Soviet dissidents

[2] It was used to refer to small groups of marginalized intellectuals whose challenges, from modest to radical to the Soviet regime, met protection and encouragement from correspondents,[3] and typically criminal prosecution or other forms of silencing by the authorities.

[17] The Helsinki Accords inspired dissidents in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland to openly protest human rights failures by their own governments.

[20] According to Soviet dissident Leonid Plyushch, Moscow has taken advantage of the Helsinki security pact to improve its economy while increasing the suppression of political dissenters.

[30] The KGB head Yuri Andropov determined, "The need has thus emerged to terminate the actions of Orlov, fellow Helsinki monitor Ginzburg and others once and for all, on the basis of existing law.

"[31] According to Dmitri Volkogonov and Harold Shukman, it was Andropov who approved the numerous trials of human rights activists such as Andrei Amalrik, Vladimir Bukovsky, Vyacheslav Chornovil, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Alexander Ginzburg, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Pyotr Grigorenko, Anatoly Shcharansky, and others:[32] If we accept human rights violations as just "their way" of doing things, then we are all guilty.

[40] That technique could be called the "medicalization" of dissidence or psychiatric terror, the now familiar form of repression applied in the Soviet Union to Leonid Plyushch, Pyotr Grigorenko, and many others.

[34]: 96 [42] In the opinion of the Moscow Helsinki Group chairwoman Lyudmila Alexeyeva, the attribution of a mental illness to a prominent figure who came out with a political declaration or action is the most significant factor in the assessment of psychiatry during the 1960–1980s.

[53] In 1977–1979 and again in 1980–1982, the KGB reacted to the Helsinki Watch Groups in Moscow, Kiev, Vilnius, Tbilisi, and Erevan by launching large-scale arrests and sentencing its members to in prison, labor camp, internal exile and psychiatric imprisonment.

Another wave of arrests followed in the early 1980s: Malva Landa, Viktor Nekipelov, Leonard Ternovsky, Feliks Serebrov, Tatiana Osipova, Anatoly Marchenko, and Ivan Kovalev.

The Moscow Helsinki Group founding members Mikhail Bernshtam, Alexander Korchak, Vitaly Rubin also emigrated, and Pyotr Grigorenko was stripped of his Soviet citizenship while seeking medical treatment abroad.

[54]: 250–251  By 1983 the Ukrainian Helsinki Group had 37 members, of whom 22 were in prison camps, 5 were in exile, 6 emigrated to the West, 3 were released and were living in Ukraine, 1 (Mykhailo Melnyk) committed suicide.

[54]: 251–252 Starting in the 1960s, the early years of the Brezhnev stagnation, dissidents in the Soviet Union increasingly turned their attention towards civil and eventually human rights concerns.

[57] Throughout the 1960s-1980s, those active in the civil and human rights movement engaged in a variety of activities: The documentation of political repression and rights violations in samizdat (unsanctioned press); individual and collective protest letters and petitions; unsanctioned demonstrations; mutual aid for prisoners of conscience; and, most prominently, civic watch groups appealing to the international community.

Dissidents active in the movement in the 1960s introduced a "legalist" approach of avoiding moral and political commentary in favor of close attention to legal and procedural issues.

Due to the contacts with Western journalists as well as the political focus during détente (Helsinki Accords), those active in the human rights movement were among those most visible in the West (next to refuseniks).

Led by Mustafa Dzhemilev, they founded their own democratic and decentralized organization, considered unique in the history of independent movements in the Soviet Union.

These include the persecutions of Osip Mandelshtam, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Joseph Brodsky, as well as the publication of The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

In literary world, there were dozens of literati who participated in dissident movement, including Vasily Aksyonov, Yury Aikhenvald, Arkadiy Belinkov, Leonid Borodin, Joseph Brodsky, Yuli Daniel, David Dar, Aleksandr Galich, Anatoly Gladilin, Yuliy Kim, Lev Kopelev, Naum Korzhavin, Konstantin Kuzminsky, Vladimir Maksimov, Viktor Nekrasov, Varlam Shalamov, Andrei Sinyavsky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Kari Unksova, Georgi Vladimov, Vladimir Voinovich, Venedikt Yerofeyev, and Alexander Zinoviev.

The provision in United States federal law intended to affect U.S. trade relations with countries of the Communist bloc that restrict freedom of emigration and other human rights.

In 1977, Carter received prominent dissident Vladimir Bukovsky in the White House, asserting that he did not intend "to be timid" in his support of human rights.

"[75] On 14 November 1988, he held a meeting with Andrei Sakharov at the White House and said that Soviet human rights abuses are impeding progress and would continue to do so until the problem is "completely eliminated.

"[78] Fellow dissident and one of the founders of the Moscow Helsinki Group Lyudmila Alexeyeva wrote: What would happen if citizens acted on the assumption that they have rights?

[63]: 275 According to Soviet dissident Victor Davydoff, totalitarian systems lack mechanisms to change the behavior of the ruling group internally.

[79] Attempts from within are suppressed through repression, necessitating international human rights organizations and foreign governments to exert external pressure for change.