'THE DISSIDENTS' DETENTE DEBATE,' RUDOLF L. TOEKES, THE NEW LEADER, 4 MARCH 1974. ' AFTER SOLZHENITSYN: DISSENT IN THE USSR,' ROBERT S. HAGEN, RESEARCH STUDY RESS-13, DEPARTMENT OF STATE BUREAU OF INTELLIGENCE AND RESEARCH, 21 MARC

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• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP79-01194A000100680001-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: C
• Document Page Count: 14
• Document Creation Date: December 19, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 18, 2002
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: May 21, 1974
• Content Type: REPORT

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RESEARCH STUDY
March 21, 1974
AFTER SOLZHENITSYN: DISSENT IN THE USSR
Summary
The expulsion of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from the USSR
on February 13, 1974, was a serious but not fatal blow to
the small but durable dissident movement in the Soviet
Union. With his loss, Sakharov and Roy Medvedev are among
the few dissidents of wide international reputation left
in the USSR, and there is a possibility that the Kremlin
will attempt to exile Sakharov and Medvedev abroad as well,
if they continue to speak out.
The dissident movement as presently constituted grew
out of the lchrushchevian "thaw" of the late 1950's. It
began as a "cultural opposition" of creative artists, then
became politicized in the mid-sixties in response to
trials of dissident writers and the Warsaw Pact invasion
of Czechoslovakia. Always small and amorphous, in the last
two years it has been weakened (but not destroyed) by a
systematic regime effort to stifle it.
The movement is now in disarray, but it can be ex-
pected to endure, in one form or another, because its mem-
bers are responding to problems of Soviet life that persist
and that the leadershipis not addressing at all, or only
unsatisfactorily.
The dissident movement apparently has little effect on
the way the Kremlin conducts its policies, other than
perhaps to restrain it from certain actions which, were it
not for the dissidents, would never be publicized abroad
and which the Kremlin could therefore take without fear of
international repercussion. Still, the regime itself
clearly does not regard the dissidents as unimportant, as
it has demonstrated by its efforts to suppress them.
DECONTROLLED FOLLOWING
March 21, 1978.
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But ideas of political activism, public accountabil-
ity, and, above all, the rule of law and respect for basic
.human rights have penetrated the Soviet intelligentsia,
albeit to a limited degree. In the last two years the
regime has systematically tried to suppress any evidence
of this embryonic development, with only occasional token
concessions in the cultural realm. The result, however,
has not been to do away with the dissident movement, but
only to make it less visible.
Prepared by Robert S. Hagen
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Background and-Nature of Dissident Movement
The dissident movement in the USSR -- the dissidents
have never had a single program or organization, so the
term "movement" is used loosely -- grew out of the
Khrushchevian "thaw" of the late fifties. Soviet histo-
rian Roy edvedev describes the thaw as "the noticeable
weakening of censorship restrictions in all areas of
intellectual and artistic life" after Khrushchev launched
his de-Stalinization campaign at the 20th Party Congress
in 1956.*
The first fruit of this relaxation in censorship
appeared in the Soviet cultural world. Andrey Amalrik --
in Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? -- calls it
a "cultural opposition," directed "not against the polit-
ical regime as such but only its culture, which the regime
regarded as a component part of itself." The members of
the cultural opposition were primarily artists: writers,
painters, etc. Out of this opposition, and official
attempts to suppress it, came samizdat, the ironic,
official-sounding Russian abbreviation for "self-published"
literature (typed or handwritten) that gave the opposition-
ists an.uticensored outlet for their ideas.
Stimulated by such events as the trial of writers
Andrey Sinvavskiy and Yuliy Daniel in 1966 and the Warsaw
Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the cultural
opposition in the mid-sixties became politicized. The
Chronicle of Current. Events, a samizdat newsletter that
appeared every two mont-h s between 968 and 1972 and was
*See Medvedev's essay "The Problem of Democrati-
zation and the Problem of Detente," Moscow, October 1973.
