Natasha Wilson1; 1 University of Melbourne, Australia
Discussion
Coming of age in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the second generation of socialist dissidents looked beyond Marxism-Leninism to left-wing thinkers and movements outside the Soviet Union in their search for solutions to Brezhnev era stagnation. Critical attitudes toward Soviet reality driven by antibureaucratic feeling turned their gazes outward and determined the constellations of their mental geographies with political orientations that spanned from social democratic to Third Worldist. Left-wing movements in Western Europe, the Eastern Bloc and the Global South all came into focus as sites of intellectual and affective engagement for socialist dissent. Comparing the cases of two left-wing dissident circles – the radical Leningrad Opposition and reformist Young Socialists, this paper reconstructs how these dissidents' understandings of the outside world developed and contributed to the elaboration of alternative political identities on the eve of Perestroika.
