--enough time for the role that the courageous dissidents ultimately contributed to the communist system's collapse to have been largely forgotten, especially in the West. This book brings to life, for contemporary readers, the often underground work of the men and women who opposed the regime and authored dissident texts, known as samizdat, that exposed the tyrannies and weaknesses of the Soviet state both inside and outside the country. Peter Reddaway spent decades studying the Soviet Union and got to know these dissidents and their work, publicizing their writings in the West and helping some of them to escape the Soviet Union and settle abroad. In this memoir he captures the human costs of the repression that marked the Soviet state, focusing in particular on Pavel Litvinov, Larisa Bogoraz, General Petro Grigorenko, Anatoly Marchenko, Alexander Podrabinek, Vyacheslav Bakhmin, and Andrei Sinyavsky. His book describes their courage but also puts their work in the context of the power struggles in the Kremlin, where politicians competed with and even succeeded in ousting one another. Reddaway's book takes readers beyond Moscow, describing politics and dissident work in other major Russian cities as well as in the outlying republics.

Download or read book Roy and Zhores Medvedev written by Barbara Martin and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The unique trajectory of Soviet dissident twin brothers Roy and Zhores Medvedev takes us through a century of history, from Stalin to Putin. They achieved fame as the first authors of independent research on Stalinism from within the USSR, but their lives were also marked by controversy.

Download or read book On Dissidents and Madness written by Robert van Voren and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2009 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book contains the memoirs of Robert van Voren covering the period 1977-2008 and provides unique insights into the dissident movement in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, both inside the country and abroad. As a result of his close friendship with many of the leading dissidents and his dozens of trips to the USSR as a courier, he had intimate knowledge of the ins and outs of the dissident movement and participated in many of the campaigns to obtain the release of Soviet political prisoners. In the late 1980s he became involved in building a humane and ethical practice of psychiatry in Eastern Europe and the (ex-) USSR, based on respect for the human rights of persons with mental illness. The book describes the dissident movement and many of the people who formed it, mental health reformers in Eastern Europe and the response of the Western psychiatric community, the battle with the World Psychiatric Association over Soviet, and later, Chinese political abuse of psychiatry, his contacts with former KGB officers and problems with the KGB's successor organization, the FSB. It also vividly describes the emotional effects of serving as a courier for the dissident movement, the fear of arrest, the pain of seeing friends disappear for many years into camps and prisons, sometimes never to return.

Download or read book The Legacy of Soviet Dissent written by Robert Horvath and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-13 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 1970s, dissidents like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn dominated Western perceptions of the USSR, but were then quickly forgotten, as Gorbachev's reformers monopolised the spotlight. This book restores the dissidents to their rightful place in Russian history. Using a vast array of samizdat and published sources, it shows how ideas formulated in the dissident milieu clashed with the original programme of perestroika, and shaped the course of democratisation in post-Soviet Russia. Some of these ideas - such the dissidents' preoccupation with glasnost and legality, and their critique of revolutionary violence - became part of the agenda of Russia's democratic movement. But this book also demonstrates that dissidents played a crucial role in the rise of the new Russian radical nationalism. Both the friends and foes of Russian democracy have a dissident lineage.

Download or read book The Universe Behind Barbed Wire written by Miroslav Marinovič and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2021 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ukrainian dissident Myroslav Marynovych recounts his involvement in the Brezhnev-era human rights movement in the Soviet Union and his resulting years as a political prisoner in Siberia and in internal exile.

Download or read book On Dissidents and Madness written by Robert van Voren and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book contains the memoirs of Robert van Voren covering the period 1977-2008 and provides unique insights into the dissident movement in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, both inside the country and abroad.As a result of his close friendship with many of the leading dissidents and his dozens of trips to the USSR as a courier, he had intimate knowledge of the ins and outs of the dissident movement and participated in many of the campaigns to obtain the release of Soviet political prisoners. In the late 1980s he became involved in building a humane and ethical practice of psychiatry in Eastern Europe and the (ex-) USSR, based on respect for the human rights of persons with mental illness.The book describes the dissident movement and many of the people who formed it, mental health reformers in Eastern Europe and the response of the Western psychiatric community, the battle with the World Psychiatric Association over Soviet, and later, Chinese political abuse of psychiatry, his contacts with former KGB officers and problems with the KGB’s successor organization, the FSB. It also vividly describes the emotional effects of serving as a courier for the dissident movement, the fear of arrest, the pain of seeing friends disappear for many years into camps and prisons, sometimes never to return.

