Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 1 – Last Friday and
Saturday, a group of civic activists met in Moscow to honor the memory of the late
Arseny Roginsky, a dissident and political prisoner who served as chairman of the
board of Memorial. Many of those attending believe that they are the heirs to
the Soviet dissidents; but tragically few of them are, Aleksandr Podrabinek
says.
Russia and the Russian opposition
need to learn the lessons of the Soviet dissident movement, the human rights activist
says; but unfortunately, not only is there little social demand for that, but
those who claim to be its heirs accept only “the most superficial and formal”
aspects of that experience, not its essence (graniru.org/opinion/podrabinek/m.275776.html).
“The people in Russia today to a
great extent are politically inert, fear change and cower before the bosses,
acknowledging if not their right to rule then acknowledging as inevitable their
power to direct people and events.” There are some exceptions to this pattern,
but they are few and far between both among the opposition and the population.
According to Podrabinek, “the cultural elite in the main as was the case
earlier remains servile and indifferent to freedom.” It submits without complaint
and accepts the baubles from the powers that be. And most of those who can’t
simply exit by emigrating, something that is now more possible than it was in
Soviet times.
Those
who identify as the political opposition aren’t able to adopt the dissident experience
because they are “engaged in a game, the main prize of which is power” even
though they haven’t won and cannot win “because it interacts with the crooks in
power” and believes that the game itself gives meaning to and justifies their
existence.
Even
those who view themselves as defenders of glasnost and freedom of speech “accept
censorship is an inevitable evil and humbly subordinate themselves to the demands
of the procuracy and media control structures.”
This is a complete contrast with the way those who circulated
anti-Soviet samizdat behaved.
But
what is especially unfortunate, Podrabinek says, is that those engaged in human
rights work have ignored the dissident experience of resistance. They take
money from the regime, they sit on its “human rights” councils, and “they
consider it normal to cooperate with the powers that be which is the only
source of the violation of human rights.”
One can’t imagine dissidents in Soviet times
doing anything similar, like taking money from the KGB or the CPSU Central
committee. But now that is the norm. The
Moscow Helsinki Group, the For Human Rightss Movement, Agora, Golos the Soldiers’
Mothers Committee, Imprisoned Russia, the Sakharov Center and Memorial all do
so.
“Dissidents in times of harsh Soviet
totalitarianism were incomparably more free and responsible people than the
present social activists living under conditions of a relatively soft authoritarian
regime,” the rights activist says.
“Thank God,” Podrabinek continues, “not
all present-day human rights activists, journalists and opposition figures or
cultural leaders conduct themselves so shamefully. There are worthy people, but
unfortunately, they are a minority.” But even those who behave well do so
because of their own ethical principles rather than because they have mastered
the past.
To assimilate the experience of the
Soviet dissidents means, the longtime rights activist says, to “be informed by
the spirit of resistance, to recognize one’s own personal and civic dignity
which already will not allow one to take money from tyrants, to participate in
dishonest councils or put up with the censors.”
Today, he says, rights activists and oppositionists justify what they
are doing by saying that “politics is the art of the possible. That may be. But
dissent is the art of the impossible. And today in Russia, unfortunately, has
been lost.”
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