Sedition

Although dissident Soviet intellectuals in the post-Stalin era received wide international attention, ordinary people who opposed the regime rarely had their voices heard. This book is the first to tell the hidden story of popular discontent during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years. It draws on an extraordinary collection of arrest and prosecution records from the 1960s and 1970s found in Soviet Procuracy archives. The attitudes of disgruntled common citizens become clear in these documents. Politically unsophisticated, unimpressed by the liberal-minded intelligentsia, resentful that Soviet goods were being exported while people at home were deprived and hungry, the everyday critics were sometimes caught in acts of "sedition." Their crimes were cursing their bosses, desecrating symbols of Soviet power, penning anonymous letters and leaflets, writing naive anti-Soviet treatises, and joining proto-political organizations. This book covers the gamut, from the death of Stalin to elections to individual and group acts of defiance. --Book Jacket.