Theresa C. Smith

Cultural Dissent and Defection: The Case of Soviet Nonconformist Artists

(1988). Cultural Dissent and Defection: The Case of Soviet Nonconformist Artists. Journal of Arts Management and Law: Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 44-62.

Summary of Empirical Findings and Conclusions

The Soviet dissident movement from its inception was extraordinarily large, persistent, intricately organized and issue- and class-inclusive. These characteristics alone might have evoked an exceptional state response. Our analyses disclose three other reasons for resort to novel methods of direction and control. On average across administrations, political protest groups and religious societies recruited progressively younger adherents who could maintain a higher level of participation, could remain active longer, and could potentially serve as a base for exponential growth in the size of the movement. The movement was also expanding in two other dimensions: geographically, out from major cities; and substantively, across new issue areas. Issues underlying political protest began to depart from established and internationally acknowledged religious freedom and human rights concerns to venture more often into newer areas such as ecology, antinuclear activism, workplace safety and environmental contamination, and reached overtly anti-Union taboo topics such as anti-Communism and national independence for the republics, or smaller zones, even cities.

Risky races? Curvature change and the war risk in arms racing

This is a preliminary analysis of the extent to which some general curvature patterns in military spending contribute to predicting war onset in a global sample of arms races. Exponential, logarithmic, and trigonometric curves are fit to the military spending data of nations engaged in arms races, and derivatives are taken at the point of war onset. In contrast to a prior unfavorable assessment (Thompson, Duval and Dia, 1979), Alcocks (1972) hypotheses on military spending curvature and incidence of war are shown to describe several cases of the onset of arms race‐related wars. However, contrary to Alcock, the majority of these wars are not signalled by deceleration in racing for both rivals. Instead, expansion of racing just prior to war is shown. Strongly exponential racing appears more likely to end in war than do other racing patterns, as argued in other data and in more complex analyses.

The Brezhnev Legacy: Nationalities and Gorbachev

The vantage point of the early 1990s provides a particularly significant opportunity to examine nationalities’ dissent and regime response to it during Leonid Brezhnev’s leadership. Despite his 1973 assertion that the nationalities’ problem was ‘solved’, and a similar claim made in the 1986 Soviet Communist Party Programme, any general expectations of assimilationist outcomes for most national minorities in the USSR were clearly premature, at best. This analysis examines empirical data from the period 1965–81 on nationalist actions, and state repression of them. It concludes that the differentiated treatment of various nationalities in 1965–81 was generally successful, in the short term. However, this policy not only failed to promote ‘integration’, but may actually have aggravated the subsequent political explosion of the late 1980s.

Characteristics of the Evidence: The Database of Psychiatric Hospital Detainees

Who is a dissident? For our purposes, any individual known to have participated in any of the activities or organizations listed below was identified as a political dissident or a nonconformist active religious believer. Note that dissident activities spanned many aspects of political activism, religious work and observance, political and religious communication, protest, and creation and dissemination of self-published (samizdat) dissident journals and other materials, as well as possession and circulation of materials published abroad (tamizdat). Unofficial or illegal organizations included human rights groups, trade unions, political fronts, cultural associations, and religious societies.

Who Are the Dissident Detainees? Some Observations and Descriptive Statistics

Unlike political dissent at the close of the eighteenth century, which was a phenomenon of the relatively wealthy, well-educated, and well-travelled, Soviet dissent sprang from a broad base of political activism across and within social strata, and republics. Antebi (1977:120) observed ‘…ce n’est pas seulement une revolte d’intellectuels. C’est aussi une revolte diffuse, qui atteint toutes les couches de la population.’ Workers and missionaries were swept up in it along with university students, white collar professionals, trade unionists, Hare Krishna devotees, environmentalists, and even police and erstwhile KGB employees. The cases of the taxi driver G.A. Bychkov, the shoe factory worker F.P. Dvoretsky, the hospital orderly F.N. Komarova, construction labourer Marchenko, and the manual worker V.A. Tsurikov provide examples of blue collar entanglement in the modern dissident movement. Soviet systematic persecution of the Evangelicals, often poor, also illustrates the class-inclusive nature of contemporary global political and religious repression of dissent,1 as events in May 1989 in China corroborate.

The Risk of Psychiatric Detention, Demographic Variables and Deterrence of Dissent

This chapter examines a set of demographic variables and other attributes to determine which characteristics and political causes presented the greatest risk of frequent and lengthy forcible hospitalization among a group of dissenters known to be detained at some point in their nonconformist activities. We also investigate the extent to which state response to dissidence may have served deterrence functions in Soviet society. The calculations reported have been derived from two datasets, the Smith-Oleszczuk data on psychiatric detainees used in the previous analyses (n=674), and our larger dataset on Soviet Repressed Dissidents (n=2749), also structured as described here in Chapter 2.

Trends, Changes with Administration and Spatial Dispersion

Psychiatric repression of Soviet political and religious agitators peaked in 19711 and 1972, measured in terms of new forced hospitalizations in this examination of the 1928–912 period (see Figure 5.1). After a drop to low levels in 1974 and 1976, court-ordered compulsory hospitalizations again built slowly to another relative maximum in 1982, when a December amnesty carefully excluded political detainees. Unlike court-mandated commitments, new administrative detentions did not subside in the mid-seventies. They show at least a local peak in 1974, for President Ford’s trip to Vladivostok, with local hospitals at capacity. As an evident effort to avoid World Psychiatric Association censure, which nevertheless took place in August of 1977, administrative hospitalizations were reduced in that year, but rebounded exponentially over the next three years. (See Figures 5.1–5.3.)

Legal and Political Developments in the Gorbachev and Yeltsin Administrations and After

Political use of FSU psychiatric hospitals in the mid-nineties has virtually dropped off the horizon of reported post-Soviet affairs, displaced by more proximal, typically and traumatically Third World public concerns about the exploding inflation rate, bondage to international lending agencies, the growth of the second economy, the resurgent power of organized crime, public safety, disparate risks of outside encroachment, internal war and conflict in the near abroad. These emergency circumstances, with potentially global repercussions in world markets and on immigration, may eclipse the human rights concerns of the calmer seventies and eighties and overshadow the psychiatric reform efforts of the late eighties and nineties. Precisely because the reforms largely failed to redesign the underlying structures which made psychiatric abuse possible, this phenomenon could recur, should it serve the purposes of executive or other governmental agencies. A review of relevant Soviet and Russian law can illustrate why this potential still exists, even after the splintering of the Communist Party and the collapse of the Union.

Political Hospitalization: Conception, Conceptualization and Conduct

Many states confront episodic phenomena of political, national, ethnic and religious dissidents who defy societal norms. The Soviet experience with dissident movements was unprecedented for its duration, intensity, mass recruiting base, and its significance in the erosion and collapse of the Union. The Soviet experience was unique in both the size and degree of organization of nonconformist informal groups. The dissident movements at their apex comprised perhaps a quarter of a million or more diverse individuals (Hubner, 1980:84), of whom hundreds, possibly thousands, of the more vocal or irritating nonconformists were confined to psychiatric hospitals for extended periods. Even pariah states, such as South Africa at the height of its defence of apartheid, did not resort systematically to this measure to inhibit political upheaval.