Text 2 The Soviet dissidents.
W
ith
the death of dictator Joseph Stalin in 1953, challenges
to the authority of the Communist party began
to be heard in the Soviet Union. Groups
of dissenters comprising
students, intellectuals, and artists argued for freedom of speech and
respect for human rights. Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin's successor,
at first tolerated
this openness, but dissidents
were later ruthlessly persecuted
by Soviet authorities. Many members of the intelligentsia were
driven underground or forced to emigrate.
The strength of dissident groups reached
its pinnacle in the late 1960s and
early 1970s. Self-published literature,
called samizdat, promoted
free speech and was secretly distributed
among dissidents. Leonid Brezhnev, who replaced Khrushchev in 1964,
cracked down on
dissident activity, fearing that
it would undermine
the legitimacy of
the Soviet system. Through contact with the West, dissidents
transmitted information
about human rights violations
in the Soviet Union to the world, and many politically controversial
works that were refused publication
in the Soviet Union were published abroad. A leading
figure among dissident writers was
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a former
political prisoner.
In 1962 he published his short novel ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich', which depicted
the daily life
of an inmate in
one of Stalin's slave labor camps.
Beginning in the late 1960s, Solzhenitsyn's work was banned
in his homeland
because of his criticism of government repression.
The recipient of the 1970 Nobel prize for literature, Solzhenitsyn
was expelled
from the Soviet Union in 1974, soon after parts of his three-volume
prison memoir
‘The Gulag Archipelago' were published in Paris. The dissent that
permeated post-Stalinist
Russian literature was echoed
by dissidents in other fields. Andrei Sakharov, a Soviet nuclear
physicist who played a crucial role
in the development of the Soviet Union's first hydrogen bomb, wrote
an essay in 1968 that called for Soviet-American cooperation and an
end to nuclear arms proliferation.
In the 1970s he campaigned against
human rights abuses in
the Soviet Union. Soviet authorities sentenced
Sakharov to
internal exile
in Gorky in 1980. Roy Medvedev, a historian, was expelled from the
Communist party under Brezhnev in 1969 because of his criticism of
Stalinism. During the Gorbachev era,
political reform led to the release of
many dissidents, and previously banned works found a new audience in
the Soviet Union. Sakharov was released from exile in 1986, and
Solzhenitsyn's Soviet citizenship was restored in 1990. Medvedev was
readmitted to the Communist party in 1989.
(From: Britannica Student Encyclopedia 2004 Children's Edition. 1994-2003)
Exercises:
Explain the underlined grammar phenomena.
Translate the words in bold.
Define the notions of individual and social rights, samizdat and slave labor camps
Do you agree with the statements in bold?
Give the summary of the text.
Ask problem questions to the students.
Read the text below, translate it and learn the new words: