Stories and Timelines help visualize the trajectories of people, events and movements over time and space. Together the multiple Stories and Timelines provide an array of engaging introductory views of different topics and perspectives animating the field of Soviet dissidence, nonconformism and alternative publishing in the final decades of the USSR. Embedded within the various stories and timelines are rare visual materials from archives. They reflect also the enthusiasm of researchers for topics they wished to help bring into view.
Soviet nonconformist artists sought to reach an audience with art works that resisted the constraints of official Soviet Socialist Realism. This is the story of how artists in various cities created journals and other editions to publicize their work.
Artists Rea Nikonova and Serge Segay produced highly original new avant-garde works from the 1960s and well into the post-Soviet era. Remarkably, they did this while living in provincial cities like Yeysk and Sverdlovsk. This is their story.
Rights activists, sometimes referred to as Democratic dissidents, comprised the mainstream dissident movement in the Soviet Union. From the arrests of famous literary authors until the highly repressive conditions of the early 1980s, this Timeline traces the arc of one of the paradigmatic dissident movement of the late twentieth century.
The trajectory of the Jewish Movement differed from that of the Rights activists. Beginning with the explosive political energy released among Soviet Jews by the 6-Day War in 1967, the Jewish Movement developed into a movement for culture as well as the right to emigrate.