Between Loyalty and Dissent: Scientific Intelligentsia in the Late Soviet Union

What was it like to grow up in Stalinist Russia and at the age of twenty be suddenly exposed to Khrushchev’s “revelations”? What did it mean to be “a loyal citizen” of one of the twentieth century’s longest and most violent dictatorships? Where did the line between loyalty and dissent run in the late Soviet Union? This paper sets out to answer these questions by looking at one of the most important groups of postwar Soviet society—the scientific intelligentsia. Making extensive use of recently declassified archival materials, personal papers, and oral interviews, I argue that there was a peculiar “crisis of belief” among the late Soviet intelligentsia and that it contributed significantly to Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power and the beginning of perestroika in the second half of the 1980s.

This crisis was a complex and multi-stage process that started as a result of Nikita Khrushchev’s partial liberalization of Soviet society in the late 1950s and was developing beneath the surface even after the crackdown of the 1960s and 1970s. This paper examines the gradual transformation of the political, ideological, and cultural beliefs of Soviet scientists, living in a small Soviet academic town, from Khrushchev’s “secret speech” in 1956 to Gorbachev’s liberal reforms in the late 1980s. Its main focus is on the scientists’ ambiguous position between the strong centralized state, which supported scientific research financially and institutionally, and the Soviet dissidents, who appealed to scientists’ human dignity. Rogacheva’s main goal is to investigate whether and to what extent the majority of Soviet scientists in this town remained “loyal” to the Soviet regime, what it meant exactly to be “loyal,” and how this changed over time, if at all.