Download or read book Death of a Dissident written by Alex Goldfarb and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-12-25 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first reports seemed absurd. A Russian dissident, formerly an employee of the KGB and its successor, the FSB, had seemingly been poisoned in a London hotel. As Alexander Litvinenko's condition worsened, however, and he was transferred to hospital and placed under armed guard, the story took a sinister turn. On 23 November 2006, Litvinenko died, apparently from polonium-210 radiation poisoning. He himself, in a dramatic statement from his deathbed, accused his former employers at the Kremlin of being responsible for his murder. Who was Alexander Litvinenko? What had happened in Russia since the end of the Cold War to make his life there untenable, and even in severe jeopardy in Britain? How did he really die, and who killed him? In his spokesman and close friend, Alex Goldfarb, and widow Marina, we have two people who know more than anyone about the real Sasha Litvinenko, and about his murder. Their riveting book sheds astonishing light not just on these strange and troubling events but also on the biggest crisis in relations with Russia since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Download or read book Dissident Gardens written by Jonathan Lethem and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dazzling novel from one of our finest writers—an epic yet intimate family saga about three generations of all-American radicals At the center of Jonathan Lethem’s superb new novel stand two extraordinary women: Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an unreconstructed Communist who savages neighbors, family, and political comrades with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs. Her precocious and willful daughter, Miriam, equally passionate in her activism, flees Rose’s influence to embrace the dawning counterculture of Greenwich Village. These women cast spells over the men in their lives: Rose’s aristocratic German Jewish husband, Albert; her cousin, the feckless chess hustler Lenny Angrush; Cicero Lookins, the brilliant son of her black cop lover; Miriam’s (slightly fraudulent) Irish folksinging husband, Tommy Gogan; their bewildered son, Sergius. Flawed and idealistic, Lethem’s characters struggle to inhabit the utopian dream in an America where radicalism is viewed with bemusement, hostility, or indifference. As the decades pass—from the parlor communism of the ’30s, McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, ragged ’70s communes, the romanticization of the Sandinistas, up to the Occupy movement of the moment—we come to understand through Lethem’s extraordinarily vivid storytelling that the personal may be political, but the political, even more so, is personal. Lethem’s characters may pursue their fates within History with a capital H, but his novel is—at its mesmerizing, beating heart—about love.

Download or read book To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause written by Benjamin Nathans and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-08-13 with total page 816 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping history of the Soviet dissident movement, which hastened the end of the USSR—and still provides a model of opposition in Putin’s Russia Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was unexpectedly confronted by a dissident movement that captured the world’s imagination. Demanding that the Kremlin obey its own laws, an improbable band of Soviet citizens held unauthorized public gatherings, petitioned in support of arrested intellectuals, and circulated banned samizdat texts. Soviet authorities arrested dissidents, subjected them to bogus trials and vicious press campaigns, sentenced them to psychiatric hospitals and labor camps, sent them into exile—and transformed them into martyred heroes. Against all odds, the dissident movement undermined the Soviet system and unexpectedly hastened its collapse. Taking its title from a toast made at dissident gatherings, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause is a definitive history of a remarkable group of people who helped change the twentieth century. Benjamin Nathans’s vivid narrative tells the dramatic story of the men and women who became dissidents—from Nobel laureates Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn to many others who are virtually unknown today. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, personal letters, interviews, and KGB interrogation records, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause reveals how dissidents decided to use Soviet law to contain the power of the Soviet state. This strategy, as one of them put it, was “simple to the point of genius: in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.” An extraordinary account of the Soviet dissident movement, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause shows how dissidents spearheaded the struggle to break free of the USSR’s totalitarian past, a struggle that continues in Putin’s Russia—and that illuminates other struggles between hopelessness and perseverance today.

