who challenged the regime. In the last two years of Stalin’s life, un-
sanctioned reading groups at universities were broken up; their lead-
ers were arrested, and in a few cases executed.
In the 1950s the Soviet intelligentsia began to demonstrate politi-
cal courage. The publication of Not by Bread Aloneand One Day of
Aleksandr Denisovich marked a Soviet thaw and slightly greater lit-
erary freedoms. Beginning in the early 1960s, a small group of So-
viet intellectuals moved to disagree intellectually with the system.
Some were motivated by religious opinions, more by a demand that
the Soviet system live up to its own laws. These were not revolu-
tionaries; like the men and women of the 1860s, they sought to meet,
talk, read, and publish their ideas. They were few in number and to-
tally harmless politically, but they attracted the enmity of the KGB
and its powerful chair, Yuri Andropov.
In 1964 Joseph Brodsky was tried in Leningrad for being a para-
site. Brodsky, who later won the Nobel Prize for Literature, was con-
demned for acting as an independent (not state-employed) intellec-
tual. In 1965 Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuri Daniel were convicted of
anti-Soviet agitation for publishing their manuscripts abroad. The dé-
tenteof Leonid Brezhnevand the thaw of Nikita Khrushchevwere
clearly over. Other themes galvanized the creative intelligentsia (and
concerned the KGB): during the next two years, there was growing
interest in immigration to Israel and America by Jews and Pente-
costals. Moreover, Aleksandr Solzhenitsynwas preparing his first
great novel for publication in the West, with its denunciation of So-
viet history. Andropov, reacting to these trends, told the Communist
PartyCentral Committee that the service had lost its control of
events inside the country.
Beginning in 1967 Andropov moved to crush intellectual dissent.
He mandated the creation of the Fifth Directorate, for counterintelli-
gencewithin the intelligentsia, and moved to break the movement.
Andropov, who had witnessed the Hungarian revolutionas the So-
viet ambassador, believed that dissent could lead to counterrevolution
in Moscow as it had in Budapest. Andropov also ensured that the So-
viet penal code include new laws that harshly punished anti-Soviet
agitation with seven years in prison plus a term of internal exile. An-
dropov insisted that the leadership take dissent seriously: from 1967
to the fall of the Soviet Union, the Politburo received scores of memos70 •DISSIDENTS06-313 A-G.qxd 7/27/06 7:55 AM Page 70