Abstract

In the wake of Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, Soviet policies on dissent took shape with the abandonment of mass terror as a method of rule, followed by a comprehensive liberalization of Soviet legal codes. As dissent gradually became organized and public from the late 1950s, a pattem of keeping arrests of dissidents to a minimum emerged. To do this, an escalating array of lesser measures was devised, from cautionary conversations with KGB officers to job dismissal. As dissent diversified in the late 1960s and 1970s to include religious, nationalist, social, and human rights movements, it gained increasing support from the West. The Kremlin often had difficulty taking this into account. In the mid-1970s, its desire for detente with the West led to concessions on human rights, including a reduction in arrests. These were exploited by dissidents, but soon retracted with detente's collapse in 1979-80, and the U.S.S.R.'s isolation. Nonetheless, Soviet policies on dissent varied within relatively narrow limits, and only changed dramatically from 1986 under Mikhail Gorbachev.