Political Dissidence in Russia during the Stalinist Years

Born in Russia in 1918 and died in 2008, Alexander Solzhenitsyn is now considered  one of the most important Russian writers, and  his destiny seems to be  similar to that of Boris Leonidovic Pasternak  [1890-1960].  This article focuses on their life stories.

The word dissidence has its linguistic specificities because is essentially used as a term for political dissidence, which is a typical phenomenon in many  totalitarian regimes. A sensational case of political dissidence was that of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. A fundamental datum of the Soviet Union in the 60s and 70s was typically given by Russian intellectuals, whose criticism focused on the institution of communism.

We have some very significant cases in this sense, like that of Boris Leonidovich Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago which despite received Nobel Prize in 1958 was banned in Russia until around the 90s. Another striking case was that of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich written  in 1962. This novel revealed to the world the Stalinist labor camps, in which Solzhenitsyn himself was imprisoned from 1945 to 1956. Solzhenitsyn had been locked up in a concentration camp because he wrote a letter where he did use disrespectful expressions  towards Stalin, and so he was sentenced to eleven years in a labor camp.

Dissent in Soviet Russia implied serious negative effects on intellectuals. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970, but the Russian writer was unable to go to Stockholm to receive this award, because the Soviet authorities forbade him to leave the country. However, the Soviet Government, in order to avoid embarrassing situations, expelled Solzhenitsyn in 1974, accusing him of having participated in anti-Soviet activity. The expulsion from Russia for anti-Soviet activity was not entirely a pipedream. In fact, Solzhenitsyn had published abroad three volumes that collected a massive set of data on lagers and deportations carried out in Russia during the Stalinist years. It is remarkable that Solzhenitsyn did his first press conference just after his expulsion from Russia at Stockholm University in 1974.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered much the same fate as Boris Pasternak, who  was awarded  the Nobel Prize in  literature in 1958 and whose Doctor Zhivago  was strongly  opposed by Soviet Government that had threatened to  expelled  him from the country whether he would like to go to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize. Boris Pasternak’s fate became the typical fate of all political dissidents in Russia in the years of Stalinism.

Pasternak told in his novel that,

“Summer came and went almost unnoticed. The doctor recovered. While planning to go to Moscow he took not one but three temporary jobs. The rapid devaluation of money made it difficult to make ends meet. Every morning he got up at daybreak, left the house, and walked down Merchant Street, past the Giant movie house as far as the former printing shop of the Urals Cossack Army, now renamed the Red Compositor. At the corner of City Street the door of the town hall bore the notice ‘Complaints’. He crossed the square, turned into Buianovka Street, and coming to the hospital went in through the back door to the out-patient department of the Army Hospital, where he worked.”

I may be wrong, but I think that the Complaints  Office  was always empty. A claim against the Soviet Government explicitly represented only the faster way to the  Gulag.   Boris Leonidovich Pasternak became the first man to run a mile in less than three minutes.

Notes

Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, Wm. Collins Sons and Co., Ltd, London, 1958,  p. 259, Chapter 15.