Anti-Sovietism

Anti-Sovietism, anti-Soviet sentiment, called by Soviet authorities antisovetchina (Russian: антисоветчина), refers to persons and activities actually or allegedly aimed against the Soviet Union or government power within the Soviet Union.[1]

For opposition to communism in general, see Anti-communism.
Russian èmigré anti-Bolshevik poster, c. 1932

Three different flavors of the usage of the term may be distinguished:

  • Anti-Sovietism in international politics, such as the Western opposition to the Soviet Union during the Cold War as part of broader anti-communism.
  • Anti-Soviet opponents of the Bolsheviks shortly after the Russian Revolution and during the Russian Civil War.
  • As applied to Soviet citizens (allegedly) involved in anti-government activities.

Soviet Russia and the USSR

During the Russian Civil War that followed the October Revolution of 1917, the anti-Soviet side was the White movement. Between the wars, some resistance movement, particularly in the 1920s, was cultivated by Polish intelligence in the form of the Promethean project. After Nazi Germany's attack on the Soviet Union, anti-Soviet forces were created and led primarily by Nazi Germany (see Russian Liberation Movement).

In the time of the Russian Civil War, whole categories of people, such as clergy, kulaks and former Imperial Russian police, were automatically considered anti-Soviet. More categories are listed in the article "Enemy of the people". Those who were deemed anti-Soviet in this way, because of their former social status, were often presumed guilty whenever tried for a crime.[2]

"Down with Bolshevism!" - Nazi propaganda poster in Russian for occupied Soviet territories.
Anti-Soviet rally in Lithuania of about 300,000 people in 1988, condemning the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Sąjūdis was a movement which led to the restoration of an Independent State of Lithuania in 1990.
After the Velvet Revolution, the city of Prague placed a Soviet-era T-55, a symbol of the Soviet invasion of 1968, on its central square as a target for public ridicule.

Later in the Soviet Union, being anti-Soviet was a criminal offense, known as "Anti-Soviet agitation". The epithet "antisoviet" was synonymous with "counter-revolutionary". The noun "antisovietism" was rarely used and the noun "antisovietist" (Russian: антисоветчик, romanized: antisovetchik) was used in a derogatory sense. Anti-Soviet agitation and activities were political crimes handled by the Article 58 and later Article 70 of the RSFSR penal code and similar articles in other Soviet republics. In February 1930, there was an anti-Soviet insurgency in the Kazak Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic village of Sozak.[3]

After the end of the Second World War, there were Eastern European anti-Communist insurgencies against the Soviet Union.

See also

References
  1. Conquest, Robert (2007). The Great Terror. USA: Oxford University Press. pp. 28–29.
  2. Yevgenia Albats and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. The State Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia - Past, Present, and Future, 1994. ISBN 0-374-52738-5.
  3. Niccolò Pianciola; Paolo Sartori (2013). "Interpreting an insurgency in Soviet Kazakhstan : the OGPU, Islam and Qazaq 'Clans' in Suzak, 1930". Islam, Society and States Across the Qazaq Steppe: 297–340.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.