What protest meant in the Soviet Union in 1967
There were no mass street demonstrations against the Soviet government in 1967. What existed was a small, closely watched circle of writers, scientists, students and former prisoners who wrote petitions, copied banned texts by hand and occasionally stood in a public square with a placard. The best-known events of the year are the January arrests that followed one such gathering, a series of trials, and a bold letter from the novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in May. The famous Red Square demonstration against the invasion of Czechoslovakia belongs to August 1968, a year later, and is covered below as the aftermath rather than a 1967 event.
Historians now often describe these people as Soviet dissidents, though the word was applied loosely. Many of them insisted they were not opposing the system but asking it to obey its own constitution and laws. That legalistic stance, sometimes called the “legal defence” approach, was a defining feature of the movement.
The Sinyavsky-Daniel trial and its aftermath
The background is the trial of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, held in Moscow in February 1966. They had published satirical and critical works abroad under pseudonyms, and were sentenced to seven and five years of hard labour respectively. The trial was held under rules that were meant to look like normal law, and it provoked unusually open protest: dozens of intellectuals signed letters in their defence.
Its consequences carried into 1967. One young man, Aleksandr Ginzburg, compiled a collection of documents on the case, often called the “White Book”. Another group, around Yuri Galanskov, produced a typed literary and political journal in the same samizdat tradition. Samizdat, meaning self-publishing, was the main method of dissent: texts were retyped with carbon paper and passed from reader to reader.
The authorities also changed the law. In September 1966 new articles were added to the criminal code of the Russian republic, including provisions aimed at spreading statements considered defamatory to the Soviet system and at group actions disturbing public order. These articles gave prosecutors fresh tools against exactly the kind of activity the Sinyavsky-Daniel case had stirred up.
January 1967: Pushkin Square and the arrests
In January 1967 Ginzburg, Galanskov and two others, Aleksei Dobrovolsky and Vera Lashkova, were arrested in connection with the samizdat materials. On 22 January a small group gathered in Pushkin Square in Moscow to call for their release. It was a modest event, a few dozen people at most by most accounts, but public protests of this kind were almost unheard of.
Among the organisers was the young writer Vladimir Bukovsky, who was arrested after the gathering. In September 1967 he was tried together with two others, and received a sentence of three years in a labour camp. His court statement, in which he argued that the prosecution itself broke the law, was circulated in samizdat and widely read among sympathisers.
The four who had been arrested earlier went on trial in January 1968, in what became known as the “Trial of the Four”, and received heavy sentences. That trial, again, is a 1968 event, and it produced a new wave of open letters of protest.
Solzhenitsyn’s letter to the Writers Congress
In May 1967 Solzhenitsyn sent a letter to the delegates of the Fourth Congress of Soviet Writers. He called for an end to censorship, which he described as a burden on literature, and he also complained that the Writers’ Union had failed to defend authors who were slandered or arrested. He further asked the union to investigate the confiscation of his own papers and manuscripts.
The letter was sent to many delegates and circulated in samizdat and abroad. The official congress did not respond to it in the way he asked, and he was later expelled from the Writers’ Union, but the letter is remembered as a landmark: a leading writer asserting, in writing and by name, that the censors should go. A few weeks later writers in Prague raised similar demands at their own congress, and the Czechoslovak Writers Union became a far more open forum than its Soviet counterpart.
The state’s reaction
The tightening of control in 1967 was visible in several ways. Yuri Andropov took over as head of the KGB in May 1967, and the security service gave more attention to what it called ideological subversion. Trials were increasingly planned to deter others rather than to hide dissent. Sentences were severe, and a few critics were placed in psychiatric hospitals instead of prisons, a practice that became a major concern later.
Other events of the year gave the authorities further reasons to be nervous. The defection of Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, to the West in 1967 was embarrassing for the leadership. The Six-Day War led Moscow to break diplomatic relations with Israel, in line with its Soviet Middle East policy, and it sharpened questions among Soviet Jews about their place in the country. These topics are treated elsewhere on this site, but they form part of the atmosphere in which dissent was watched.
What changed in 1968
The pace of events increased in 1968. The Trial of the Four in January was followed by a growing flow of petitions. In April the typed bulletin known as the Chronicle of Current Events began to appear, recording arrests and trials in a consistent, factual style. The physicist Andrei Sakharov circulated his essay on progress, peaceful coexistence and intellectual freedom that summer.
Then came the Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia, ending the Prague Spring in August 1968. On 25 August a small group sat down in Red Square holding banners that opposed the invasion. Reports usually put the number at eight people, among them Larisa Bogoraz, Pavel Litvinov and Vadim Delaunay, who had already been tried in 1967. Most were arrested within minutes, and the group was tried in October 1968 and given sentences of camp or internal exile. Natalya Gorbanevskaya, who took part with her infant son, was not tried with the others; she was detained later and was committed to psychiatric treatment.
Why 1967 still matters
It is easy to overstate 1967. The dissident circle in Moscow was tiny, and its members were mostly known to each other and to the KGB. Most Soviet citizens, if they heard of the arrests at all, did so from foreign radio or from whispered conversation. Nonetheless, the year established the pattern that continued for two decades: appeals to the law, reliance on samizdat and foreign broadcasts, a state response of prosecution, and a small group willing to accept the consequences. It also differed sharply from the open, often youthful street politics seen in Western Europe, where the European New Left was already mobilising, and from the open ferment among Czechoslovak writers and students.
Dates and numbers in this area are often given differently in different accounts, particularly the sizes of crowds and exact sentences, and the figures above are best treated as approximate.