Repression and Resistance

Brezhnev reversed Khrushchev’s “Thaw,” triggering resistance by a segment of the liberal intelligentsia. The struggle crystalized over Stalin’s political legacy, leading to a compromise that blocked hard-line efforts to rehabilitate Stalin but did little to address the problems he left behind. The chapter describes the origins of the human rights movement, the rise of unofficial samizdat literature, the creation of the underground dissident journal The Chronicle of Current Events, the Jewish emigration movement, Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and KGB chief Yuriy Andropov’s efforts to suppress the movement. It also describes the author’s visit to Stalin’s native Georgia on the one hundredth anniversary of his birth, his contacts with members of the Soviet dissident community including Sakharov, and his experience with the Chronicle and other samizdat works.