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00:00We're in the divided city of Berlin, in East Berlin, the capital of the German Democratic
00:24Republic. It's the first day of June, 1979. We're in the Friedrichshain neighborhood,
00:31inside the Samariterkirche, the Samaritan church. This is a tall Protestant evangelical church
00:38with a prominent spire built in red brick in a neo-Gothic style in the late 19th century,
00:45hearkening back to past traditions. But now, the dark and cool interior echoes with modern,
00:52soulful blues sounds, and the youthful audience is fully alert and participating in something new.
01:00This is the first blues mass held in East Germany. The setting was crucial. Because of a detente and
01:08compromise between the East German state and the Protestant church, churches became sites for
01:14happenings otherwise not permitted. To perform music and songs in public, one needed state approval.
01:21Except in the church space. It all started when blues musician Gunther Holly Holwas,
01:29frustrated at being refused state permission to perform, approached the pastor of the Samariterkirche
01:35with the idea of putting together a concert. The pastor, Rainer Eppelmann, loved the idea,
01:42but he insisted it had to have biblical content. And thus, a new hybrid form, the blues mass, was invented.
01:53Pastor Rainer Eppelmann had been born in 1943. He was a conscientious objector when drafted into the East
02:00German army and was jailed for his stances. But jail only strengthened his convictions. Eppelmann was horrified
02:08to discover that his own father had been an SS officer working at the Buchenwald concentration camp.
02:15And in reaction, Eppelmann rejected unlimited claims of worldly authority. After working as a bricklayer,
02:23he turned to the study of theology and became a pastor in East Berlin in 1974, reaching out to youth
02:30an engaging youth culture. In total, from 1979 to 1986, 20 blues masses were organized in East Berlin
02:41churches. At first, the numbers of attendees were small in the hundreds, but then word spread. And
02:48each weekend, the numbers almost doubled. By 1982, up to 4,000 came to the masses. At each event,
02:57music was played, especially blues, Bible texts and psalms were read, and skits, like parables,
03:04addressed current social ills and discontents. Eventually, punk music also was included.
03:12Blending the sacred and secular in a safe space, Eppelmann succeeded in drawing many non-believers.
03:20Neighbors and older parishioners complained of the loudness, but this was a new public that was being
03:26brought into being. The Stasi spied relentlessly on these events, with an entire dedicated blues team.
03:35Eppelmann's residence was bugged. The authorities forced organizers to reschedule events at the last
03:41minute. It's estimated that some 8% of clergy were secret informers. Quite openly, the Stasi filmed the
03:50comings and goings of participants in the street and from rooftops to remind them that they were being
03:56observed. By 1987, the popularity of the blues masses ebbed. But this was in part because new kinds of
04:05community and association had grown up in this space, and participants now joined environmental and peace
04:12movements. So from the Stasi perspective, the threat remained, mutated, and spread in new forms.
04:21In this stretch of our course, we're looking for the causes of the collapse of communism in Eastern
04:26Europe and the Soviet Union. What led up to the events of 1989 to 1991? The answer is not simple. Many
04:35factors converge to topple communism. But in this lecture, we'll focus on the role of dissent within
04:41the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites. Although the fall of communism was not caused by
04:48active resistance alone, dissent grew and over time did something more widely influential. It presented
04:56possible alternative future scenarios. Communism in power had always faced dissent and opposition.
05:05The record of protest, revolt, and resistance went back to the 1921 Kronstadt Rebellion,
05:12when former supporters of Lenin and the Bolsheviks protested against their authoritarian methods
05:18and were crushed. Later revolts included the 1953 East Berlin Workers Uprising, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution,
05:28and the 1968 Prague Spring. Open revolt was so threatening that the state tried to impose
05:36secrecy when it could. When Warsaw Pact countries invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, soldiers were at first not
05:44even told where they were intervening. Secrecy also shrouded an internal revolt by workers inside the Soviet
05:51Union in 1962. Demonstrations broke out over shortages and work conditions in Novosarkov.
05:59Strikers at an electric plant gained support from other factories. Columns of protesters shouted for
06:07meat, milk, and wage increases. And they carried portraits of Lenin while clashing with the police.
