Thinking different. Dissent in the USSR

financed by the Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship, Karin und Uwe Hollweg Foundation and Deutsche Sacharow Gesellschaft
Project Duration: 2021-2022

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Am I different? At least once in our lives, we ask ourselves this question. But what happens when the state does not defend and protect this value, but instead violates human rights itself? What does it mean when people are excluded from society, socially or spatially isolated, arrested, put in camps or psychiatric wards, or even murdered because of their differences?

In the online special Thinking Different – Dissent in the Soviet Union, dekoder, in cooperation with the Research Center for East European Studies at the University of Bremen, explores one of the most exciting chapters in Soviet history: the loud and quiet acts of resistance against the authoritarian state. It highlights various attempts to initiate political change from within culture and society. Or to bring about cultural change. It tells the different stories of dissidents and shows the historical context and consequences of dissent in the Soviet Union. 

Thinking Different: Dissent in the Soviet Union is a web project in german and russian language within the framework of historical education that aims to transfer knowledge from research and archives to the public. The life stories of protagonists of dissent in the Soviet Union (Andrei Sakharov, Joseph Brodsky, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Kolya Vasin and Ry Nikonova) presented in the online special are based, among other things, on sources from the FSO archive. A large amount of archival material is therefore presented to the general public in a contemporary format.

https://dissident.dekoder.org/


Project team:
Concept, editing, direction: Dr. Leonid Klimov, dekoder
supervision and authors at FSO: Prof. Dr. Susanne Schattenberg, Dr. Manuela Putz
Archival research: Alesia Kananchuk, Dr. Tatiana Dvinyatina