The Dictatorship of Reason: Aleksandr Vol 'pin and the Idea of Rights under “Developed Socialism”

Abstract

The Soviet mathematical logician Aleksandr Vol'pin is often credited with introducing the post-Stalin dissident strategy of attempting to hold the Soviet government to its own laws. In this article, Benjamin Nathans asks how Vol'pin himself arrived at the deceptively familiar rhetoric of civil rights and rule of law and how that rhetoric functioned in emerging dissident circles in the 1960s. Rather than approaching rights through classic liberal notions of social contract and self-interest, Vol'pin drew on the strikingly cosmopolitan and interdisciplinary ferment of Soviet intellectual life during the thaw years, putting logic, philosophy of language, and the burgeoning field of cybernetics to unexpected purposes. The result, Nathans suggests, was a counterintuitive blend of idealism and literalism that became an indispensable element of dissident thought and practice within late Soviet culture.

“When They Come for You”: Legal Mobilization in New Authoritarian Russia

“…Soviet dissidents were among the first to make legal arguments and claim human rights in public activism against the communist state (Thomas ). Alexander Esenin‐Volpin was among the first dissidents in the late 1950s who introduced legal arguments into protest against the Soviet authorities (Moyn ; Nathans ). These dissidents took the Soviet Constitution literally, demanding that the authorities step away from their authoritarian interpretation of the Constitution and respect the human rights guaranteed under the Helsinki Agreement of 1975 (Nathans ) .…”

“…Alexander Esenin‐Volpin was among the first dissidents in the late 1950s who introduced legal arguments into protest against the Soviet authorities (Moyn ; Nathans ). These dissidents took the Soviet Constitution literally, demanding that the authorities step away from their authoritarian interpretation of the Constitution and respect the human rights guaranteed under the Helsinki Agreement of 1975 (Nathans ) . Relying on law, dissidents could step “outside the codified borders of a repressive political system” (Přibáň : 571–72).…”

The Intimate Life of Dissent Ánthropological Perspectives

“…Specifically, following a brief but optimistic (as it is remembered today) decade of de-Stalinisation, the late 1960s and 1970s revived the persecution of 'other-thinking' (inakomysliye) in a multiplicity of its forms. The term was applied to activists for human rights, religious liberties, Jewish migration, nationalist and ethnic selfdetermination, civic rights, socialist Leninist reformists and defenders of constitutional rights (Nathans 2007), as well as Jewish, German and Chinese 'otkazniki', or refuseniks. 9 It also encompassed writers, artists, actors, singers, philosophers, sociologists and others who did not necessarily oppose the socialist order, or even its partocratic structures, but simply engaged with experimental artistic genres, schools of thought and research methods.…”

End of organized atheism. The genealogy of the law on freedom of conscience and its conceptual effects in Russia

“…Rather than raising theological questions about being and "thinking without God" (Watkin 2011:1), a version of atheism propagated by Nikolai and other atheist activists I met in Moscow in 2017-2018 constitutes a political claim to the right to critical thinking coupled with a call for juridical equality between religion and atheism in relation to the law on freedom of conscience. At the same time, Nikolai's polemic reminds of the language of the Soviet constitutional rights activists and dissidents who publicly challenged the Soviet party-state to respect and realize its own constitution (Boobbyer 2005;Nathans 2007). Indeed, in merging his atheist denunciation of clericalization of the state with the diatribe against the ineffectual state, Nikolai has posited atheism as an intellectual and political alternative to the ideologies of the state and the church.…”