Peter Reddaway

The Dissidents

A Memoir of Working with the Resistance in Russia, 1960-1990

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

In the last decades before the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, courageous dissidents within the country worked tirelessly to expose the tyranny and weakness of the Soviet state. Their work, first published in underground texts known as samizdat and then often republished in the West, alerted fellow citizens and the rest of the world to the human rights abuses and economic failures of the communist regime. It is not an exaggeration to say that this work helped set the stage for the collapse of the regime. Today these men and women are largely forgotten, both in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere. The Dissidents brings them and their work to life for contemporary readers. Peter Reddaway spent decades studying the Soviet Union and came to know these dissidents and their work, publicizing their writings in the West and helping some of them to escape the Soviet Union and settle abroad. In this memoir he tells their stories and also captures the human costs of the repression that marked the Soviet state: the forced labor camps, the internal exile, the censorship, the use and abuse of psychiatry to label those who found fault with the Soviet system mentally ill. Reddaway's book also places the work of the dissidents within the context of the secretive politics inside the Kremlin, where a tiny elite competed for power-even as the Soviet system was crumbling around them.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Council on Foreign Relations
• Seitenzahl: 370
• Erscheinungstermin: 11. Februar 2020
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 238mm x 163mm x 35mm
• Gewicht: 776g
• ISBN-13: 9780815737735
• ISBN-10: 0815737734
• Artikelnr.: 55183118

Autorenporträt

By Peter Reddaway

Inhaltsangabe

Contents:
Introduction
1. First Steps
2. Graduate Studies: A Double Miracle
3. Immersion: Daily Life in Khrushchev's Russia
4. Expulsion: Cultural Trends, Literary Friends, and the Sharp Edges of the
Soviet State
5. The Emergence of Dissent: Bringing Dissidents and the Emerging Human
Rights Movement to the World's Attention
6. The Other '68: Upheaval in the Soviet Bloc and the Chronicle of Current
Events
7. Two Early Giants of Soviet Dissent: Marchenko and Grigorenko
8. Confronting the Naysayers in the West
9. "The Mental State of Such People Is Not Normal": Exposing the Political
Abuse of Psychiatry
10. Dignity under Persecution: Dissent among the Ethnic Minorities
11. Religious Persecution, Religious Dissent
12. Fighting on Old and New Fronts: 1968 to 1983
13. Publishing Samizdat in the West
14. Dissent and Reform under Gorbachev: Uncertain Terrain
15. Upending Manufactured Schizophrenia
16. The End: RIP USSR, 1917 to 1991
Some Conclusions
Works by Peter Reddaway Cited in This Volume, by Year
Notes
Subject Index
Names Index