Bibliography Ambrose, Stephen E., Rise to Globalism New York: Penguin Books, 1993 Bonner, Elena G., Alone Together New York: Alfred Knopf, Inc., 1986 Erikson Jr., Edward E., Solzhenitsyn: The Moral Vision Grand Rapids: William Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1980 Kodjak, Andrei, Alexander Solzhenitsyn Twayne Publishers, 1978 Johnson, Paul, Modern Times New York: Harper Collins Publishing, 1983 Rothberg, Abraham, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Major Novels Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971 Sakharov, Andrei, Memoirs New York: Alfred Knopf, Inc., 1991 Sakharov, Andrei, Moscow And Beyond New York: Alfred Knopf, Inc., 1991 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich New York: Bantam Books, 1963 Westwood, James, Endurance And Endeavour London: Oxford University Press, 1991

in 1989 the world changed dramatically. The Cold War ended and the threat of communism ended in Europe. Such Eastern European countries as Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia) and others stopped being Soviet satellites. "East and West Germany, meanwhile, were moving rapidly toward unification."[1] But this was not the end. In November 1991 the Soviet Union, "the evil empire" that had kept the democratic and non-democratic world in fear and strain for almost seventy years disappeared. It left fifteen independent republics, with Russia being the largest one. Russia, out of all the former Soviet bloc states and the former Soviet Union, was the first one to fall to Communism. But also it was the last one to liberate itself from it despite all the controversy going on inside Russia such as the three-day-coup of August 1991 by Brezhnev-era hard-liners. These transformations, though painful sometimes, were unexpected and startling. There could be many explanations for why Communism was being abandoned: America's and NATO's successful containment policies; the arms race bankrupting Moscow, and "mostly it was the objective fact that Comm unism is a rotten system."[2] But even such reasons would have never been enough if the human beings in the oppressed countries stayed passive. However, the human spirit can never be destroyed and there is always an opposition to the existing regime whatever it is. In totalitarian societies such as Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy dissent was outlawed and dealt with brutally. In the Soviet Union, another totalitarian state, the opposition also was always illegal until the collapse of the empire with the brief exception of Alexander Kerensky's provisional government in 1917. The dissident movement had a long history of persecutions in Russia starting from Czarist times when great national poets and writers such as Alexander Pushkin, Michael Lermontov, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodr Dostoevsky suffered from censorship which extended to their brilliant works. It also had two major branches: the Westernizers and the Slavophils. The split in Russian society began in the times of Peter the Great (1672-1725), who reformed the administration of the state in a way unknown before to Russian people. His reforms touched almost every aspect of Russians' life through the introduction of European styles and traditions which Peter I learned during his year-long stay in Holland and England. Ever since then the intellectual movement was divided in the two major groups of thinkers--Westernizers and Slavophils. "Westernizers were those who believed that the traditional Russian ways of life could be a bitter handicap, and the sooner Russia caught up with the West the better. The Slavophils, influenced by the German romantics, opposed westernization and idealized Russia's distinctiveness."[3] One of the brightest events of the dissident movement of the 19th century was the Decembrist revolt in December of 1825, when a group of Russian army men tried, without success, to abolish Tsarist rule by refusing the oath of allegiance to a new Tsar, Nicholas I, and forcing him to abdicate. "The Decembrist

Some topics in this essay:
Andrei Sakharov, Soviet Union, Intellectual Freedom, Sakharov Russia, Bolshevik Revolution, Union Solzhenitsyn, Soviet Writers, Sakharov Solzhenitsyn, Denisovich Shukhov, Olle Stenholm, soviet union, ivan denisovich, human rights, dissident movement, aleksandr solzhenitsyn, andrei sakharov, day life ivan, day life, life ivan, concentration camps, life ivan denisovich, alfred knopf inc, york alfred knopf, soviet regime, development capitalism russia,