06:14Troops with tanks were sent in and fired into the crowds of workers and students, killing 26. Afterwards,
06:22the Soviet Union ensured that no word of the Novocharkov massacre ever appeared in state media,
06:29but rumors would spread. The same was true of industrial accidents and the regime's own mistakes.
06:37Word would get out. I experienced this when I went to Moscow in 1989. Our Russian student hosts
06:45would wait until we were exactly in the midpoint of the long, long metro escalators to tell us grisly
06:53stories about how an entire crowd of commuters had been dropped into the machinery of the escalator when the
06:59stairs gave way and had been ground up in tiny bits. As I found out later, this urban legend was
07:06likely an echo of a real metro accident in 1982 at Avia Motormaya station, when at least eight people
07:14died trampled to death. The list of suppressed mishaps is long. The Kishtim disaster of 1957 saw a tank of
07:24radioactive solution explode at a weapons-grade plutonium plant in Chelyabinsk, releasing radiation
07:31estimated at two-thirds that of the later Chernobyl disaster. The disaster was only officially admitted
07:38in 1989. Amid the successes of the cosmonauts, Sputnik and Gagarin, the world's worst space program
07:47catastrophe was kept secret. When a rocket exploded on its launch pad in 1960, it killed over a hundred,
07:55including the rocket program commander. The mishap was hidden to protect an aura of success.
08:04In 1971, smallpox was accidentally released by a bioweapons project at the Aral Sea,
08:11and in 1979, anthrax spores likewise spread at Svetlovsk. In 1983, the Soviets mistakenly shot
08:21down a civilian aircraft, Korean Airlines Flight 007, and all 269 aboard perished. The Soviets recovered
08:31the black boxes and plain wreckage, but kept them secret for nearly a decade. Rumors and unofficial
08:39knowledge, even if fragmentary, eroded trust in the system as a whole. Also slowly challenging
08:47legitimacy was the national question, how to blend or fuse different peoples or ethnicities into the
08:54state. In hindsight, the ethnic federal structure of the Soviet Union looks a lot like a time bomb
09:01that started ticking under Lenin. Lenin aimed to win sympathies of non-Russian populations
09:07by promising them a share in power and a communist mission while preserving their cultural attributes
09:14of identity. In the long run, nationalism was supposed to be overcome, but instead,
09:19it actually increased in salience. As economic shortages worsened, non-Russian republics believed
09:26they were being bled dry to support the center in Moscow. Russians believed that they were subsidizing
09:33all the others and being neglected themselves as a result. Moreover, in its outer empire of satellite
09:40states, the Soviet Union practiced imperialism while theoretically and ideologically condemning it,
09:47a contradiction that also would prove explosive. This latent tension always makes me think of a strange
09:55encounter I had in 1978 in Vilnius, Lithuania in the Soviet Union as a boy. While the adults talked freely
10:04in the outside air of Vingo Park, I went to return an empty bottle of Baikal soda to the kiosk where we
10:12had bought it to get the refund coin. As I returned the bottle, the woman behind the counter addressed me in
10:19Russian. She never could have suspected that I was a rare visitor from America and knew no Russian,
10:26a language I only later started to study in college in Chicago. So I stammered in Lithuanian,
10:32I'm sorry, I don't speak Russian. This was unheard of, and the woman started yelling at me for
10:38insolently pretending not to speak the dominant language. From behind her, a smiling woman colleague
10:46of hers leaned forward, gave me the coin, and grinned at me as if we were both in on a joke.
10:53Though Stalin had once claimed the Soviet Union could be national in form, socialist in content,
10:59ethnic identities and tensions lay just under the surface. Underneath these looming problems,
11:07resistance simmered over decades in the form of dissidence, discontent, and evasion of the system's
11:14demands in ways small and dramatic. Claims of total control proved extraordinarily vulnerable to the
11:23least sign of opposition, which carried on despite the 160,000 KGB agents active in the end of the 1960s.
11:32Dissent ranged from writing graffiti on a wall to desperate acts like trying to clamber over the Berlin
11:38wall. Most often, dissent did not take the form of big organized movements and was not violent.
