"Dissident". This word sounded quietly in Soviet times, but proudly

Like many political and medical terms, this word is of Latin origin and consists of two parts. The prefix dis carries a negative meaning, and the root sident means consent. So, a dissident is by definition an uncooperative person.

The only question is, what is he actively objecting to? In Soviet times, this people were often referred to this proud tribe by people who listened to the "Voice of America" and protested in the kitchens of small Khrushchevites while drinking port 777 for caviar and sprat in tomato.

It was believed that everywhere behind such "intelligent people" eavesdrop on the omnipotent KGB, and to protect themselves from them, turned on the radio or opened the water taps. To add romanticism, acquaintances were inspired with the idea that a dissident is a person desperate, internally free and not afraid of all sorts of satraps.

As it turned out, they tried in vain. If the information about such sedition reached the workers of the first department, then, as a rule, it came from someone who was present (sometimes it was he who opened the valve). In addition, such information in the era of late Brezhnev's socialism did not lead to imprisonment in the terrible cellars of the Lubyanka, so they will scold everyone ...

A real dissident is a citizen who has clearly outlined ideological contradictions with the dominant ideology and does not hide his convictions, whatever it costs him. This is his difference with the kitchen conspirators, whose expression of discontent was limited to showing the cookie in his own pocket.

The fates of many Soviet writers who started their careers with writing works published in the USSR are interesting. Usually they did not at all plan to write anything specifically against the authorities, they merely stated the stories from their lives (sometimes enriched with camp experience). Dissident writers, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Varlam Shalamov, gained fame thanks to Soviet publications, they simply enabled many people to learn the truth about the lives of millions of prisoners. And the conclusions and generalizations arose in the minds themselves ... At the same time, deportation from the country became a real tragedy for them, although there was a rather prosperous life in the West in the material sense, and even sometimes a Nobel Prize.

Indeed, considerable attention has been paid to combating this phenomenon. A huge explanatory work was conducted among the population, the meaning of which was to assert that the dissident is either an ideological saboteur bought for Western money or a madman.

The latter statement was reinforced by numerous examples of inadequate behavior of some opponents of Soviet power. Vladimir Bukovsky, who had been exposed to corrective psychiatry for a long time, admitted in a recent interview that many Soviet dissidents were really sick people. Normal citizens lived a normal life, went to work, celebrated Soviet holidays, studied, wondering about the situation in the world and the internal situation only within the framework of production political information. Self-immolations on Red Square were the lot of a few protesters against the introduction of troops into Czechoslovakia or Afghanistan.

Most often it happened that the dissident was someone who sincerely believed in the just organization of a socialist society, and did not agree only with what he thought were some distortions of the communist idea, not suspecting that he touched any of the cornerstones of this system. The fate of such a naive romantic became unenviable.