Dissident

   In broad terms, a dissident is someone who actively challenges an established political regime, policy, or institution. In the Soviet Union, the notion was used during the Brezhnev era to refer to citizens who overtly or subtly criticized the authority of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. They did so through protests and production and dissemination of samizdat literature. Dissidents would often find themselves demonized in the official media and unable to publish their works or seek official employment in the Soviet Union. Furthermore, they often suffered from harassment, persecution, and imprisonment by the KGB. Eventually, the term began to connote a nonconformist who attempted to inform the public, at home and abroad, of the violation of human rights in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

   Historically, there were a number of types of dissidents in the USSR: “true Communists,” who maintained that Soviet ideology presented a case of perverted Marxism; “Western liberals,” who believed that capitalism and political pluralism were the only acceptable systems; Russian nationalists, who supported the view that Russia had its own unique trajectory of development with emphasis on Eurasianism and Russian Orthodoxy; minority activists, who fought for the rights of national minorities and the titular populations of the union republics; religious activists, who demanded freedom to observe their faith without prejudice or hindrance; and artists and authors, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose views were a combination of different strands of the dissident movement.