Vladimir Putin’s government has performed a contorted dance around the centennial of physicist Andrei Sakharov on May 21. Two years ago Putin issued an executive order to prepare the celebration. Sakharov was instrumental in developing the Soviet hydrogen bomb, which fits with Putin’s growing obsession with weaponry and Russian military might.
However, Sakharov is recognized and remembered today for his pacifism, passionate advocacy of human rights and courageous defense of Soviet political prisoners. This is the reason why he was awarded the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize and why he was removed to Gorky by the Leonid Brezhnev government five years later.
None of that sits well with Putin’s Russia whose ideology is a witches’ brew of Soviet nostalgia, intolerance and repression at home mixed with isolation and aggression abroad. Everything Sakharov stood for in the final three decades of his life is now regarded with hostility and persecuted by the authorities. Not surprisingly, the Moscow Sakharov Center has been labeled “foreign agent” and a photography show dedicated to Sakharov which it was planning to put on has been banned.
In light of what is going on in Russia a century after Sakharov’s birth and three decades after his death, the natural question is: Was the Soviet dissident movement a failure?
The movement was by no means homogenous. It was a loosely organized umbrella grouping united by shared opposition to the Soviet regime. It had two distinct strains: pro-democracy activists and nationalists. Both strains featured a wide variety of overlapping ideologies and beliefs.
Nationalists had roots in pre-revolutionary Russia and strove for the end of Russian domination and independence for their nations. The nationalist sentiment varied from one Soviet republic to the next, and some had fewer nationalist dissidents, but the idea of independence had a fairly broad, if silent, support. Local communist party leaders were also sympathetic to the idea of becoming their own bosses — and so the Soviet Union died easily and relatively painlessly when its time came.
Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union Jews were allowed to go to Israel and Crimean Tatars to return to Ukraine’s Crimea.
The Russian dissident movement also had two wings, embodied by Nobel laureates Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. They were in a very real way an outgrowth of the 19th-century Westernizers and Slavophiles. Potentially antagonistic, they were allies since the Soviet government was hostile to democracy on the one hand and to religion on the other.
Active dissidents were few and they were constantly harassed, packed off to jail or thrown out of the country by Yury Andropov’s KGB by the end of the 1970s. But their sympathizers were more numerous — and the Soviet intelligentsia was often sympathetic to both wings of the movement without making a distinction between them. However, the views of the nationalist wing had their supporters in the Soviet bureaucracy, “blood and soil” writers and artists and even in the party and the KGB. They were receptive to the idea of an exclusive and powerful Russia and felt that ethnic Russians were “oppressed” in the Soviet system. Moreover, in the late Soviet system, Orthodox Christianity became something of a fashion.
The truth is that in post-Soviet Russia, the Solzhenitsyn wing has won — maybe not decisively but in many respects. At the very least, Putin’s Russia is slowly morphing into the caricature first drawn by Vladimir Voinovich in his satiric anti-utopia Moscow 2042. This truly prophetic work also pokes fun at Solzhenitsyn, describing a kind of bucolic country estate where the great writer brings to life his ideas of Russia’s future. Another satirist, Vladimir Sorokin, is also given to charting Russia’s grotesque future course, and his vision relies heavily on Solzhenitsyn’s ideas.
Indeed, Solzhenitsyn was steeped in Orthodox Christianity and saw Russia as holy and pious. His Russia is gentle and meek yet, being a traditionalist, he was not ready to give up on the Empire. His early blueprint for post-Soviet Russia envisioned a union of three Slav brother nations. Ironically, the dissolution of the USSR was decided by the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian party hacks.
Solzhenitsyn notoriously dismissed a demand by Ukrainian nationalists that the Holodomor be recognized as genocide. His argument was that the Bolsheviks starved and murdered peasants of every other nationality as well. Curiously, it was exactly the Soviet argument against singling out Nazi crimes against the Jews, including the executions in Kyiv’s Babyn Yar — because other Soviet citizens were murdered by the Germans as well.
After the collapse of the USSR Solzhenitsyn didn’t return to Russia until 1994 and, having arrived there, was horrified by the democratic reforms he saw, writing a pamphlet entitled Russia in Collapse which echoed his complaints about America’s dechristianization and consumerism voiced while he was living in the West.
Many of his views — including his concern about Russians “left behind” in the newly independent states and his rejection of the Western capitalist model — are in the foundations of today’s Putinism. Not surprisingly he seemed to have approved of Putin in his final years and Putin repaid him for his support by making his literary works part of the Russian high school curriculum.
Equally telling is the fact that the right-wing nationalist opposition to the Putin regime, which was strong in the first decade of the century, has weakened substantially.
Today’s anti-Putin opposition in Russia is very different from the dissidents of the Sakharov’s wing. Soviet dissidents demanded openness, respect for human rights and freedom, while Navalny and his followers are not talking about ideology so much as about kleptocracy and corruption. But at the end of the day, the issues are remarkably similar: the authoritarian rule, the persecution of those who speak out, the brutal lawlessness of the police.
In fact, some issues are even identical to those for which Sakharov advocated during his lifetime and for which he was punished. He was sent to Gorky for speaking out against the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and now Moscow is waging wars of aggression in Ukraine and Syria. He defended the Crimean Tatars’ right to return to their land, and that long-suffering nation is being persecuted on their soil once more now that Putin has annexed Crimea.
This makes Sakharov, his work and his views, highly relevant today while Solzhenitsyn and his legacy have been reassessed and ard viewed far more negatively since his vision has been more or less implemented in modern Russia. Perhaps there is a symbolic meaning in the fact that protests against the Putin regime often take place on an ugly modern thoroughfare in Moscow built as part of Stalin’s protofascist 1935 Moscow reconstruction plan and which is currently known as Sakharov Avenue.
