The Dissident Movement

In the 1960s and early 1970s, a dissident movement surfaced among Soviet intellectuals. This movement is thought to be contributed to Khrushchev lessening his control on the State. The movement illustrates the State’s inability to adapt to the expanding mobility of the people. The activists in this movement were highly motivated for their cause. Their passion and sentiments were so large, beyond their numbers.

The ways in which the people in the movement expressed their ideologies varied from protests to literature to journals. For example, the people of this movement would circulate some manuscripts of banned books. I think that this is a bold statement and showed their dedication to the cause. A leader in this movement, particularly the concept of freedom and human rights, was Andrei Sakharov. His most famous work is his essay, “Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom”.

The Soviet State would try to suppress the events regarding this movement via propaganda. This propaganda would negate the movement’s ideologies, threaten the loss of job and imprisonment, and confiscate the literature being circulated.