Publicly, only small groups of intellectuals dared to express their discontent with the Soviet nationalities policy. Although much lionised in post-Soviet nationalist historiographies, the dissident movement did not and could not have brought down the Soviet Empire. Until its rebirth under Gorbachev, the dissident movement remained the cause of hundreds, at most a couple ofthou- sand activists. The dissident movement in fact began with attempts to show that Stalin and his successors had forsaken the 'Leninist' notions of national equality. This was the principal message of Internationalism or Russification? by the prominent Ukrainian dissident Ivan Dziuba. Subsequently, the dissenters began openly advocating national rights and self-determination, as well as the advancement of civil rights. In Ukraine, by far the largest western republic, the generation of the 'sixtiers' first explored the limits of artistic expression but soon established an opposition to the regime on the issues of civil rights and cultural freedoms. The underground Ukrainian Herald began appearing in 1970, and a large Ukrainian Helsinki Watch, one of only two such groups in the Soviet west, emerged in Kiev in i976 under the leadership of the former establishment writer Mykola Rudenko.
Interestingly, in view of its weaker industrial development, Lithuania led Estonia and Latvia in the growth of a nationalist dissident movement. There, workers and peasants were far more prominent than in Russian or Ukrainian dissent, which was dominated by intellectuals. Petitions in defence of the Catholic Church collected tens of thousands of signatures, and the underground Chronicle of the Lithuanian Catholic Church appeared steadily from 1972. In 1972, following the self-immolation of a nineteen-year-old non-conformist, mass youth protests tookplace in the city of Kaunas.[315] In 1976, the Lithuanian Helsinki Watch group came into existence under the leadership of Victoras Petkus. (It was suppressed in two years.) In Latvia, the 1971 letter by '17 Latvian Communists' (who, as was revealed later, included Berklavs) complained to foreign Communist parties about the advances of assimilation in the republic. In Estonia, the i972 memorandum to the UN that decried Russification and demanded restoration of independent statehood marked thebirth of organised dissent. On the fortieth anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (i979), dissidents of all three Baltic nations issued a declaration demanding its nullification. Among the signatories were thirty-seven Lithuanians, four Estonians, and four Latvians. In contrast to other nations of the region, the dissident movement in Estonia exploded briefly in 1980-1, under the influence of contemporary events in Poland, but was immediately weakened by arrests and imprisonments.
In contrast, dissent in Belorussia was unorganised and limited to statements by intellectuals in defence of the national language. In Moldavia, even such sporadic expressions of discontent were rare.
By the early 1980s, the general population in the Soviet west was reasonably informed about living standards in Eastern Europe and the so-called capitalist countries and in its majority was cynical about Soviet ideology. Multiple indications of malfunctions in the Soviet economy and various social problems - from the lowest birth rate Union-wide in Estonia and Latvia to one of the highest child mortality rates Union-wide in rural Moldova - caused citizens to privately question the efficiency of Soviet socialism. Yet, in those years the authorities almost succeeded in rooting out organised dissent. Mass expression of discontent did not emerge until Gorbachev's glasnost' began creating a genuine public sphere. Only the reforms originating in Moscow allowed the non-Russian national movements to resume their interrupted (or 'frozen') nation-building projects by returning to what Hroch designates as the stage of mass mobilisation. In all western republics, the national cause acquired a truly mass following only after the long-suppressed economic frustrations and social tensions had flowed into the default channel of nationalistic discourse.
In a recent, fundamental study of the Soviet Union's collapse, Mark R. Beissinger argues that nationalist mobilisation proceeded in 'tides' within which the example of one region could influence developments in others. In the rise of secessionist movements within the USSR, the Balts were in the avant-garde. As Beissinger shows repeatedly in his book, other nationalities drew encouragement from their successes and emulated their methods.[316]This, however, applies to the political separatist movement, while the national awakening of the glasnost' period was originally a more complex phenomenon, which began as an ecological and cultural movement. Arguably, the movement started after the Chernobyl' disaster in April i986, which both prompted Gor- bachevto expand the limits ofglasnost' and gave birth to mass environmentalist movements.
Even in the Baltics, the first open protests were against the grand designs of Soviet industry. In Estonia, the first mass meeting opposed Moscow's new phosphorus-mining project, which would damage the country's environment (1987). In 1988, the so-called 'singing revolution' symbolised the breakthrough in cultural revival. The national movement finally reached its organisational stage with the formation of the Estonian Popular Front in April 1988. In Latvia, the first successful effort at open mobilisation of the public was aimed against the construction of a hydroelectric dam on the Daugava River in 1987. Later in the same year, the so-called 'calendar' demonstrations followed, commemorating the 1941 deportations, marking the anniversary of the Molotov- Ribbentrop Pact, and celebrating the proclamation of independence in 1918. In October 1988, a popular front was constituted in the republic. Lithuania, where the Communist Party had been slower in answering the Kremlin's call for reforms, was the last to join the string of demonstrations in the Baltic region, with the first public meeting being organised by a group of Catholic activists on 23 August 1987, to mark the anniversary of the Soviet-German Pact. The popular front known as Sajudis was established in June 1988.
The transition from the stage of cultural and ecological protests to the stage of political mobilisation took longer in Belorussia. There, national awakening began during 1987-8 with cultural figures petitioning the government for the protection of Belorussian culture against assimilation but escalated into open expressions of discontent in June 1988 with the discovery of mass graves of the victims of Stalinist terror in the Kurapaty forest. As the most powerful symbol of Stalinist crimes - and of what was seen as the Soviet regime's general criminal nature - Kurapaty galvanised public opinion. By October, the Belorussian analogue of Moscow's Memorial Society emerged under the name of the Martyrology of Belorussia Association. Led by the archaeologist Zianon Pazniak, this group immediately began organising the Belorussian Popular Front (BPF) but met fierce resistance from the authorities. At this point, Belorussian activists had already established contacts with Sajudis. The BPF's founding congress consequently took place in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius in June 1989.[317] Still, the republic's government effectively prevented the BPF from reaching out to the countryside.
In Ukraine, where the party leadership kept a lid on public opinion until as late as 1989, the development of the national movement combined the traits of the Lithuanian and Belorussian models. In Western Ukraine, a mass movement for the restoration of the Greek Catholic Church emerged in 1987. (The authorities finally gave their permission in late 1989.) In the east, the plight of Chernobyl' was the earliest uniting factor as well as the most obvious symbol ofthe regime's ineffectiveness and criminal secretiveness. The public ecological association, the Green World, was founded in 1987, while the organisation in defence of the national language, the Taras Shevchenko Ukrainian Language Society, was not established until February 1989. But in the same month, a more important political organisation came into existence, namely, the Popular Movement for Restructuring. Better known simply as Rukh (Movement), it was similar in structure and political aims to the Baltic popular fronts at the early stage of their development.
315
V Stanley Vardys and Judith B. Sedaitis,
316
MarkR. Beissinger,
317
David Marples,