Download or read book The Jewish Movement in the Soviet Union written by Yaacov Ro'i and published by Woodrow Wilson Center Press / Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: satisfaction of his denouement.

Download or read book Dissident Histories in the Soviet Union written by Barbara Martin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-05-16 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How was it possible to write history in the Soviet Union, under strict state control and without access to archives? What methods of research did these 'historians' - be they academic, that is based at formal institutions, or independent - rely on? And how was their work influenced by their complex and shifting relationships with the state? To answer these questions, Barbara Martin here tracks the careers of four bold and important dissidents: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Roy Medvedev, Aleksandr Nekrich and Anton Antonov-Ovseenko. Based on extensive archival research and interviews (with some of the authors themselves, as well as those close to them), the result is a nuanced and very necessary history of Soviet dissident history writing, from the relative liberalisation of de-Stalinisation through increasing repression and persecution in the Brezhnev era to liberalisation once more during perestroika. In the process Martin sheds light onto late Soviet society and its relationship with the state, as well as the ways in which this dissidence participated in weakening the Soviet regime during Perestroika. This is important reading for all scholars working on late Soviet history and society.

Download or read book A Ransomed Dissident written by Igor Golomstock and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-25 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1939, a ten-year-old Igor Golomstock accompanied his mother, a medical doctor, to the vast network of labour camps in the Russian Far East. While she tended patients, he was minded by assorted 'trusty' prisoners – hardened criminals – and returned to Moscow an almost feral adolescent, fluent in obscene prison jargon but intellectually ignorant. Despite this dubious start he became a leading art historian and co-author (with his close friend Andrey Sinyavsky) of the first, deeply controversial, monograph on Picasso published in the Soviet Union. His writings on his 43 years in the Soviet Union offer a rare insight into life as a quietly subversive art historian and the post-Stalin dissident community. In vivid prose Golomstock shows the difficulties of publishing, curating and talking about Western art in Soviet Russia and, with self-deprecating humour, the absurd tragicomedy of life for the Moscow intelligentsia during Khruschev's thaw and Brezhnev's stagnation. He also offers a unique personal perspective on the 1966 trial of Sinyavsky and Yuri Daniel, widely considered the end of Khruschev's liberalism and the spark that ignited the Soviet dissident movement. In 1972 he was given 'permission' to leave the Soviet Union, but only after paying a 'ransom' of more than 25 years' salary, nominally intended to reimburse the state for his education. A remarkable collection of artists, scholars and intellectuals in Russia and the West, including Roland Penrose, came together to help him pay this astronomical sum. His memoirs of life once in the UK offer an insider's view of the BBC Russian Service and a penetrating analysis of the notorious feud between Sinyavsky and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Nominated for the Russian Booker Prize on its publication in Russian in 2014, The Ransomed Dissident opens a window onto the life of a remarkable man: a dissident of uncompromising moral integrity and with an outstanding gift for friendship.

Download or read book Swimming in the Daylight written by Lisa C. Paul and published by Skyhorse. This book was released on 2014-08-05 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In September 1984, Lisa Paul, an American college student living in Moscow and working as a nanny, enters Inna Meiman’s house for her first Russian language lesson. And so begins a two year friendship and fight for Inna’s life. Swimming in the Daylight chronicles Inna’s struggle to shed her refusnik status and to be granted a visa to travel to America, seeking medical treatment for the cancer that is slowly killing her. Inna reveals an indomitable spirit as she endures a perverse reality as a citizen of the Soviet Union—she must deny invitations from countries in the West to receive life-saving cancer treatment due to her inability to receive a visa from her own government. This refusal, Inna explains to Lisa, is the Soviet authorities’ way of persecuting her and her husband Naum, a member of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group fighting for human rights in the USSR. Spurred by outrage and the desire to help her friend, Lisa returns to the United States, vowing to do all she can to get Inna out of Moscow. Lisa stages a hunger strike, holds a press conference, and galvanizes American politicians to fight for Inna’s freedom. All these efforts eventually succeed in pursuing Mikhail Gorbachev to issue Inna a visa in December 1986, and she finally steps foot on American soil. At a time when international strife seems insurmountable and worries at home seem to paralyze, this story will teach people everywhere that it is the courage inside that defines a person and can change the future.