Published in English translation as a Radio Liberty
Dispatch dated November 19, 1973. Excerpt~ed in The New
York Times, November 8, 1973.
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the "organ" of a large number of dissenters, carried the
masthead motto: "The Movement in Defense of Human Rights
in the USSR Continues." The Chronicle, drawing on a net-
work of anonymous "correspondents t roughout the USSR,
advocated no specific reforms. Instead, it reported in a
strictly factual, telegraphic manner on political trials
and protests, religious and national persecutions,
samizdat, labor camp news, and a variety of other dissi-
dent concerns. Copies regularly reached foreign radio
stations, especially Radio Liberty, and were rebroadcast
to the USSR.
In the transition from cultural opposition to human
rights movement, the dissenters picked up new members from
the scientific-technical intelligentsia. Although some
students and workers became involved as well, the move-
ment as a whole remained firmly grounded in the intelli-
gentsia -- a minority of the intelligentsia at that.
Amalrik analyzed the composition of the movement in its
heyday -- early 1968 -- by examining the occupations of
some 700 signatories to samizdat letters protesting the
trial in January that year of two writers, Aleksander
Ginzburg and Yuriy Galanskov. He found that academics,
including not only university professors but also members
of research institution.:, such as the Academy of Sciences,
constituted 45% of the signatories. Arti.7ts accounted for
22% (of whom 601 were members of official creative unions),
engineers and technical specialists 13%, and teachers,
doctors, lawyers, and publishing-house employees 9%.
Workers (6%) and students (50) were a small minority of
the signatories.
Despite the "class" uniformity of the dissidents,
however, they hold often widely differing political and
social views. Amalrik recognizes three general categories
in the human rights movement:
--"Genuine Marxist- -Leninists" claim that the present
regime has distorted the founding doctrine of the
Soviet state and call for a return to true princi-
ples. Roy Medvedev is in this category.
a
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--"Supporters of 'Christian ideology,"' writes
Amalrik, "maintain that the life of society must re-
turn to Christian moral principles, which are
interpreted in a somewhat Slavophile spirit." This
group would include Solzhenitsvn, whose Slavophile
orientation was clearly expressed in his September
5, 1973, letter to the Soviet leadership (excerpted
in The N,6w York Times, March 3, 1974).
--"Finally, believers in 'liberal ideology' ultim-
ately envisage a transition to a Western kind of
democratic society, which would, however, retain the
principle of public or governmental ownership of the
means of production." Andrey Sakharov belongs to
this last category.
At least two other major categories of dissent must
be distinguished: religious and nationalist. Among the
most active religious dissenters are the Lithuanian
Catholics, who for several years have produced their own
samizdat journal, the Chronicle of the Lithuanian Catholic
C-hu rch. In the past year t is Journal, which at first
eat almost exclusively with religious persecutions, has
devoted more attention to Lithuanian nationalist activi-
ties. Catholicism and nationalism are closely related in
Lithuania, but the movement toward the latter in the pages
of the Lithuanian Chronicle- may reflect the same kind of
"coming of age" of dissentthat occurred in the transition
from cultural opposition to human rights movement.
Nationalist dissent, active and passive, has a broader
base of support among the Soviet population as a whole,
both Russian and non-Russian, than the other kinds of
dissent mentioned above. Occasionally, as in the 1972
riots in Kaunas, Lithuania, it becomes violent. In the
case of the Ukraine it has been subjected to especially
harsh repressions and has produced saimnizdat works of high
caliber, such as Ivan Dzyuba's Internationalism or Russifi-
cation? Nationalist dissenters such as the Crimean Tatars,
deported to Central Asia under Stalin, are among the-most
persistent dissidents.
1
The Jewish nationalist movement is at present having
unheard-of successes, by Soviet standards, in securing
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the right to emigrate for its members. Former prison camp
inmates now in Israel describe national loyalties as
easily the strongest among the million-odd prisoners of
the camps.