11:46Resistance could take nearly invisible everyday forms, like reading the official press and then
11:53interpreting it against the grain, concluding that the system was so mendacious that the real truth
11:59was often the very opposite of the official line. Or take political jokes, the so-called anecdotes,
12:06which I love to collect. Some scholars now question their effect, suggesting jokes might even have
12:13reinforced despair and passivity. But George Orwell called every joke a tiny revolution,
12:21an assertion of our inborn freedom of thought. Is it possible that each joke eroded the system more?
12:28Or what about those coveted western blue jeans, condemned as decadent? Was wearing blue jeans a form
12:34of dissent? As a whole, it's vital to keep in mind how courageous but rare were the instances of
12:43outright frontal resistance. Many people supported the ruling system in spite of its shortcomings, valuing
12:51security, the promise of equality, rules, imposed order, and seeming stability. Others remember the terror of
13:01Stalin and its trauma left them cowed. Dissidents appeared with many different motives, from hippies
13:10to punks to religious believers. Some were neo-Leninists, critiquing the status quo from what they considered a
13:19more authentic communist position. So-called refuseniks were Jewish citizens seeking to emigrate from the
13:27Soviet Union in the face of widespread antisemitism. Environmental protesters and peace activists also
13:35raised their voices. Artists were prominent among the dissidents, finding creative ways to confront the
13:42limits that were imposed on them. The East German poet Uwe Kolbe got a long poem approved as quite
13:50politically correct. Only once it was published was it obvious that the first letter of each line
13:57spelled out an obscene challenge to the elite. In 1972, the Hungarian artist Tomasz Szentjövi turned
14:06repression into performance art. He put a chair outside the Intercontinental Hotel in Budapest,
14:14put a leather belt around his mouth and sat down. His piece was called Sit Out, Be Forbidden,
14:22and it involved being arrested. It took the police 20 minutes to arrive, ending the performance.
14:29Other dissidents refused to participate in systems of control. When the Stasi sought quietly to recruit
14:36informers, some brave souls responded by telling everyone they knew about it, which made them useless as
14:44assets. The dissident movement, for all its variety and diversity, started to come together and grow.
14:52The persecuted writer Andrey Szynovsky, in his book Soviet Civilization, claimed that it all started
14:59with Khrushchev's secret speech in 1956, in which, quote, the government had confessed to committing crimes
15:07against humanity, against its own people, and even against the Soviet power and the party, end quote.
15:14An admission, in essence, that the system itself was vicious. Szynovsky concluded, quote,
15:21Dissidence is thus an intellectual movement first, a process of independent and courageous reflection
15:28on the mysteries of the history and system of the Soviet state, end quote. Szynovsky should know.
15:36In 1966, he and fellow satirist Yuli Daniel were brought before a show trial and condemned for anti-Soviet
15:44agitation and propaganda for their writings, which had been published underground and abroad. They received
15:51sentences of seven and five years, respectively, in labor camps. Another milestone came with a 1968
16:00Red Square protest in Moscow. Disgusted by the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia,
16:07eight dissidents, men and women, gathered to hold up signs, including,
16:12shame to the occupiers, and for your freedom and ours. That was eight protesters out of 230 million
16:21citizens. This demonstration lasted less than five minutes as the dissidents were grabbed, beaten,
16:27and arrested. Some of the thugs shouted that the protesters were parasites, anti-Soviet Jews. Once
16:35arrested, some of the protesters were sentenced to exile or labor camps, others sent to psychiatric hospitals.
16:42Though small and quickly shut down, this protest was a first step in the growing unification among
16:49dissenting voices. The following year, 1969, in protest against Soviet repression
16:57and its demoralization of his people, the Czech student of history, Jan Palach, at 20 years old,
17:04set himself on fire and perished. Czechoslovak security forces worked to erase traces of his grave,
17:11which became a shrine. In 1972, a 19-year-old Lithuanian student, Romas Kalanta,
17:19set himself on fire in downtown Kaunas. Although the state tried to cover it up,
17:24his death provoked widespread riots after his funeral and growing unrest afterwards. In Lithuania,
17:32religious motives for resistance were strengthened by decades of state aggression against the Catholic
17:37Church. In the northern part of the country is a site of pilgrimage, the Hill of Crosses,
17:43where over two centuries believers had created a virtual forest of crosses. The state bulldozed the
17:50site three times, but after each destruction, people returned in secret with more crosses.
