Word: movement
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...until 18 months ago, virtually unknown?an unemployed Jewish computer programmer on the fringes of the Soviet Union's human rights movement in Moscow. Then the Kremlin leaders decided to crush, once and for all, the flickering life signs of dissidence in the U.S.S.R. That is how last week, Anatoli Shcharansky became the symbol of deteriorating U.S.-Soviet relations, the object of confrontation politics between the Kremlin and the White House, and the personification of the struggle for human rights being waged by the Soviet Union's dogged dissidents. Put on trial for treason in Moscow, he was speedily convicted...
...more notable dissidents. Of 38 founding members of the Helsinki Watch Committees, 17 are now in prison, while seven have emigrated or been exiled. Yet another trial is expected soon. The defendant will be Alexander Podrabinek, 24, who has devoted himself exclusively to one aspect of the human rights movement: the plight of dissenters who have been imprisoned in KGB-run mental institutions where beatings and the injection of painful and dangerous drugs are commonplace...
Samizdat, or underground literature, began to flourish, enriched by such banned works as Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle. But even at the height of the movement, active dissenters have never numbered more than a few thousand people. Still, the influence of their ideas is incalculable in a country where muted discontent over material and intellectual deprivation is widespread...
Attorney Dina Kaminskaya was chosen by Shcharansky and Ginzburg to represent them. She was then disbarred for her previous, vigorous defense of several other dissenters and forced into exile ten months ago. In Washington last week she argued that "the dissident movement will not be defeated in spite of all these persecutions. There will always be people who surface to fight, even when the persecutions become more cruel...
British Sovietologist Peter Reddaway, a longtime observer of the dissident scene, believes that the human rights movement's links with religious minorities and ethnic groups like the Ukrainians give it a potential mass base. "An unpleasant period is ahead for the dissident groups, but I'm sure they will respond as they have in the past, by toughing it out. A pattern has been established over the years: when dissident leaders disappear, others come forward to take their place." There was no more compelling proof of the dissidents' will to resist than the closing statement delivered by Shcharansky...