(Glasnost) and Democratization
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CHAPTER 1 OVERVIEW In the early 1980s, well before Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of openness (glasnost) and democratization sparked unofficial expression in the Soviet Union, an activist in one of the nation's few openly political, independent organizations worked to popularize a slogan with a counter-Orwellian twist: "Little Brother is Watching Back."1 Although the activist, Sergei Batovrin, among the founders of the independent peace movement, emigrated in 1983, his motto has proved prophetic. In thousands of self-starting groups of widely diverse size and orientation, Soviet citizens have begun the process of reconstituting civil society that Communist rulers had sought since 1917 to eradicate. Although still seen and felt mainly at lower political levels, these nyeformalniye ob'yedinyeniya, informal associations, are sowing seeds of democracy on harsh but not hopeless ground. Their expanding activity, among both youthful and mature citizens, is moving the Soviet public from totalitarian conformity and passivity to the kind of active pluralism that could grow to check the power of the Communist Party and the Soviet state. The emergence of so many spontaneous, free associations since 1986 is working a significant, perhaps fundamental, change on Soviet life. What was for so long a grey and mute mass has begun to speak out in a chorus of vigorous, even dissonant voices. A society that was atomized by Stalinist terror has 1 begun to structure itself. Through their membership in the groups, individuals who were powerless in the face of central authority have acquired muscle and influence. For even when they are affiliated to some degree with official institutions, the informal clubs generally operate not under the direction of those in power but on the initiative of their own members. Nicknamed nyeformaly, or "informals," to distinguish them from participants in officially organized and controlled bodies, these millions of historic preservationists, environmentalists, rock-music devotees, nationalists, human rights campaigners, body-builders, pacifists, sports fans, Afghan war veterans, hippies, political activists and others are the grassroots and sometimes the strategists of a social movement. Far from a united movement, it is nevertheless a force for joining citizens with one another and, over time, for forcing the rulers to cede power to society. Already it has enabled dissenting intellectuals to make common cause with ordinary citizens who used to either ignore them or even applaud their persecutors. Indeed, as leaders of informal groups and, in some cases, as elected members of parliament, the once-isolated dissident avant-garde has been able to speak and act, as the Communist Party pretended to do, "in the name of the people," for the public interest. This embryonic civil society is also making its first, as yet uncertain steps toward dialogue with the authorities. It is 2 eliciting responses -- also tentative, clumsy and even violent on occasion -- from the state. Neither this exploratory give-and- take nor the composition and leadership of the informal associations themselves have drawn enough informed attention and comment outside the Soviet Union. Yet the widespread phenomenon is likely to be more enduring in its impact on Soviet life and political conduct than any single figure, Gorbachev included. The rise of the informals as activist citizens and groups poses a complex challenge to Gorbachev and his Soviet regime. In opposition, the informals can fuel social disorder and a repressive response. As allies of a reformist Party leadership, on the other hand, the informals may help write a blueprint for a more open and more democratic Soviet state with a balanced social contract between citizens and government. Whether they act as forces for short-term disruption or long-term stability, it is certain that as new factors on the Soviet scene they deserve careful study. This report offers an introduction to the informal groups, a partial inventory of their number and activity, an incomplete evaluation of their performance and potential. Not a definitive guide -- religious groups figure only as they take part in secular activities, for instance (See Chapter 2) -- it records developments, with a few exceptions, only up to the Spring of 1989. The civil society emerging from decades of oblivion is still too much in flux to be pinned down, labeled and fully 3 analyzed. This report, therefore, is a work in progress, sketches for a portrait it would be premature to paint. Background The wave of spontaneous civic energy and self-expression that gave birth to many of the Soviet informal associations is one that Mikhail Gorbachev released rather than ordained. Not the product of an official initiative, it is the response from below to the relaxation of pressure from above. As such it is the confirmation, in a Soviet setting, of the truth in Alexander Herzen's plea to the newly installed Czar Alexander II: "Sire, give us freedom of speech... We have so much to say to the world and ourselves."2 With varying degrees of effectiveness, Lenin and his heirs worked from 1917 till 1985 to insure that the Soviet Union spoke only with a single voice, that of the Communist Party. While some private associations managed, even under Stalin's terror, to survive that repression, their numbers were few and their lives short. In Moscow, in 1945, for example, five students were arrested soon after the party at which they proclaimed themselves to be a "Society of Poor Sybarites." Although the Society's "charter" required only that each member devise some form of cost-free entertainment for the others, the authorities characterized the group as an "anti-Soviet organization" and sentenced its young founders to labor camp terms ranging from 4 four to seven years.3 After Stalin's death and during Nikita Khrushchev's on- again, off-again "thaws," the social instinct began to reassert itself. According to current official sources, organizing began in the second half of the 1960s,4 taking primarily non-political form as literary, cultural, scientific or sports clubs. Seeking niches where official ideology would not intrude, Soviets set up amateur groups to study philosophy, art, history, religion and folklore, to sing folk songs and to watch and discuss films. Instead of persecuting such associations as real or potential conspiracies, Soviet authorities generally left them alone. Police subjected individual non-conformists -- such as poet Joseph Brodsky, history student Andrei Amalrik, mathematician Alexander Yesenin-Volpin, writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel -- to imprisonment or psychiatric detention without necessarily harassing their circles of friends. Benign neglect, however, shifted to purposeful repression when the activities of some of these early informal groups took on a political cast. Young Muscovites who had caroused together as members of SMOG, initials that stood either for nothing or for the "Society of Young Geniuses," found themselves in psychiatric wards and prison camps after they helped organize protests over the 1965 arrest and 1966 conviction of Sinyavsky and Daniel. Spokesmen for the Crimean Tartars (See Chapter 5), exiled en masse to Central Asia in 1944, were similarly punished when they 5 campaigned openly to recover their ancestral lands. But as arrests followed protests of previous arrests, the small community of human rights advocates stubbornly persisted. Beginning in 1968, the editors of the samizdat publication, Chronicle of Current Events, recorded not only the oppression of others but the imprisonment of their own colleagues. Unofficial publications appeared in Lithuania, the Ukraine and elsewhere and kept circulating even as their founders disappeared into the gulag. By mid-1976, when activists in Moscow, Kiev and Vilnius - - followed by others in Yerevan and Tbilisi -- formed separate but loosely connected Public Groups to Promote Compliance with the Helsinki Accords in the USSR -- known as the Helsinki Groups -- the authorities faced a thin but wide network of civil protest. In it Jews and Volga Germans seeking to leave the Soviet Union interacted with the Moscow intelligentsia campaigning for legal and political reforms, with Catholics and Baptists demanding respect for their religious beliefs and with nationalists from the Baltics to the Caucasus urging linguistic, cultural and, in some instances, political autonomy. The penalty for such organized temerity was harsh repression -- terms of imprisonment or internal exile for many of the leading figures in different groups, forced emigration for others. By early 1980, when Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov was exiled from Moscow to Gorki, the multi-faceted human rights movement for which he had 6 been the best-known spokesman appeared decimated and moribund. At the same time, however, independent-minded associations -- rock groups, sports clubs, amateur choirs and theaters, poetry circles and seminars on religion and philosophy -- that kept their political profiles low or non-existent managed to proliferate. And even this evidence of social energy outside official control alarmed Soviet authorities. Writing in Kommunist in 1981, the late Semyon Tsvigun, deputy chairman of the KGB under Yuri Andropov, noted gloomily that he had observed a growing tendency towards the creation of "various unions, `clubs,' theaters and seminars made up of anti-social elements, which are a counterweight to existing social associations and organizations of working people."5 Mixed and Muddled: The Official Response Despite such official grumbling, the numbers of informal groups, swelling before Gorbachev came to power, have risen dramatically in recent years. In October, 1984, for instance, the Ministry of Culture counted just 29,352 amateur musical groups in the USSR. But seven months later the journal Smena reported that authorities had registered 160,00 electrical guitar ensembles and that in the Moscow region roughly one band out of three went unregistered. Apparently excluding rock bands but without precisely defining the kinds of groups it was tallying, a Pravda editorial of December 27, 1987 spoke of more than 30,000 7 amateur associations then in the USSR.