Western media have focused on the "liberal" wing of
the dissident movement, whose active members probably
never numbered more than a few thousand (though the number
of passive sympathizers is certainly larger). Great
Russian nationalists, for example, who can be described as
right-wing, are more numerous and certainly more influen-
tial. The authorities have reacted to the left and
centrist opposition and to the non-Russian nationalists
far more harshly than to the Russian nationalists. Vladimir
Osipov, editor of the Russophile samizdat journal Veche,
includes his name and address in the journal, something the
Chronicle editors never dared to do.
The Crackdown
Regime concern with the dissident movement in general
and the Chronicle in particular evidently led to an order
for a crackdown on dissent at the November 1971 Central
Committee Plenum, the same one that approved the general
game plan for detente. According to the Chronicle's 27th
issue, the last to appear, on January 14-15, 1972, the KGB
searched apartments in Moscow, Leningrad, Novosibirsk, and
Vilnyus, all in connection with "Case No. 24," the name of
the drive to suppress the newsletter. Thousands of
samizdat documents were reportedly confiscated. Among the
apartments searched were those of two prominent Moscow
dissenters, Pyotr Yakir and Victor Krasin. Six months
later, in June, Yakir was arrested and imprisoned in
Moscow for interrogation. Krasin was arrested in
September.
The Yakir-Krasin Trial
A year later, on August 27, 1973, the two men were
brought to trial in a suburban Moscow courtroom, charged
with violating Article 70 of the Russian Criminal Ccde
forbidding "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." Spe-
cifically, they were accused of accepting money and anti-
Soviet literature from NTS (the Peoples' Labor Alliance,
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a Russian emigre group in West Germany that collaborated
with Hitler) and distributing this literature to Soviet
citizens. The defendants cooperated with the prosecution
during the investigation and publicly "repented" of their
"crimes" at the closed trial and an open press conference
a few days later. They were sentenced to relatively
lenient three-year terms in prison camp and three years
in internal exile. Shortly after the trial, a Moscow
appeals court reduced the prison sentences to just over a
year, and, since both men had already been held that long
during the pre-trial investigation, they went immediately
into exile, as provided by Soviet law.
The regime evidently hoped the carefully prepared
Yakir-Rrasin trial would be the capstone to its campaign
against the dissident, movement. Unlike earlier political
trials, this one was well-publicized both at home and
abroad, although exclusively via official TASS reports --
foreign newsmen were not admitted. The lesson for the
dissident audience in the USSR was clear: be silent or
face similar treatment. For its foreign audience, the
regime's message was that there is no indigenous dissident
movement in the USSR, only a few slanderers willing, for a
price, to serve as outlets for anti-Soviet agitators
abroad. TASS quoted Yakir as saying, "We misled public
opinion in the West by selling the idea that there was a
political opposition in the Soviet Union."
The Movement Today
But even today, half a year after the trial, Yakir's
statement is not convincing. Dissidents continue to speak
out, new names appear on letters of protest, and samizdat
continues to circulate because the audience for i-i-In tie
USSR is undiminished.
The movement is even more amorphous, however, than it
was in 1968-1972. Two years of systematic police harass-
ment have sent most of the early activist leaders into
prison camps, psychiatric hospitals, or exile. Now that
Solzhenitsyn has been expelled, Sakharov and Roy Medvedev
are among the few internationally prominent dissenters
left.
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There is a real possibility that now the Kremlin will
expel Sakharov and Medvedev as well if they continue to
speak out. (Medvedev's brother, Zhores, is already in
forced exile in London.) Sakharov said last November he
had taken preliminary steps to get permission to come to
the US and lecture on physics at Princeton. But in the
wake of Solzhenitsyn's deportation he has reportedly
decided to stay and continue,.his civil rights activities.
The Kremlin, however, may pressure him to go ahead with his
original plans. Once abroad, he would almost certainly be
stripped of his citizenship and forced into permanent
exile. The loss of Sakharov, always more of a political
organizer than Solzhenitsyn, would be devastating to the
movement.
The two-year-old drive against the dissidents has re-
sulted not only in the exile or imprisonment of a large
part of its leadership but also the demoralization of many
of those who are still at large.
