Leonid Luks's Lecture "Dissident Movement in the Soviet Union as a reaction to unfinished de-Stalinization"

On September 24, 2018 within the framework of the regular scientific seminar "West and East: Universalism of Culture", Professor of the Catholic University of Eichstätt Leonid Luks delivered the lecture "Dissident movement in the Soviet Union as a reaction to unfinished de-Stalinization".

The lecture of L. Luks, the scientific supervisor of the International Laboratory for the Study of Russian and European Intellectual Dialogue, was devoted to the dissident movement that became a kind of prologue to perestroika.
If we talk about the history of the Soviet dissident movement, it should be said: "In the beginning was Khrushchev." "The posthumous overthrow of the tyrant", which was carried out by the First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee at the Twentieth Party Congress, was the beginning of a dynamic process of erosion of existing methods of governing. Despite all the restoration efforts of the ruling oligarchy this process could not be stopped. After 1956, the thesis that Soviet rulers did not need more mass terror in order to stay in power, was common among Western Sovietologists. The society after so many years of terror became an obedient tool in the hands of rulers. Therefore, the emergence of a dissident movement  (in this, as it seemed then, conquered and pacified society) a few years after the Twentieth Party Congress, was a big surprise, both for the Soviet leadership and for Western observers.