A Comparison of Dissidents in the USSR and US

A Comparison of Soviet and US Dissidents

By

J. Otto Pohl

The dissidents of the USSR were split among numerous national and and ideological movements. The various nationalist currents were generally united internally. Although there were changes in direction in some from returning to their homeland in the USSR to emigration abroad for instance among the Germans and Meskhetian Turks. But, as a general rule the Lithuanian national movement was unified in seeking a restoration of independence as were the Latvian, Estonian, Georgian, and Ukrainian ones. The Jewish and German movements after 1973 were united in their goals to emigrate out of the USSR. Finally, the Crimean Tatar movement showed a very high degree of solidarity in working towards returning from exile in Uzbekistan to their homeland and restoring the Crimean ASSR. Despite the small populations of some of these nations such as the Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks they had far more activists in absolute numbers than did the various strands of the Russian dissident movement. When the USSR fell apart these movements were largely successful in finally achieving their goals. The one major exception were the Meskhetian Turks. But, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, and Georgia all regained their status as independent nation states. Likewise most Jews and Germans left the former Soviet states and a significant portion of the Crimean Tatars returned to resettle Crimea. The unity and ability to mobilize large scale support among their peoples allowed these movements to succeed when the opportunity presented itself.

The dissident movement among the ethnic Russian majority of the USSR is a different story. It was always relatively quite small and split ideologically between socialists seeking to return to Leninist principles like Medvedev, democrats seeking Swedish style Social Democracy like Sakharov, and nationalists like Solzhenitsyn and Shafarevich. When Gorbachev first initiated Glasnost and Perestroika in the 1980s it looked like the socialist dissidents had triumphed. After the USSR fell apart after 1991 it superficially appeared that the democrats had won. But, after Putin rose to power it soon became clear that the nationalists who always emphasized that Russia was historically different from Europe had been proven right all along. The Russian dissidents enjoyed none of the advantages of cohesion and popular mobilization that the non-Russian movements had relied upon for success.

The one thing that did unite all the Russian and non-Russian dissident movements of the Brezhnev era was opposition to the regime. On that they could all agree. Now that the US has entered a phase of stagnation with some key parallels to the USSR in the 1970s a comparison of our own dissident movements to the Soviet ones is in order. Like in the USSR the one thing that can unite them is opposition to the regime in DC.

First there is the national question. In the US this is generally expressed in terms of “race relations.” But, it is clear that race functions in the US much like natsional’nost’ did in the USSR. The main difference is that the national question in the US is much less complicated than in the USSR. There are historically only two major nations or nations in the process of formation in the US from the 20th century on,  European Americans and African Americans. With mass immigration in recent decades, a third nationality, Hispanics has been added. But, a portion of these have already been functionally assimilated into the White nation. Like Russians versus Ukrainians in the USSR the national interests of the White and Black nations in the US differ in a number of aspects and as a result their goals are considerably different. I am not going to address the goals and tactics of Black dissidents in the US in this essay. But, due to cultural and historical differences the only thing that they share with White ones is an opposition to the current political system. Hence any cooperation between the movements will have to center around this common opposition rather than any positive vision or future goals.

White dissidents in the US more closely resemble the Russians than any of the movements of smaller nations in the USSR. Like ethnic Russians in the USSR,  Americans of European ancestry are a slight majority of the population and have historically been the politically dominant group in the state. They are also ideologically split like the Russians. On the left are a few sincere socialists like Medvedev represented in the USSR. In the center an even smaller number of people still clinging to democracy and opposing the regime at its base. Finally, there are various self described nationalists of both the French civic and German ethnic kinds despite the embryonic nature of Euro-American ethnogenesis. In terms of thinkers and leaders there are no White American dissidents of anywhere near the intellectual caliber of Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, or Shafarevich. Even in terms of rank and file numbers there are very few actual White US dissidents compared to Russian ones in the USSR during the 1970s. In organizational terms they are even less institutionalized. Nothing like the Chronicle of Current Events or Moscow Helsinki Group exists in the US at the present time. Rather there are a handful of individuals attempting to resurrect ideas of the old left, old right, and the republicanism of the antebellum era against a seemingly insurmountable barrier of general willful ignorance and unaccountable centralized political power.

This of course is not to say things are hopeless. But, dissent such as it exists in White America is at a very basic level. Real dissenters are a tiny and marginalized minority and the regime has far more popular support than the USSR did after 1956. A big part of the problem is the lack of serious intellectual and moral leadership. The Russians had Solzhenitsyn and Shafarevich. The US has no comparable figures on the horizon.