The Metamorphosis of Soviet Dissent
Abstract
On January 25th, 1977, Andrei Dimitrievich Sakharov, one of the Soviet Union's most brilliant physicists, was summoned before the Prosecutor General of the USSR and ordered to recant a statement he and other dissidents had made regarding a bomb explosion that had taken place earlier that month in a Moscow subway. In the statement, Sakharov and the others intimated that the blast, in which six or seven passengers had been killed and numerous others injured, had been executed by the Committee of State Security (KGB) in an attempt to place increasing pressures on dissidents within the Soviet Union. Although he has thus far refused to modify his original statement, the famous Russian dissident has not been jailed by the authorities. Nevertheless, it would have been unthinkable for a man of Sakharov's stature to have made such an attack on the police arm of the Communist Party during the Khrushchev regime. But dissent in the USSR has increased greatly over the past decade. More importantly, it has changed qualitatively, effectively undergoing a metamorphosis that increasingly threatens the very basic political and philosophical underpinnings of the Soviet Communist State.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 1977
- Accession Number
- ADA512193
Entities
People
- Angelo D. Guttadauro
Organizations
- United States Army War College