Status Updates From Dissidents among Dissidents...

The majority of the Soviet intelligentsia participated in the dismantling
of the Soviet Union

the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 did
away with all this, ending the Thaw, largely because it clearly showed how
insignificant was the expert advice of the intelligentsia for those in power

One of the best known Marxist groups at the end of the 1950s was the
one known as the Union of Patriots, which was created in May 1957 by
graduates of the History Faculty of Moscow State University

The late
1950s and early 1960s were marked by the intensification of social
conflicts within Soviet society, with the emergence of spontaneous mass
protests and strikes as a popular reaction to the growth of social inequality,
the lack of industrial democracy, the bureaucratic imbalances of the
planning system, local abuses of party and law enforcement agencies, and
the unresolved national question on the periphery

Reflection on the USSR has been marred – and still is – by two frequent
errors,’ Moshe Lewin wrote in his classic work The Soviet Century. ‘The
first is to take anti-communism for a study of the Soviet Union. The second
– a consequence of the first – consists in ‘Stalinizing’ the whole Soviet
phenomenon, as if it had been one giant gulag from beginning to end

The task of the Bolsheviks should
be not to reinforce the state apparatus they inherit from previous overlords,
but to ‘smash and break it’. According to Lenin’s thinking, such a state
should not attempt to present itself as a moral force, an educator of the
masses; on the contrary, it must convince these masses that they no longer
need any educators.

The party of Lenin accepted this moral burden of making the
transition to socialism in a country which was not ready for it. The dead weight of this decision would assert itself
throughout the whole of Soviet history, and without any doubt the moral
responsibility for all the events of that history runs back to October 1917,
when the Bolsheviks made the crucial decision to seize power

failure to ask basic questions that permits the
proliferation of masquerades and political manipulations, result
that people struggle with the dead and destroy tombs instead of
finding real opponents. the past cannot be extinguished, and the present is always woven from a
mix of different remnants, the unique combination of which creates the
new, whose novelty is always contingent.