To what extent does dissent help explain the collapse of the Soviet Union?

During the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovaks carry their national flag past a burning tank in Prague 1968. Source: Russia Beyond

To understand how far dissent can explain the collapse of the Soviet Union, this essay will assess the role of dissent within the traditional arguments for this process. This complex question has in general been very little researched by Sovietologists. Most who have studied the Soviet collapse have explained it through other means such as the unreformable Soviet economy (Chris Miller) or the role of Mikhail Gorbachev and his failed policies (Vladislav Zubok). Whilst these conclusions are convincing, the role of dissent must not be understated. For the purposes of this essay, a ‘dissident’ will be defined as someone who ‘thought differently’ about the ideology of the Soviet Union, and thus the totalitarian, communist foundation on which it was built.[1] This included dissent against, but was not limited to, the one-party state, the centralised command economy as well as the side effects of such a system In this respect, anyone who opposed the official Soviet aims, values and ideas can be said to have acted out some form of ‘dissent’. This enables one to attribute dissent not just to those who laid the foundation for ideas of human rights and freedoms to disseminate in the 1960s and 1970s, in a within-system form known as ‘intrastructural dissent’. It can also be attributed to those who participated in a popular and open form of dissent between 1985 and 1991, noted as ‘extrastructural dissent’, which advocated system-rejective change.[2] This essay will also discuss the relationship between dissent and reform under Gorbachev from 1985, namely his policies of glasnost and perestroika, a new political ‘openness’ which highlighted systematic failures, such as the failing economy and previous environmental and human rights abuses. These deep-rooted issues arose out of intrastructural activities and opened up the Soviet Union to extrastructural dissent that led nationalist movements in the Eastern Bloc to pass laws unilaterally, win local elections and assert their sovereignty. Whilst dissent alone cannot fully explain the dissolution of the USSR, as dissent relies upon a failure within the system to thrive, its crucial role in publicizing and exacerbating existing systematic issues was significant in the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Whilst one cannot argue they impacted the immediate collapse of the Soviet Union, the Soviet dissidents from the mid-1960s, mainly limited to intellectuals who were willing to speak out against the Soviet ideology, laid the foundations for greater political and social freedoms and arguably the creation of democracy in the new republics. Essentially, the dissenters’ long-term goal was the development of a ‘civil society’.[3] In this regard, they wanted to reform from within the system and undermine the political and social order from below, described by Alexander Shtromas as ‘intrastructural dissent’.[4] This intrastructural dissent was first seen in underground texts, known as samizdat, that alerted fellow citizens and the rest of the world to human rights abuses in the Communist regime. This form of dissent escalated into silent demonstrations, most prominently in Moscow. On December 5, Soviet Constitution Day, sometimes a hundred people, would gather in Pushkin Square and, at six o’clock in the evening, doff their hats and bow their heads.[5] The dissident movement also produced champions of human rights, such as Andrei Sakharov. In 1968, his book Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom criticised the regime and questioned the competence and legitimacy of the Soviet political system itself. Between 1972 and 1979, Sakharov ‘visited… (foreign) diplomatic offices eight times’ and ‘conducted more than 150 so-called press conferences for Western correspondents’ which led to ‘about 1,200 anti-Soviet programs’ broadcast on Western radio stations.[6] In this respect, the dissidents were able to educate the world on issues such as human rights, as appeals by ‘dissidents to foreign audiences quite often evoked a positive response’[7]. Significantly, the dissidents may have affected Jimmy Carter’s international policy as president in 1977, which placed ‘human rights’ as ‘the cornerstone’.[8] Thus, whilst the international appeal from dissidents and the collapse of the Soviet Union do not immediately connect, this aided in the decay by eroding the legitimacy of the Soviet government and continuing to undermine its image abroad.