There is a noticeably stronger strain of desperation
in the movement now as its members, never sanguine about
their chances of success in bringing about reforms, face a
powerful regime that has demonstrated the seriousness of
its cow-nitment to rep-ression. When Sakharov's Human Rights
Committee was formed in Moscow in 1970, the Chronicle.
(Issue No. 17) published the group's statement of aims,
among which was "co_nsultative assistance to the organs of
government in the establishment and application of guaran-
tees of hi-mian rights, carried out on the initiative of the
Committee or of interested organs of government." This
hope for an interest in the regime in promoting human
rights, while not totally abandoned now (especially by
"loyal oppositionists" like Roy M dvedev) is certainly
dimmer than it was then, area the Comer ittee's founding
documents may sound a little naive to today's dissenters.
But although the movement is in disarray, it can be
expected to endure, in one form or another, because its
members are responding to problems of Soviet Lire that per-
sist and that the leadership is not addressing at all or
only in an unsatisfactory manner. Even if i`(c were possible
to intimidate, imprison, or exile all the activists, what
British scholar Peter Redda;,,al calls a "second generation"
of dissenters could be expected to appear in response to
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the national and religious repressions, censorship, bureau-
cratism, and official arbitrariness that produced the first
wave of dissent in the sixties. Last year's press campaign
against Sakharov and now the Solzhenitsyn expulsion have
already led to a limited resurgence of open protest, and
many of the names on today's letters and petitions were
absent from the record of the last decade's activities.
Conclusion
The dissident movement apparently has little effect on
the way the Kremlin conducts its policies, other than per-
haps to restrain it from certain actions which, were it not
for the dissidents, would never be publicized abroad and
which the Kremlin could therefore take without fear of
international repercussion.
Still, the regime itself clearly does not regard the
dissidents as unimportant, as is demonstrated by its'
efforts to suppress them.
Moreover, in the case of such dissenters as
Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, the decisions are clearly im-
portant enough to be made in the Politburo itself.
Brezhnev's 11arch 10 reply to a French correspondent that he
is "not concerned" with the Solzhenitsyn issue, and
Kosygin's February 16 remark to a Scandinavian newsman that
he is "not interested" in it were probably more wishful
thinking than an accurate reflection of the Politburo
attitude since the issue blew up with the publication of
The Gulag Archipelago in Paris last December.
The regime's hypersensitivity to open domestic criti-
cism reflects a fear that such criticism represents a
"clear and present danger" to its authority, an attitude
characteristic of Soviet regimes, including Khrushchev's,
since 1917. Its repressive reaction to dissent reflects
the continuing predominance in the regime of people who,
as Roy Medvedev writes, "grew up and were formed in condi-
tions of the full political passivity of Soviet society,
with an absence of public accountability, with a prepond-
erance of not political but administrative forms and
methods for directing society based not on persuasion but
on compulsion." Nevertheless, ideas of political activism,
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public accountability, and above all the rule of law and
respect for basic human rights have penetrated the Soviet
intelligentsia, albeit to a limited degree. In the last
two years the regime has systematically tried to suppress
any evidence of this embryonic development, with only
occasional token concessions in the cultural realm. The
result, however, has not been to do away with the dissi-
dent movement, but only to make it less visible.
