Pushkin square

Demonstration at the statue of A. S. Pushkin on 5th Dec. 1976 / archive Mezhdunarodnii Memorial. 

Dates: December 5th, 1965; January 22th, 1967, and others

Place: Moscow

Partecipants: Aleksandr Esenin-Vol’pin, Vladimir Bukovskii, Liudmila Alekseeva, Aleksandr Ginzburg, Iurii Galanskov, Apollon Shukht, Liudmila Polikovskaia, Irina Iakir, Viktoria Vol’pina and others

Description:
The 1965 demonstration in Pushkin square was organised by the mathematician and activist Aleksandr Esenin-Vol’pin, son of one of the most important figures in Russian culture at the beginning of the 20th century, the poet Sergei Esenin, who committed suicide at the age of thirty in 1925. It took place in December 1965 in front of Pushkin’s statue and is considered the founding event of the human rights movement in the USSR.
The protesters were showing their solidarity for the writers Andrei Siniavskii and Iulii Daniėl’ who were on trial, having been arrested in September in 1965 after their works were published in tamizdat, under the pseudonyms of Abram Terts and Nicolai Arzhak. Shortly afterwards Siniavskii and Daniėl’ were convicted respectively to seven and five years imprisonment. Formally the trial was open to the public, but in reality, access was limited to few participants, who were carefully chosen by the Party (cf. Piretto 2001: 287). The trial, together with that of the future Nobel Prize Iosif Brodskii, labelled as a ‘social parasite’, in 1964 represented a flashpoint for social unrest. The defendants themselves were ordinary intellectuals employed in official academia, but it was not so much their role that provoked protest but the way their trial was conducted.
Siniavskii and Daniėl’ were accused under article 70 of participating in anti-Soviet agitation and publishing anti Soviet propaganda in their works. They refused to plead guilty and engaged in surreal discussions with their accusers about the nature of their work. Siniavskii argued that it was a mistake to identify the ideas and behaviour of fictional characters with the author’s opinions, who created them to pursue clear artistic intentions. Daniėl’ affirmed his view of contemporary Soviet society, in which he saw a return to the cult of personality (cf. Clementi 2007: 58).
A demonstration was organised for December 5th, 1965, anniversary of the day the Stalinist Constitution (which on paper guaranteed the right to demonstrate) came into force.  According to Liudmila Alekseeva and Vladimir Bukovskii between eighty and two hundred people took part, for the most part students. The twenty-two arrested were immediately released, but were expelled from their institutes (cf. Parisi 2017: 129). The protest was defined by Esenin-Vol’pin in his Civil Appeal as ‘a meeting for openness’ (miting glasnosti) (cf. Esenin-Vol’pin: web); in the following years it became a ‘silent meeting’ (miting molchaniia), during which protestors gathered in front of the monument to ‘the Sun of Russian poetry’, took off their hats and stood in silence, always for less than five minutes to prevent police intervention (cf. Clementi 2007: 54).
From 1977, this annual protest took place on the 10th of December, the anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 (cf. ibid.). During the Soviet period, Pushkin square was the place of at least one other protest: on January 22nd, 1967, a group of students protested against the arrests of the editors of the almanac Phoenix, that had taken place a few days before, between January 17th and 19th. A small number of protesters holding posters with the phrase ‘Freedom for Galanskov, Dobrovolskii, Lashkova, Radzievskii’, were stopped by members of the Komsomol and arrested (cf. Piretto 2001: 284).

Federico Iocca
[30th June, 2021]

Translation by Diletta Bacci

Bibliography

• Clementi M., Storia del dissenso sovietico, Odradek, Roma 2007.
• Esenin-Vol’pin A., Grazhdanskoe obrashchenie, http://antology.igrunov.ru/authors/volpin/1083933987.html, online (last accessed: 30/06/2021).
• Parisi V., Guida alla Mosca ribelle, Voland, Roma 2017.
• Piretto G. P., Il radioso avvenire: mitologie culturali sovietiche, Einaudi, Torino 2001.