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Pollution and Purification in the Moscow Human Rights Networks of the 1960s and 1970s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Barbara Walker
Barbara Walker*
Affiliation:
University of Nevada
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Abstract

In this article Barbara Walker examines the theme of (samo)zhertvovanie in the Moscow human rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Some participants in that movement have expressed emotional satisfaction in the belief that they were motivated by the desire for self-giving; but that belief has sometimes been received with doubt. Walker uncovers the social phenomenon of a charity movement for the benefit of political prisoners that, she argues, lies near the social and emotional heart of the human rights movement. An important theme of the charity movement, whether real or constructed, is emotional purification of a sense of personal and social contamination stemming from participation in what some experienced as corruption in Soviet state and society. This article draws on ideas of spiritual atonement and salvation through altruism as explanatory cultural factors in this phenomenon.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 68 , Issue 2 , Summer 2009 , pp. 376 - 395
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2009

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References

Many thanks to those who have read and commented on this article, including two anonymous readers for Slavic Review, Choi Chatterjee, Julie Hessler, Walter Pintner, Mark D. Steinberg, and Mack Walker. Thanks also to the wonderful panel (chaired by William Taubman) and panel audience that responded most helpfully to an early version of this paper presented at die annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in November 2006. I also wish to express my deepest gratitude to those who have allowed me to interview them on a topic so close and dear to them, as well as to Tat'iana Mikhailovna Bakhmina and Konstantin Polivanov for their extensive and helpful guidance in researching this topic.

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36. One of my informants who describes him/herself as peripherally involved in the dissident movement and in the workings of the Aid Fund, e-mail, 28 March 2006.

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