Soviet

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 conspirators were of liberal inclinations, and their background was Russian freemasonry and the Russian army."[4] That revolt can be seen as he first sign of the major revolution to follow and that is why it is important despite its failure. It was the first attempt to change the existing order in the Russian Empire. The revolts after it were also unsuccessful until World War I, which served as a powerful catalyst for deep change. The Bolshevik Revolution was supposed to bring changes to many aspects of Russian people's lives. And it did bring a 99% literacy rate, the development of heavy industry, urbanization of the former agricultural country with absolute monarchy and feudal laws and many others. But it did not bring freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of assembly. Stalin tried his best to eliminate even the slightest possibility of any kind of dissidence--through purges, show trials, concentration camps and massive brain-washing on completely government-controlled media. But everything has its end and so did Stalin--he died in 1953 and other people took over: Nikita Khruschev, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Andrei Chernenko and at last Mikhail Gorbachev. Under these Soviet leaders the situation of domestic suppression vacillated from loosening up to tightening again, but fortunately none of them managed to crush the human spirit as much as Joseph Stalin did. During the end of the 1960s and the beginning of 1970s the dissident movement in Russia started expanding more and more, rapidly touching mostly the upper intellectual classes of the Soviet society along with the scientific circles.