Soviet dissidents were people who disagreed with certain features of Soviet ideology or with its entirety and who were willing to speak out against them. The term dissident was used in the Soviet Union (USSR) in the period from the mid-1960s until the Fall of Communism. 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, and typically criminal prosecution or other forms of silencing by the authorities. Following the etymology of the term, a dissident is considered to "sit apart" from the regime. As dissenters began self-identifying as dissidents, the term came to refer to an individual whose non-conformism was perceived to be for the good of a society. The most influential subset of the dissidents is known as the Soviet human rights movement.
Moscow Helsinki Group members Yuliya Vishnevskya, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, Dina Kaminskaya, Kronid Lyubarsky in Munich, 1978
A Chronicle of Current Events No 11, 31 December 1968 (front cover)
Yelena Bonner and Andrei Sakharov after their arrival for the conferment of the honorary doctorate in law from the University of Groningen, 15 June 1989
Image: Jimmy Carter Portrait 2
Anti-Sovietism or anti-Soviet sentiment refers to persons and activities that were actually or allegedly aimed against the Soviet Union or government power within the Soviet Union.
Russian èmigré anti-Bolshevik poster, c. 1932
"Down with Bolshevism!" - Nazi propaganda poster in Russian for occupied Soviet territories.
Polish anti-Soviet propaganda poster during the Polish–Soviet War, depicting Leon Trotsky.
Anti-Soviet rally in Lithuania of about 300,000 people in 1988, condemning the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Sąjūdis was a movement which led to the restoration of an Independent State of Lithuania in 1990.