Archie Brown convincingly argues, however, that the dissidents failed to ‘make any positive impact of policy outcomes prior to the late 1980s.[9] This is because the dissident movement was weakened by repression, and ‘so made little headway among the mass of ordinary people in the Russian heartland’.[10] In the decade before Gorbachev, the KGB began to act with greater assertiveness towards dissent in a prolonged Soviet press campaign, which offered ideological justifications for the new tough line. In Pravda, the official Soviet newspaper, it branded the dissidents as ‘unconcealed enemies of socialism’ who ‘exist only because they are supported, paid and praised by the West’ to spread ‘bourgeois propaganda’.[11] This sealed the mass of the people off from the influence of dissenting views – the extent of this could be seen in the Survey of March 1991, which presented that 71 per cent of citizens could not recall the name of a single dissident.[12] The Soviet regime also systematically jailed or removed key individuals from the dissident movement. Dissident Roı̆ A. Medvedev noted the ‘ranks of dissidents growing thin’ by the late 1970s, exacerbated by Sakharov’s exile to Gorky in 1980.[13] Peter Reddaway agrees, stating from 1980, every formal dissident group ‘stopped in its open, public activity and fell silent’ meaning the democratic movement had been ‘virtually destroyed’.[14]This shows that intrastructural dissent did very little to destabilise the Soviet Union in the years up until Gorbachev’s premiership.

Yet, the constant companionship of dissent and repression presents a clear continuous struggle between what Joshua Rubenstein notes as the two Russia’s; The Russia of violence and deceit and the Russia of justice and humanity.[15] This view is agreed by Soviet Union Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, who wrote the dissidents ‘in an unfree country… behaved like free men’ which he argued ‘changed nation’s governing traditions’.[16] It can be argued that the dissidents set the moral agenda for Gorbachev’s introduction of glasnost as they first introduced the word into the world’s vocabulary. Famously put by Vladimir Bukovsky, ‘Mr Gorbachev did not invent glasnost – he borrowed it from the Soviet human rights movement’.[17] To this point, it can be argued that Gorbachev gave the ideals of the dissidents a platform, that further catalysed the collapse of the Soviet Union as the crimes of the past were exposed. Thus, despite decades filled with persecution, the currents of dissent as mentioned would not just fade away, as this intrastructural dissent laid the seedbeds of future political reform and opposition to the Soviet regime, committed to the restoration of morality, civic virtues and the end of the totalitarian era.

It must be acknowledged that Mikhail Gorbachev played a key role in the collapse of the Soviet Union; Former US Secretary of State James Baker argues that the transformation of the state ‘would not have begun if not for him (Gorbachev)’[18]. Gorbachev personally started the process of allowing the population to stop being in fear of the state, essentially ‘turning off the lever of repression’ and starting to restore basic human values.[19] Specifically, Gorbachev focussed on the values of ‘openness and freedom’, which offered up a more open challenge to the authorities.[20] Adopted in 1986, glasnost (‘openness’) opened the public to the subject of the environment – only scraps of information had reached the public about the ecological disaster developing in the USSR prior. It was found that in ‘ninety cities – almost all of the major industrial cities of the Soviet Union – harmful substances in the atmosphere were found to be higher than permissible norms’.[21] Gorbachev notes how this newfound freedom gave a powerful impetus to the ‘green movement’ and new objections to major industrial works, such as nuclear power stations and chemical plants.[22] From this, however, more generalizations were made about the whole Soviet system. To the people, these environmental problems were only added evidence against the original sins of the system, while to others they were the result of irresponsibility and mismanagement by the Party and state leadership.[23] The Estonian Sovereignty Declaration stated that part of the reason to request sovereignty was that the ’natural environment in many regions in the republic is catastrophic’.[24] This is reiterated by Jane Dawson who states that the nuclear worries, accentuated by the Chernobyl disaster were a symbol of one ‘ethnic group over another’ because ‘poorly constructed and operated nuclear power stations were obvious symbols of Moscow’s disregard for the welfare of its member nations’.[25] Gorbachev went so far as to characterize these criticisms as an ‘all-out attack launched against the government’.[26] Thus, Gorbachev’s reform of glasnost brought attention to issues such as environmental degradation, which further eroded the legitimacy of the Soviet system, and aided in the creation of an atmosphere of popular discontent.

Glasnost also opened the nationalities question within the Soviet Union. The Soviet-Afghan war (1979-89) challenged Soviet legitimacy and created new forms of political participation. The ‘legitimacy effects’ arose as the war disrupted domestic cohesion between non-Russian minorities and the Russian system as non-Russian Soviet republics perceived it as a Russian war fought by non-Russian soldiers.[27] They noticed ‘similarities between the Russian oppression of Afghanistan and of the non-Russian republics’, seriously eroding the legitimacy of the Soviet system in the eyes of non-Russian nationalities and encouraging successionist movements.[28] Ausra, the journal of the Lithuanian underground, reporting on anti-Russian demonstrations during funerals of Baltic soldiers killed in Afghanistan, noted: 'under oppression themselves, Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians 'were being forced' to obey the brutal order of the Russian officers and ‘shed both their own blood and Afghan blood’.[29] The Soviet-Afghan war also created new forms of political participation, initiating the first shots of glasnost and creating a significant mass of war veterans who formed new civil organizations weakening the political hegemony of the political party. The Afghanistan war strengthened the forces unleashed by glasnost – by late 1985, there was a stream of reports against the Afghanistan war. Artem Borovik, Ogonek magazines war correspondent, published a three-article series portraying gloom and war weariness in the Soviet army.[30] Thus, glasnost redefined the relationship between the citizens and the Soviet state, as the Afghanistan war provided a great opportunity for dissent. Conclusively, the Soviet-Afghan war was another example of growing dissent and ‘popular discontent’ with the Soviet regime after the introduction of Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, which catalysed the collapse of the Soviet Union.[31]

As this essay has shown, glasnost opened up the Soviet Union to popular dissent, on a multitude of areas, such as the environment and on the Soviet-Afghan war. This form of dissent appears indispensable in the USSR’s disappearance, accentuated by Gorbachev’s decision to implement the policy as well as his reluctance to use forms of repression. Peter Reddaway argues that without the ‘organs of coercion’, the USSR could not survive.[32] Leonid Shchransky also wrote ‘I used to regard these abuses as just isolated violence, but now I realise that this regime cannot live without this repression, that repression is its bread’.[33] He was right – as soon as Gorbachev’s policy glasnost was introduced and accelerated, the regime was doomed to fall as it enabled popular disaffection with communism and led to essential electoral votes for nationalists and intellectuals who led the opposition movements.

Dissent also highlighted the deep-seated systematic issues within the Soviet Union. Stalin’s decision in the 1920s to introduce a command economy created a system that was fundamentally inefficient and began to stagnate under Brezhnev. This was because the Soviet command economy was unable to adapt to changing global circumstances as it was a ‘top-down system that lacked the flexibility and dynamism of market economies’.[34] An overriding theme throughout these premierships was the arms race, which meant the Soviet’s economic weaknesses were exacerbated by massive defence spending. In return, this meant other areas were starved of money. When Gorbachev took power, the military expenditure was 40 percent of the state budget and out of 25 million roubles in total expenditure on science, 20 billion went to the military for technical research and development.[35] Gorbachev set himself the task of reforming the Soviet economy as ‘economic growth had virtually stopped by the beginning of the 1980s and with it the improvement of the rather low living standard. The real per-capita income of the USSR was among the lowest of the socialist countries, not to speak of the developed Western nations’.[36]

To overcome the continuing decline in economic growth and to avoid stagnation, Gorbachev invented perestroika, the restructuring of the Soviet economy. This restructuring is most acceptably defined by a major utilization of market mechanisms in an economy dominated by central planning as opposed to ‘market socialism’ where market regulation is dominant.[37] However, these efforts only made things worse. By lifting controls on prices and allowing more autonomy for state enterprises, ‘he unleashed inflation and led to a collapse in productivity’.[38] For example, butter doubled whilst pork and beef almost quadrupled in price.[39] This led to political uncertainty in the public around the leadership of Gorbachev, as his approval rating fell from 52 percent in 1989 to 21 percent in 1990.[40] Gorbachev’s economic reforms created ‘winners and losers’, with the losers often being those who had been favoured by the old system, especially the blue-collar workers who lost job security and benefits.[41] This led to resentment and dissent among those who had lost out, further destabilizing the system. Placed aside glasnost, Reddaway summed up that Communist economics became an ‘acknowledged failure’ that meant the regime began to go through a ‘profound crisis of legitimacy’.[42] As the economy began to collapse, dissent grew. Resultingly, Gorbachev’s reforms created an economic catastrophe that undermined the authority of the Communist government and the economic power that it held beforehand, which made the inevitability of collapse far greater.

According to Andrei Grachev, Gorbachev’s foreign policy was also one of the ‘reasons for the breakup of the monolith that was the Soviet Union’.[43] Gorbachev planned to build an open and independent world based on justice and respect for mutual interest, calling for a ‘friendship of the peoples’.[44] Gorbachev explained years later the departure from Kremlin politics:

‘I called a conference of the political leaders of the Warsaw Pact countries and told them… we would adhere strictly to the principle of equality and independence, which included the responsibility of each country for the development of its own country. This meant that we would not commit acts of intervention or interference in their internal affairs’.[45]

Instead of creating unity, these policies resulted in the republics and their leaders using this opportunity to lodge claims against Russia, liberated from the fear that traditionally united them. Nationalist minorities in society started to press their own ‘dissonant’ agenda, described by Alexander Shtromas as ‘extrastructural dissent’.[46] These nationalist passions and prejudice against the imperial-bureaucratic power of the centre counteracted the neutral magnetism of a people united by a common, history, economy and culture upon which Gorbachev relied. This popular dissent also took inspiration from the dissidents in Moscow years prior, seen in the Lithuanian Act of the Re-Establishment of the State (1990) that read: ‘The State of Lithuania stresses its adherence to universally recognised principles of international law… and guarantees human, civil and ethnic rights’.[47] Václav Havel and Lech Wałęsa, who led the anti-communist movements in Czechoslovakia and Poland respectively, also took inspiration from the dissidents in Moscow. In his famous essay, The Power of the Powerless, Havel illustrated his deep admiration for dissidents and their willingness to challenge the status quo. Havel described dissidents as those who opened his mind to the question of ‘whether the brighter future is really so distant’.[48] He concludes the essay by questioning if the Soviet system has blinded and kept the people from developing their future. Written in 1978, this powerful essay gives a strong reasoning behind his actions of defiance in 1989. Wałęsa authors a similar view, describing the dissidents as ‘the symbol of wisdom and courage’ and the ‘wave of reforms’ for which they fought are ‘overtaking Eastern Europe’.[49]Despite this, extrastructural dissent trended towards anarchy and revolution, rather than through a state-controlled adoption as many dissidents had stressed. Therefore, it must be argued that the new freedoms that Gorbachev introduced allowed nationalist groups to mobilize, set out their agendas, win elections and ultimately win independence. This tidal force of nationalist dissent and revolution made the collapse of the USSR inevitable by 1989. Despite this, the role of the intrastructural dissidents must not be understated as they created the conditions for extrastructural dissenters, such as anti-communist and independence movements to thrive in the late 1980s.

