Press Release, 13.05.2024

Photo from left to right: Nikolai Ivlyushkin, Alexander Daniel, Svetlana Gannushkina, Valery Borshchyov, Vyacheslav Bakhmin, Vyacheslav Igrunov, Alexei Smirnov, and Alexander Podrabinek / Photo by the Yabloko Press Service

On 12 May, a round table with the participation of Soviet dissidents was held at the Yabloko central office in Moscow. The participants talked about the history of the dissident movement, its political and moral aspects, as well as the protection of human rights in modern Russia. Valery Borshchyov, Co-Chairman of the Moscow Helsinki Group and a member of the Federal Political Committee of the Yabloko party, Svetlana Gannushkina, Chair of the Civil Assistance Committee and a member of the Federal Political Committee of Yabloko, Alexander Daniel, human rights defender and writer, Vyacheslav Igrunov, MP of three convocations of the State Duma from Yabloko, Vyacheslav Bakhmin, Co-Chairman of the Moscow Helsinki Group, Alexander Podrabinek, human rights defender and journalist, Soviet political prisoners Alexei Smirnov and Nikolai Ivlyushkin participated in the discussion. Tatyana Kasatkina, the wife of imprisoned Chair of the Board of the Memorial human rights centre Oleg Orlov, as well as other participants and witnesses of the Soviet dissident movement were among the guests of the event.

The word “dissident” was alien to the dissident circle: dissidents never called themselves such, Alexander Daniel said, and other speakers agreed with him. It was an external label. And it is not entirely correct to call a community of active dissenters with the Soviet regime a “movement”. “If this was a movement, it was a Brownian one,” Daniel quoted his mother, human rights defender and publicist Larisa Bogoraz.

The dissident movement was never political. This was a moral and ethical activity, Nikolai Ivlyushkin emphasised. This idea was supported by other speakers, noting that this social phenomenon was individualistic: dissidents were interested in individual manifestations of human rights violations. Nevertheless, the round table participants agreed on the main thing in common, answering the question about what did not suit them in the Soviet state.

“The lies didn’t suit me. The lies that we heard everywhere,” Svetlana Gannushkina said. “As a citizen of this country, I perceived what the authorities did as my responsibility and pain.”

Vyacheslav Bakhmin shared that for him, as a physicist, the discrepancy between what was happening in reality and what the authorities were demonstrating was striking.

“An unwillingness to be a hypocrite and lie with everyone else,” was Bakhmin’s motive for participating in the dissident movement.

Alexei Smirnov was dissatisfied with Soviet policies about “approximately the same as we have now: political prisoners, war, domestic and foreign policies”.

Alexander Daniel, answering the question of what prompted him to be in the dissident movement, noted that his “friends in large numbers were imprisoned in camps for words, for texts… under Article 70 and 190.” (Note: Article 70 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR “Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”, Article 190 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR “Dissemination of deliberately false fabrications discrediting the Soviet state and social system”).

Photo by the Yabloko Press Service

The question of the participation of Soviet dissidents in political activities caused heated debate. The speakers and guests of the round table used to have and still have different ideas about whether a dissident should engage in politics. Meanwhile, Valery Borshchyov noted that five dissidents, including the late Sergei Kovalyov, are members of Yabloko.

Alexander Podrabinek expressed his regret that dissidents in Russia had not become a political force when there had been such an opportunity. The publicist and human rights defender concluded that as long as human rights were on the periphery, our country would continue falling into the same trap.

There were many young people – students and political activists – among the round table audience. However, when the participants discussed the continuity of the dissident movement, Alexander Daniel admitted that he did not know what experience to pass on to the current generation. He noted that the current persecution for graffiti and posts was worse than what Soviet dissidents had faced.

“The present period is completely different, much more terrible,” Daniel summarised.