17:57Over time, the diverse movement of dissidents found their aims coalescing around the issue
18:05of basic human rights. Increasingly, dissidents agitated on legal grounds, demanding for themselves
18:13in practice the rights that were actually formally written into the Soviet constitution and in the
18:19Helsinki Accords that had been signed in 1975. A Moscow-Helsinki group was founded in 1976 and other
18:28similar groups in Eastern European countries. An amazing widespread spontaneous phenomenon of resistance
18:37came in the form of samizdat, the underground publication and circulation of uncensored texts.
18:44Samizdat in Russian means self-published. In practice, that meant laboriously copying texts by typewriter,
18:53page by page. The few early Xerox machines were kept under lock and key to prevent their use.
19:00The texts would be passed from friend to friend, often with only one evening in which to read it.
19:06These samizdat products would also be smuggled out of the country, and then readings of them would be
19:13broadcast back into the country via Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, or Vatican Radio.
19:20One astonishing item of samizdat was an essay by the young Russian historian Andrei Amalryk.
19:27Amalryk had been expelled from Moscow State University because of his historical views.
19:33His essay, which appeared in 1970, was entitled,
19:36Will the Soviet Union survive until 1984? In it, Amalryk engaged in a thought experiment,
19:46convinced that the system around him was unsustainable and would break down. He imagined,
19:52in one possible scenario, the Soviet Union and China going to war, leading to the implosion of the USSR by
19:591984. That war did not happen. Instead, the Afghan war sapped Soviet resources for a decade. But the
20:08collapse did happen. In retrospect, when so few made even the haziest predictions of Soviet collapse,
20:16this was a remarkable feat. In 1976, Amalryk was forced to emigrate and died in a car accident in
20:23Spain in 1980. Far greater was the impact of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and his three-volume tome,
20:31The Gulag Archipelago, based on his eight years in the camps and the narratives of fellow prisoners.
20:38He had been allowed to publish a short novel in 1962 entitled One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,
20:46which broke the silence about the camps. But then his later writings were refused publication,
20:52and he was expelled from the Writers' Union. Working in secret, he produced an experiment in
20:58literary investigation, as he termed it, revealing the reality of the camp system spanning a continent
21:05and spanning all the history of the Soviet Union, not just Stalinism. He denounced it in thundering
21:12language and condemned amnesia about this vast suffering. The manuscript was hidden with the help of
21:20an Estonian fellow ex-prisoner and then smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in the West in 1973,
21:28while also circulating in samizdat form within the Soviet Union. In the West, it struck its readers
21:35as a message from another planet and changed discourse about Soviet history. Within the Soviet Union,
21:43even the committed communist dissident Roy Medvedev, who still hoped that the Soviet experiment could be
21:49salvaged, praised the book as a life-changing read. Then, in 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested,
21:58forcibly put on a plane, and deported to Germany. He eventually settled in Vermont in the United States to
22:05continue his epic projects of fiction. Upon his arrest and expulsion, however, he published the essay
22:12Live Not By Lies, urging his readers to refuse to cooperate in falsehood and compulsion, no matter the cost.
22:22An impressive long-term samizdat project was the Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania,
22:28Lietuvos Katalik Ubozničius Kronika, or just Kronika for short. With 81 editions, produced from 1972 to 1989,
22:40it was the longest-running samizdat periodical in the Soviet Union, published by Catholic priests and nuns.