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 VOLUME LVII, NUMBER 5
MARCH 4, 1974
Correspondents' Correspondence ............................ 3
West Meets East/siLVIO F. SENIGALLIA
How Nixon Works/ANDREW J. GLASS .................... 4
The Truth About Economists/ROBERT LEKACHMAN 6
Questions for the CIA/RAY ALAN ............................ 9
The Dissidents' Detente Debate/RUDOLF L. TOKES.. 11
Fair Game/WALTER GOODMAN 15
Writers & Writing
The Artist as Hero/PEARL K. BELL ........................ 17
Pilgrimage of a Poet/GEORGE WOODCOCK .............. 19
In Search of Man/MICHAEL LIEBER ........................ 20
Filling in the GapS/VOJTECH MASTNY ............. :...... 21
On Television/MARVIN KITMAN ............................. 23
Dear Editor .............................................................. 25
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ITSYN,
KHAROVI MEDVE
10
LEKSAxtDlt 1. SOLZ1IF.NITSY,N's expulsion from
the Soviet Union last month, coming as it
(lid in the midst of a growing concern over
the course of East-Nest detente, has intensified the
debate in the Free World about what the current re-
laxation of tensions between the superpowers means
for dissidents within the USSR. A number of observers
have noted that were it not for the Kremlin's policy
of improving relations with the West, the Nobel Prize-
winning author would probably have been prosecuted
and imprisoned instead of deported; indeed, he is the
first prominent Soviet figure to be forced into exile
since 1929, when Stalin ordered Leon Trotsky out of
the country. Others have pointed out that since the
Nixon-Brezhnev summit of May 1972, the Soviet gov-
ernment has largely succeeded in breaking the hack
of the dissident movement; and in banishing Solzhenit-
syn, the Kremlin has not only rid itself of its most cele-
brated domestic critic but clearly hoped to diminish
the power of his voice by making him just another
Russian emigre cut off from his spiritual roots.
Long before this debate flared outside, however, it
was under way inside the USSR. In the 1970 Nobel
lecture that Soviet authorities would not permit him to
deliver, for example, Solzhenitsyn expressed the fear
that East-West detente would harm prospects for in-
ternal democratization in the USSR. His view v: as not
shared, though, by either of the other two leading
Soviet dissidents--Andrei D. Sakharov, the nuclear
physicist and father of the Russian H-bomb who be-
came a fighter for civit rights in his country: or Roy A.
Medvedev, the revisionist historian who advocates the
return of Communism to its original Marxist-Leninist
principles. I t seems an especially appropriate time,
therefore, to analyze the different attitudes of the three
men toward detente, which have tended to be ob-
scured by their common opposition to the excesses of
the Soviet regime.
Solzhenitsv. following the classical tradition of the
Russian intelligentsia, is perhaps above all else a moral
philosopher. accordingly, he assumes the posture o.1
keeper of his people's moral conscience and guardian
against its corrupt and inherently Immoral rulers. his
contempt for professional politicians ("boils on the
neck of society preventing it from freely moving its
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head and arms"), far from being restricted to the Soviet
leadership, extends to powerful hypocrites of all na-
tions, including avaricious heads of nonaligned nations,
apologists for acts of terrorism and "national libera-
tion wars," U.S. Democrats seeking to profit from the
Watergate scandal, International Olympic Committee
officials, and those who in the name of ending the Cold
War wish to muzzle free international broadcasting.
In his letter proposing Sakharov for the 1973 Nobel
Peace Prize, Solzhenitsyn deplored "the widespread mis-
take 'of defining peace as the absence of war rather
than the absence of violence," and urged the leaders
of world opinion ' to expose individuals who accept a
fraudulent peace as the alternative to armed conflict:
"Coexistence on this tightly knit earth should be
viewed as an existence not only without wars-that is
not enough!-but also without violence, or telling us
how to live, what to say, what to think, what to know
and what not to know. . . . If we want to achieve not
just a brief respite from the threat of war, but a real
peace, a peace in essence, with a healthy foundation,
we will have to struggle no less intensely against the
quiet, concealed forms of violence than we struggle
against the loud forms.... We will have to erase from
human consciousness the very idea that anyone has
the right to use force against justice, law and mutual
consent."
Solzhenitsyn's moral-absolutist definition of interna-
tional order leads him to an unqualified repudiation of
East-West detente as it has been practiced in the post-
Vietnam era. He argues that it resolves nothing and
serves to prolong the danger of global war:
"There seems to be little doubt, as many now realize,
that what is going on in the USSR is not simply some-
thing happening in one country, but a ' foreboding of
the future of man, and therefore deserving the fullest
attention of Western observers. No, it is not any diffi-
culties of perception that the West is suffering, but a
desire not to know, an emotional preference for the
pleasant over the unpleasant. Such an attitude is gov-
erned by the spirit of Munich, the spirit of complaisance
and concession, and by the cowardly self-deception of
comfortable societies and people who have lost the will
to live a life of deprivation, sacrifice and firmness."
