“We Report about the Crimes against Justice…”: Believer’s Appeals and Complaints in the Brezhnev USSR

Abstract

In the article are analyzed the appeals, complaints, and letters of believers in the Soviet Union as one of the long-standing cultural forms of communication with the authorities. The religious people, using the legitimated by the soviet authoritarian system channel of communication, fill it with opposition/protest content. The writing of appeals and complaints, which contained the information on the needs and requirements of believers, who did not hide their religious affiliation, becomes mass since the Khrushchev era. A number of letters reflect the soviet civic formation, for example, the recognition of individual and civil rights is used to demand freedom of conscience. The article shows, how a form of communication approved by the government and designed for demonstrating sympathy towards the regime was privatized by common people and filled with a new meaning. Religious people strove to show that their actions were in accordance with the current law, and local authorities are represented as law-breakers. Furthermore, their action against believers / religion undermine the confidence and even discredit the Soviet power. The propaganda of the Helsinki agreements and the new Constitution led to appropriating the “eхport” (for the bourgeois society) ideas/concepts inside the soviet society. Apprehended the article “The Soviet Law and the Freedom of Conscience” in the newsletter “Izvestija” (1976) as a sign about the change / the turn of religious policy inside the country, the believers’ petition campaign for their rights protection significantly increased.