22:47Each secret edition urged, after you have read it, give it to someone else. Its secret typists kept
22:55kerosene and matches nearby in case of arrest to destroy their work. Once typed, issues were also
23:02smuggled out to the West, then broadcast back in by radio. Kronika started when the Soviet government
23:11sentenced three priests to hard labor for teaching religion to children. The underground editors
23:17collected information and relayed it without editorializing in factual, deliberately spare
23:24language. The Kronika is available online in English translation today. As an example, in issue 10 from
23:321974, there was a report on a school in Sutkaj, Lithuania, where a teacher and a pioneer youth organizer
23:40organized an atheist evening program and forced children who attended church to play roles ridiculing
23:47religion. After its first decade, the editors were getting more information sent to them than they
23:54could use. This showed a growing fearlessness. And no one was more fearless than Sister Neole Sadunaite.
24:01Born in 1938, she secretly took vows to become a nun in 1956 and worked in the world as a certified
24:10nurse. With others, Sadunaite worked on typing Kronika. But even during Khrushchev's desolidization
24:18initiative and after, repression continued, and Sadunaite was arrested in 1974. She was sentenced to the
24:26camps in Mordovia for six years and then exiled in eastern Siberia until 1980. Sadunaite wrote a
24:35testimonial, also available online, called A Radiance in the Gulag. Amazingly, she recalled that the years
24:43in prison were her happiest, as they gave her a chance to witness to others. Here she recognized that
24:51the best people were often in the camps. The worst were in charge of the state. A teacher of atheism
24:58was brought in to influence her, but then stopped when the teacher became interested in how to pray.
25:05In spite of a heart attack, many health challenges, and threats of being put into a psychiatric
25:11institution, Sadunaite continued her activism. Finally, let me note one last vital text that
25:18circulated in Samizdat. This was an essay from 1978 entitled The Power of the Powerless,
25:26written by Vaclav Havel, Czechoslovakia's most famed dissident, a playwright who got stampeded into
25:33politics. Though he was nonpartisan, Havel's defense of literature and freedom of thought put him in
25:41conflict with the state. He defended an outrageous and unsanctioned rock band called the Plastic People of
25:48the Universe. Havel and other dissidents gathered into a group called Charter 77, named after a
25:55petition appealing to the state to honor human rights obligations that it had undersigned as part of
26:01the Helsinki Accords. Havel served nearly four years in prison, from 1979 to 1983, and was jailed in 1989.
26:11His ideas were stirringly summed up in the essay, The Power of the Powerless.
26:18This essay begins, A specter is haunting Eastern Europe, the specter of what in the West is called
26:24dissent. It is a natural and inevitable consequence of the present historical phase of the system it is
26:32haunting. After this tweaking of Marx, Havel imagines how the seemingly mighty monolith of regime power,
26:41can be brought down. All it takes are remarkably small, modest, ordinary human acts, like a grocer
26:50refusing to put up empty government slogans in his store. From such small acts of refusal, refusing to
26:58live a lie and instead striving to live in truth, others then take courage for nonconformity, opening the
27:06way to what Havel called a moral reconstitution of society. Dissent could take varied forms. But the 1980
27:16Solidarity movement in Poland showed the power that could result from fusing these impulses, spreading
27:23them broadly across society. Solidarity, Solidarność in Polish, was an independent trade unit established in a
27:31country that claimed it was already ruled by the workers. And it presented the challenge of a mass,
27:38peaceful mobilization within the Soviet bloc. How had it come to this? Back in 1976, Poland saw strikes and
27:49protests over price increases on food because of inflation and payments on foreign loans. The
27:56government crackdown on protesters was harsh. In response, an organization called COR, standing for
28:04Workers' Defense Committee, was set up. Strikingly, COR really did bring together intellectuals and workers,
28:11not just as a rhetorical slogan. A kind of ferment of protest activity began, and a so-called flying
28:19university with the works of exiled writers like Czesław Miłosz circulated underground in Samizdat form.
28:28Poles had long, long experience with underground resistance after centuries of foreign occupation.