A NDREI D. SAKHAROV, in his famous 10,000-
word statement, "Thoughts on Progress,
Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Free-
dom," was the first to consciously link the question
of political democratization in the USSR with the larger
issue of peaceful coexistence and global economic prog-
ress. A strong advocate of East-West convergence, he
nevertheless also supports a balance-of-power approach
to international peace and stability. But he fears a
devil's pact between the two superpowers at the expense
of their democratic opponents at home and their mili-
tarily weaker clients abroad. Consequently, although
he is an anti-Machiavellian in the general area o in-
ternational politics, Sakharov is prepared to use a ery
legitimate lever-such as U.S. denial of "most-favored-
nation" status to the USSR until it eases emigration
restrictions-to bring about a liberalization of Soviet
society. His overall view was perhaps most succinctly
stated in an interview he gave to a group of Western
reporters on August 21, 1973, the fifth anniversar of
the occupation of Prague:
"Detente without democratization, detente in which
the West in effect accepts the Soviet rules of the game,
would be dangerous. It would not really solve an of
the world's problems and would simply mean capitulat-
ing in the face of real or exaggerated Soviet powe . It
would mean trading with the Soviet Union, buying its
gas and oil, while ignoring all other aspects. I t ink
such a development would be dangerous because it
would contaminate the whole world with the antide o-
cratic peculiarities of Soviet society, it would en ble
the Soviet Union to bypass problems it cannot resolve
on its own, and to concentrate on accumulating still
further strength.
"As a result, the world would become helpless be-
fore this uncontrollable bureaucratic machine. I ink
that if detente were to proceed totally without qualifi-
cations, on Soviet terms, it would pose a serious th eat
to the world as a whole. It would mean cultivating a
closed country where anything that happens may be
shielded from outside eyes, a country wearing a ask
that hides its true face. I would not wish it on any ne
to live next to such a neighbor, especially if he i at
the same time armed to the teeth."
Yet, as I. F. Stone observed in his insightful anal sis
in the New York Review of Books, Sakharov "is no
enemy of detente. On the contrary, complete and genu-
ine detente, ideological as well as political coexistence,
has been one of the two objectives of the extraordi ary
campaign that he has been waging since 1968. he
other is the democratization of the Soviet Union."
Roy A. Medvedev, unlike Solzhenitsyn and Sakha ov,
believes the impetus for democratic reform will come
from gradual personnel and policy changes in the top
Party leadership, rather than from outside pressures.
He tends to downgrade the positive results achieed
by open protest, and is sharply critical of what he
terms the "immorality" and "provocative" behavio of
certain dissidents. Medvedev's samizdat essay, ""he
Problem of Democratization and the Problem of e-
tente," made public last November, was prompted by
what he considered to be the counterproductive radical-
ization of several leading spokesmen for the Soviet
civil rights movement. These people, he argues, "have
begun to express more extreme views and to make till
less constructive proposals, guided more by emotions
than by considerations of political appropriateness.'.
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The examples of this kind of imprudent behavior
cited in Medvedev's essay clearly point to at least
three identifiable figures. One is the writer Vladimir Y.
Maksimov, who in an open letter to the German novel-
ist Heinrich Boll denounced Chancellor Willy Brandt's
Ostpolitik as a fraud and described its architect as a
"mediocre apologist for a new Munich who takes him-
self for a great politician." Another is Sakharov, who
is taken to task for his endorsement of U.S. trade re-
strictions against the USSR. The third is Solzhenitsyn,
who is chastised for comparing the South African gov-
ernment's treatment of imprisoned blacks with the
Kremlin's confinement of dissident activist Pyotr Gri-
gorenko in a hospital for the criminally insane.
