Word: rubenstein
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...Rubenstein is not purely academic, he blends the historical with the personal for the human rights movements gained force only with the entrace of powerful personalities. Herein lies the power of his book, as he explores the development of dissent through the lives of the important activists. Rubenstein succeeds in portraying the risks involved in participation and what attracted the dissidents. He tells us they were not "ordinary cautious citizens" but often "people with eccentric personalities." But what is more interesting is that those who originally demonstrated were personally affronted, and unable to ignore attacks on their friends, values...
...means to embarass the government. To some it all seemed like a charade to oppose specific violations of law but not to oppose the general absence of rights in a police state, where the law could be ignored with impunity by any government officer didn't make sense. Rubenstein makes clear there are no independent judicial institutions in Russia and--no dissident has ever been tried and found innocent--there is a total disregard for legality at all levels of the government...
...times, Rubenstein's book becomes a court calendar where we watch dissidents held in pretrial retaining centers for over a year without contact with relatives, where they are tried without defense witnesses, closed courtrooms, without cross-examinations, sometimes with the judge leaving the room (case of Yuri Orlov) or with no trial whatsoever (Andrei Sakharov). What Rubenstein reveals is that in the Soviet Union, abuses of human rights are not isolated incidents. There are day-to-day harassment, searches, interrogations, interference with phones, psychological confinement, separation of families, inhuman treatment of prisoners. Often the regime is purposely inconsistent creating...
...While Rubenstein writes adroitly, his style causes some minor problems. Because he writes thematically (and chronologically within each theme) he cites quotations two or three times in several cases. He also assumes that the reader already has specific knowledge of the subject, for he never clarifies what losing membership in the Communist Party or Writer's Union implies. Often, the introduction of new dissidents throughout scatters the chronology and one loses track of years. One also gets no real feeling of just how widespread the movement really...
Those faults all result from Rubenstein's desire to list as many events and people as possible, a laudable motive. But there is a major point which Rubenstein does not make adequately: namely that the new generation of dissidents (especially those involved in Jewish emigration) makes different demands than their predecessors. They are no longer trying to change the Soviet system or to influence internal policies--they are simply asking to leave. They are not political in any oppositional sense. In fact the contradict the very philosophy of the human rights movement which is based on civil disobedience. Because they...