Between Two Ages (1970) by Zbigniew Brzezinski

Author:Zbigniew Brzezinski [Brzezinski, Zbigniew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-09-15T05:18:26+00:00

had perished under Stalin. Though a number of these dissenters have been tried both privately and publicly in Moscow and Leningrad, they have not been deterred from protesting, and they did so again, at grave personal risk, following the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia.

For the time being and for some time to come, the intellectual and orthodox dissenters will in all probability remain a relatively small, isolated group. Like their predecessors in the nineteenth century, at the moment they do not appear able to attract broader popular support. The majority of the Soviet Union's urban population—only one generation removed from their rural setting—are characterized by a social orthodoxy based on a rather simplistic internalized ideology and by a sense of satisfaction in their recent social advancement. Moreover, in its social origins and ways of thinking, the party is closer to the masses than the masses are to the intellectuals. *

A very special and particularly perplexing kind of dissent is posed by increasing restlessness among the Soviet Union's nonRussian nations. The political significance of this phenomenon has largely been ignored by American scholars of Soviet affairs. Yet about onehalf of the two hundred and forty million inhabitants of the Soviet Union are nonRussian, and many of them possess a distinctive sense of their own cultural heritage, their own language, territory, and history. Their intelligentsia, almost entirely Sovietreared, tends to be increasingly assertive though not necessarily secessionist in attitude. It is beginning to demand a larger share in Soviet decisionmaking as well as a bigger part of the economic pie, and it is becoming increasingly leery of Russification. To some extent this Russification is deliberately fostered by Moscow, but it is also the natural result of industrialization and modernization. Official Soviet discussions of this problem, as well as attacks on the dangers of local nationalism, indicate that Soviet leadership is becoming apprehensive; indeed, a number of nonRussian intellectuals have been tried and sentenced in recent years. For the moment, the Soviet government has succeeded in confining nationalist tendencies to a relatively few intellectuals while evidence on the attitude of nonRussian party cadres tends to be ambiguous; however, the very scale of this problem, as well as the fact that nationalism tends to be infectious whether suppressed or tolerated, would suggest that in the years to come the Soviet Union might well be faced with a nationality problem graver in its political consequences than the racial problem in the United States.

The rumblings of ideological discontent within the scientific community have probably been more immediately disturbing to the party. The now wellknown manifesto by the prominent Soviet nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov, which was published in the West in mid1968, 32 had apparently first been circulated among Soviet scientists and then revised by the author in the light of comments. The fact that subsequent Soviet responses to Sakharov took an indirect form, never mentioning him by name, and that he was not denounced by the usual device of a public statement of condemnation signed by his

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