To conclude, dissent played a large role in the collapse of the Soviet Union. The intrastructural form of dissent from underground dissidents laid the foundation for democratisation and the incorporation of human rights and civic virtues. The dissidents had a profound impact on both the leadership and reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, whose policy of glasnost appeared to be a by-product of their call for change. This policy opened the Soviet Union to popular extrastructural dissent, as it highlighted the weaknesses and failures of the government in areas such as the environment and human rights. It also emphasized the systematic issues of the Soviet system, such as the failing economy and the top-down political structure which became no longer sustainable in the face of growing dissent and social unrest. Resultingly, this growth in dissent led to radical successionist movements demanding independence under the rhetoric of the earlier dissident movement calls for human and civil rights, which appeared impossible to obtain within the Soviet Union. Whilst dissent alone cannot fully explain the collapse of the Soviet Union, due to its inherent reliance upon leadership and systematic failures to function as a factor, its role in intensifying these such issues and creating new ones cannot be overlooked in its role in the breakup of the USSR. Thus, when combined with other factors, it can be argued that dissent played a significant role in the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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[1]Mikhail Gorbachev, Mikhail Gorbachev: Memoirs, (London: Doubleday, 1996), 153 [2] Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, (Oxford, 1997), 8 [3] Peter Reddaway, The Dissidents: A Memoir of Working with the Resistance in Russia, 1960-1990, Washington, (D.C: Brookings Institution Press, 2020), 292 [4] Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, 8 [5] Joshua Rubenstein, Soviet Dissidents: Their Struggle for Human Rights, Boston, (MA: Beacon Press, 1980), 80 [6] Quoted in Joshua Rubenstein, The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 36 [7] Peter Reddaway, “Dissent in the Soviet Union”, Problems of Communism. 32:6 (HeinOnline, 1983), 8 [8]Rubenstein, The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov, 35 [9] Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, 10 [10] Reddaway, “Dissent in the Soviet Union”, 14 [11] Rubenstein, Soviet Dissidents: Their Struggle for Human Rights, 269 [12] Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, 10 [13] Roı̆ A. Medvedev , On Soviet Dissent, (New York; Columbia University Press, 1985) [14] Peter Reddaway, Soviet Policies on Dissent and Emigration: the Radical Change of Course since 1979, (August 28, 1984), 23 [15] Rubenstein, Soviet Dissidents: Their Struggle for Human Rights, 269 [16]Rubenstein, The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov, 26 [17]Wall Street Journal, December 22, 1987, 18 in Rubenstein, Soviet Dissidents: Their Struggle for Human Rights [18] Quoted in Charles W. Kegley Jr., 'How did the Cold War Die? Principles for an Autopsy', Mershon International Studies Review, 38 (1994), 23 [19] Alexander Daniel, Interview with Joshua Rubenstein, Moscow, 2003 [20] Mikhail Gorbachev, Interview with Fred Master in Resurgence, No.184, September-October 1997 [21]Gorbachev, Mikhail Gorbachev: Memoirs, 205 [22]Gorbachev, Mikhail Gorbachev: Memoirs, 206 [23]Gorbachev, Mikhail Gorbachev: Memoirs, 206 [24] Declaration of the Supreme Soviet of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic on the Sovereignty of the Estonian SSR, 16th November 1988 [25] Jane Dawson, Eco-nationalism: Anti-nuclear Activism and National Identity in Russia, Lithuania and Ukraine, (Duke University Press, 1996), 162 [26]Gorbachev, Mikhail Gorbachev: Memoirs, 206 [27] Rafael Reuveny and Aseem Prakash. “The Afghanistan War and the Breakdown of the Soviet Union.” Review of International Studies 25, no. 4 (1999), 13 [28] Reuveny and Prakash. “The Afghanistan War and the Breakdown of the Soviet Union.” 13 [29] Bohdan Nahaylo, 'When Ivan Comes Marching Home: The Domestic Impact of the War in Afghanistan', The American Spectator, 20 (1987), 15 [30] Quoted in Reuveny and Prakash. “The Afghanistan War and the Breakdown of the Soviet Union.” 13 [31] Peter Reddaway, “The Role of Popular Discontent.”, The National Interest, no. 31 (1993), 57 [32] Reddaway, “The Role of Popular Discontent.”, 63 [33] Quoted in Robert Sharlet, “Dissent and Repression in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe: Changing Patterns since Khrushchev.” International Journal 33, no. 4 (1978), 795 [34] Chris Miller, The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the USSR (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 178 [35] Gorbachev, Mikhail Gorbachev: Memoirs, 215 [36] Gorbachev, Mikhail Gorbachev: Memoirs, 216 [37] Ernest Mandel, Beyond Perestroika: The Future of Gorbachev’s USSR, (London; New York: Verso, 1989), 56 [38]Miller, The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy, 2 [39] Robin Bunce, Communist States in the Twentieth Century, History + for Edexcel, Hodder Education, (2015), 181 [40] Bunce, Communist States in the Twentieth Century, 181 [41] Miller, The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy, 84 [42] Reddaway, The Dissidents: A Memoir of Working with the Resistance in Russia, 241 [43] A. S. Grachev, Final Days: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Soviet Union, (Boulder, Colo: Westview Press, 1995), 198 [44] Grachev, Final Days: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Soviet Union, 199 [45] Mikhail Gorbachev and Zdenek Mlynar, Conversations with Gorbachev: On Perestroika, the Prague Spring and the Crossroads of Socialism, (New York, 2002), 84-85 [46] Quoted in Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, 8 [47] Supreme Council – Reconstituent Seimas 1990-1992, Lietuvos Respublikos Seimas [48] Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless, (October 1978), 80 [49] Lech Wałęsa, The Struggle and the Triumph: an Autobiography, (New York: Arcade, 1992), 250