TRANSFORMATION OF SCIENTIFIC APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF SOVIET DISSIDENCE IN THE 1960s AND 70s

Abstract

The article presents the dynamics of scientific understanding of dissidence. The author identifies several stages of scientific reflection and analyzes the specifics of various approaches to the phenomenon. In the West, the first stage occurred in the 1960-70s. This was the period of the emergence of dissidence in the Soviet Union. Representatives of the "totalitarian school" were in solidarity with the oppositionists in their struggle against the Soviet government. This position determined the specifics of scientific discourse: the analysis of political practices of dissidents was combined with the glorification of oppositionists, the Soviet system was assessed as totalitarian and inhumane. The "revisionists" of the 1970-80s considered the opposition of some citizens as a universal property of industrial society both in Europe and in the Soviet Union. In Russian science, the study of dissidence began in the second half of the 1980s and was a paraphrase of Soviet historiography: the dissident movement was interpreted as a stage of the revolutionary struggle. The postmodern approach to the typology of the Soviet man, which developed at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries, proclaimed man a linguistic construct, did not distinguish between official and oppositional discourses. Postmodernists have interpreted dissidents as an invariant of party ideologues. In modern science, interest in the study of dissidence has decreased. But the study of dissident discourse can provide a new direction for research and overcome the schematism of the postmodern approach to the phenomenon.