as in manuscript illuminations. See also: CATHEDRAL OF THE DORMITION; RUBLEV, ANDREI; THEOPHANES THE GREEK
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hamilton, George H. (1990). The Art and Architecture of Russia. London: Penguin Group. Lazarev, Viktor. (1966). Old Russian Murals and Mosaics: From the Eleventh to the Sixteenth Century. London: Phaidon. Simonov, Aleksandr Grigorevich. (1970). The Frescoes of St. Pherapont Monastery. Moscow: Iskusstvo Publishing House.
Soviet Russia’s first Constitution of 1918 decreed that the bourgeois classes should be disenfranchised. The categories of people marked for disen-franchisement included those who hire labor for the purpose of profit; those who live off unearned income such as interest money or income from property; private traders and middlemen; monks and other clerics of all faiths and denominations; agents of the former tsarist police, gendarmes, prison organs, and security forces; former noblemen; White Army officers; leaders of counterrevolutionary bands; the mentally ill or insane; and persons sentenced by a court for crimes of profit or depravity. However, many more people were vulnerable to the loss of rights. Vladimir Lenin declared that his party would “disenfranchise all citizens who hinder socialist revolution.” In addition, family members of disenfranchised persons shared the fate of their relatives “in those cases where they are materially dependent on the disenfranchised persons.”
Also described as lishentsy, the disenfranchised were not only denied the ability to vote and to be elected to the local governing bodies or soviets: Under Josef Stalin the disenfranchised lost myriad rights and became effective outcasts of the Soviet state. They lost the right to work in state institutions or factories or to serve in the Red Army. They could not obtain a ration card or passport. The disenfranchised could not join a trade union or adopt a child, and they were denied all forms of public assistance, such as a state pension, aid, social insurance, medical care, and housing. Many lishentsy were deported to forced labor camps in the far north and Siberia.
In 1926, the government formalized a procedure that made it possible for some of the disenfranchised to be reinstated their rights. Officially, disenfranchised persons could have their rights restored if they engaged in socially useful labor and demonstrated loyalty to Soviet power. Hundreds of thousands of people flooded Soviet institutions with various appeals for rehabilitation, and some managed to reenter the society that excluded them.
According to statistics maintained by the local soviets, over 2 million people lost their rights, but these figures on the number of people disenfranchised are probably underestimated. In the electoral campaigns of 1926 to 1927 and 1928 to 1929, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR)
DISHONOR
reported roughly 3 to 4 percent of rural and 7 to 8 percent of the urban residents disenfranchised as a percentage of the voting-age population. Rates of disenfranchisement were higher in those areas with large non- Russian populations. Although portrayed as bourgeois elements, the disenfranchised actually included a wide variety of people, such as gamblers, tax evaders, embezzlers, and ethnic minorities. The poor, the weak, and the elderly were especially vulnerable to disenfranchisement.
Disenfranchisement ended with Stalin’s 1936 Constitution, which extended voting rights to all of the former categories of disenfranchised people except for the mentally ill and those sentenced by a court to deprivation of rights. Nonetheless, “former people,” or those with ties to the old regime, remained vulnerable during subsequent campaigns of Stalinist terror. See also: BOLSHEVISM; CONSTITUTION OF 1918; CONSTITUTION OF 1936; LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH
Alexopoulos, Golfo. (2003). Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926-36. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. (1993). “Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia.” Journal of Modern History 65:745-770. Kimberling, Elise. (1982). “Civil Rights and Social Policy in Soviet Russia, 1918-36.” Russian Review 41:24-46.
GOLFO ALEXOPOULOS
DISHONOR See BECHESTIE.
Individuals and informal groups opposed to Communist Party rule.
This movement comprised an informal, loosely organized conglomeration of individual and group-based dissidents in the decades following the death of Josef Stalin in March 1953 through the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s. They opposed their posttotalitarian regimes, accepting, as punishment, exile, imprisonment, and sometimes even death. The dissidents subjected their fellow citizens to moral triage. By the year 1991, they helped to bring down the regimes in Europe, which, for a number of reasons, had already embarked upon a political modernization and democratization process. Dissidents were less successful in the East and Southeast Asian countries of the communist bloc. It may be ironic that with the reversion to authoritarian practices in such former Soviet republics as the Russian Federation, Belarus, and the Ukraine by the turn of the twenty-first century, dissidents have reappeared in the 2000s as individuals, or, at most, small groups, but not as a movement.
DEFINITIONS
The most precise historical usage dates from the late 1960s. The term “dissident” (in Russian, inakomys- liachii for men or inakomysliachaia for women) was first applied to intellectuals opposing the regime in the Soviet Union. Then, in the late 1970s, it spread to Soviet-dominated East Central and Southeast Europe, which was also known as Eastern Europe. Most broadly, a dissident may be defined as an outspoken political and social noncomformist.
The classic definition of dissent in the East Central European context is that by Vaclav Havel, a leading dissident himself and later president of the Czechoslovak and Czech Republics, from December 1989 until his resignation February 2, 2003. Wrote Havel: “[Dissent] is a natural and inevitable consequence of the present historical phase of the [Communist dictatorship-Y.B.] system it is haunting. It was born at a time, when this system, for a thousand reasons, can no longer base itself on the unadulterated, brutal, and arbitrary application of power, eliminating all expressions of nonconformity. What is more, the system has become so ossified politically that there is practically no way for such nonconformity to be implemented within its official structures” (Havel, 1985, p. 23). Havel thus places dissent into the post-Stalinist or posttotalitarian phase of the communist system. The semi-ironic concept of dissent also implies that its practitioners, the dissidents, differed in their thinking from the majority of their fellow citizens and were thus doomed to failure. By making, however, common cause with the party reformers in the governing structures, the dissidents, including Havel, prevailed for good in Eastern Europe, and at least temporarily in the Russian Federation, Belarus, and the Ukraine.
SOVIET LEADERS AND LEADING DISSIDENTS
The party reformer Nikita Khrushchev, who after Stalin’s death headed the Soviet regime from March
1953 to October 1964, was committed to building communism in the Soviet Union, in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe and throughout the world. Paradoxically, he ended by laying the political and legal foundations for the dissident movement. That movement flourished under Khrushchev’s long-term successor Leonid Brezhnev (October 1964-No-vember 1982). Being more conservative, Brezhnev wanted to restore Stalinism, but failed, partly because of the opposition from dissidents. After the brief tenure of two interim leaders-the tough reformer Yuri Andropov (November 1982-February 1984) and the conservative Konstantin Chernenko (February 1984-March 1985)-power was assumed by Andropov’s young prot?g?, the ambitious mod-ernizer Mikhail Gorbachev (March 1985-December 1991). Like Khrushchev, Gorbachev both fought and encouraged the dissident movement. Ultimately, he failed all around. By December 1991, the Soviet Union withdrew from its outer empire in Eastern Europe and saw the collapse of its inner empire. It ceased to exist, and Gorbachev resigned from the presidency December 25, 1991.
The most outstanding ideological leaders of the Soviet dissidents were, from the Left to the Right, Roy Medvedev (Medvedev, 1971), Peter Grigorenko (Grigorenko, 1982), Andrei Sakharov (Sakharov, 1968, 1992), and Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Solzhen-itsyn: 1963, 1974-1978). The more radical Andrei Amalrik (Amalrik, 1970) cannot