Medvedev admits that a causal relationship might
exist between the relaxation of international tensions
and the growing repression of Soviet dissidents. But
in the long run, he feels, the advantages of detente may
outweigh the difficulties now being experienced by the
regime's critics. In his opinion, the responsibility for
recent retrograde policies belongs to "our hawks" and
"Right-wing circles" within the Party's Central Com-
mittee. With the removal of conservative Politburo
members Pyotr Shelest and Gennadi Voronov, he inti-
mates, these forces have lost their leaders.
Medvedev credits the cessation of jamming of for-
eign Russian-language broadcasts in September 1973,
the ratification by the Supreme Soviet of two United
Nations covenants on social and political rights, the
continued outflow of Jewish emigrants, the de facto
suspension of the notorious "education tax," and the
generally pragmatic stance toward the West to detente-
inspired compromises. While he does not discount the
influence of Western public opinion on Soviet internal
policies, he thinks. there are practical limitations to the
efficacy of dissident protest aimed at foreign countries:
"In general, the opportunities for pressure on the
Soviet Union from the point of view of interstate or
economic relations should not be overestimated. Not
only because the Soviet partners in the talks will rea-
sonably protest against interference in Soviet domestic
affairs, but we generally doubt very much that the
majority of Western leaders are really seriously con-
cerned with problems of political and human rights in
the USSR or China. In the long run, Nixon, Pompidou
and Heath defend the interests of the ruling classes of
their countries, and it is not axiomatic that capitalist
circles in the United States, England, France, and the
German Federal Republic are so interested in the most
rapid development of socialist democratization in the
USSR or in speeding up economic, social and cultural
progress in the Soviet Union. Therefore, Soviet 'dissi-
dents' who turn to Western countries for support must
consider carefully the `address' to which they direct
these appeals."
The trouble, as Medvedev sees it, is that dissident
appeals have provided Western "Rightist" circles with
too much comfort, and have not given enough encour-
agement to "Leftist social organizations which are most
interested in the evolution of genuine socialist democ-
racy in our country." In any case, he feels "it would
he an illusion to think that Western public opinion will
sometime become more concerned with internal Soviet
problems than with internal problems of its own."
Finally, he reminds his fellow intellectuals "not to fall
victim to a peculiar Moscow-centrism and fail to see
that in many other countries there arc just as severe,
and in many instances still more severe, internal prob-
lems than those that exist in the USSR."
DESPITE THEIR disagreements about how to
put pressure on the Party leadership, a re-
markable consensus exists among dissident
Soviet intellectuals on the nature of contemporary in-
ternational relations and the place of the USSR in the
community of nations. All seem to agree that some kind
of change is inevitable in the way the USSR coexists
with the rest of the world. None has false illusions
about the Western political institutions and the capital-
ist market economies that shape the daily lives of
politicians, intellectuals and the common people on
the "other side." They oppose political extremism and
ideological demagoguery of all kinds. They are deeply
concerned about the prospects of a genuine and endur-
ing peace, and are fearful of the Soviets' "military-
industrial complex."
According to their individual temperaments, these
men address different constituencies at home and
abroad. As an artist, Solzhenitsyn probably speaks to
the largest audience: everyone who dreads war, op-
pression and the power of faceless bureaucrats over
the destiny of mankind. Sakharov, the liberal scientist,
seems to be directing his remarks to political decision
makers, educated elites, and those who believe in the
superiority of reason to the blind passions of anachron-
istic ideologies. Medvedev might be called the honest
broker between the two, trying to reconcile his com-
rades' pleas for sympathy and help from the outside
with the forbidding political realities of the Soviet Union
-where, he argues persuasively, all domestic reform
must begin.
With Solzhenitsyn in exile and Sakharov in danger
of being forced to follow him abroad, we may soon
see the important debate on democratization and de-
tente that has been flourishing among Soviet dissidents
reduced to the more orthodox positions taken by
Medvedev and other inward-looking reformers. If that
happens, the dissident movement will probably "go
native" for a while and cease to be a serious ob-
stacle to Moscow's efforts to sell its version of detente
to the West. But then, of course, the moral fiber of the
West will face its true test.
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