28:34In 1978, these activities got an unexpected boost when the Polish Archbishop of Krakow,
28:44Karol Wojtyla, was elected as the new Catholic pope. He was the first non-Italian pope in over four
28:52centuries. Taking the name John Paul II, he was pope until 2005 and exercised a vast influence in word and
29:01example. Stalin had once scoffed at religious authority, asking, how many divisions does the pope
29:08have? Well, this joke now got turned around. In June of 1979, Pope John Paul II returned to his native
29:17Poland, and hundreds of thousands came out to hail him and his message, be not afraid. In Poland,
29:25workers' rights, national identity, and religion combined. Then, in 1980, strikes grew again in
29:34response to increases in meat prices. The strikers now took over factories and settled in for a
29:41confrontation with the government. In August, an inter-factory strike committee was formed in the
29:48shipyards of Gdańsk. Lech Walesa, a 36-year-old electrician, became its leader. Walesa was a
29:56proletarian, but he was also a Catholic and a patriotic pole. The Solidarity movement's demands grew,
30:04including the right to found independent unions, to strike, and to exercise free speech. They were
30:10essentially demanding a civil society. That is the zone of free association of individuals that is
30:17not within the control of the state. Solidarity activists studied Havel's famed essay, The Power of
30:24the Powerless. They championed the radical concept of act as if you are free, refusing to accept illegitimate
30:33force. When the government agreed to negotiate and gave in to the demand for free trade unions,
30:39it seemed the protesters were winning. The new national union was called Solidarity. By November,
30:46it had 8 million members, a third of all Polish adults in the country. By 1981, its membership was
30:55more than 10 million. Clearly, this was not just a traditional workers' union, but was becoming a national
31:02independence unit, the self-mobilization of an entire people. Showing its might, in March
31:091981, Solidarity organized a general strike that shut down the country for four hours. The Polish
31:17Communist Party crumbled. Of its previous three million members, one million quit the party outright,
31:23and some 700,000 joined Solidarity. Amid this cascade of events, the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact
31:33threatened invasion, in a repeat of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Instead, on December 13, 1981,
31:43a Polish general, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, declared martial law. Mass arrests took place, including 6,000
31:52Solidarity leaders, Valencia among them. Massive violence or civil war was avoided, except in the coal mines of
32:01Katowice, where nine miners were killed by the army. But even these measures were unable to quell discontent.
32:09Solidarity continued to work underground.
32:13In our times, Jaruzelski proved a very controversial person in Poland. He claimed that he had acted as a
32:20patriot to forestall Soviet invasion and save lives. Others see him as a traitor. He died in May of 2014,
32:292014, and Valenza attended his funeral. Valenza was freed in November of 1982, after almost a year in jail.
32:38And the next year, in 1983, he received the Nobel Peace Prize. Martial law was lifted in 1983,
32:46but the uneasy standoff continued. Pope John Paul II visited Poland again in 1983,
32:54and was greeted by 10 million Poles who came out to see him. In October of 1984, a priest who spoke out
33:03against the government, Father Yerzy Popeluszko, was killed by secret police. Instead of shutting people
33:09up, this act made him a martyr, whose grave became a holy site and the symbol for reinvigorated protest.
33:17The challenge of solidarity proved epic, and arguably played a large role in the hollowing out
33:25of the official ideology in the Soviet bloc. Having surveyed the course of dissent up to the
33:32collapse of the Soviet bloc, we should at least briefly note the afterlife and long-term legacy of
33:38resistance movements, which were as varied as the movements themselves. Attempts were made to turn
33:44movements like solidarity into political parties, but fizzled as the political landscapes became
33:50far more fragmented. Havel enjoyed a unique political career, going from prison, in short order,
33:59to president of his country. However, Havel missed his dissident days. He missed the closeness of those
34:06who thought alike in some ways, even if not all. The solidarity of their resistance was a precious
34:13memory. Other dissidents had to reconsider their memories. Pastor Eppemann, co-founder of the blues
34:20masses in East Berlin, discovered after the wall came down how much he had been betrayed by those he
34:27thought were his fellows. At one meeting to organize blues masses, six of the seven other participants
34:35had actually been Stasi informers. Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994, hoping for a warm
34:43welcome for his ideas, including Russian nationalism and religiosity and Slavic unity. But instead,
34:51he was ignored or seen as a relic of a bygone age, although the Putin regime did try to court him.
34:57Solzhenitsyn died in 2008, at the age of 89. While the afterlives of dissent were varied,
35:05the legacy was a lasting one. Imagining and articulating alternatives, giving hope for liberation.
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