However spectacular the period of glasnost’ and perestroika may have been, there are pertinent reasons to take a broader time-frame and include developments in the mature Soviet period. The collapse of the Soviet system combined socio-economic stagnation with ideological bankruptcy and increasing dissent (Shlapentokh 1990: 174–80; Zubok 2011: 259–69). Between 1965 and 1968, the relatively liberal period of ‘thaw [ottepel’]’ ended. Frost set in with the trial against writers Iulii Daniel’ and Andrei Siniavskii in 1965. On 5 December (Constitution Day), 200 people joined the miting glasnosti [glasnost’ meeting], and the 1968 suppression of the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia provoked protests in Moscow, too (Vaissie 1999: 56–72; Berglund 2012: 48–50; Horvath 2005: 18–20). Those who engaged in an explicit critique of Soviet society landed in the broad category of ‘dissidents’. Exchange between Soviet and West European philosophers was suppressed. However, while repressive domination was effective, ideological hegemony became increasingly hollow, credibility being replaced by calculation. Anthologies of dissident publications, in samizdat and tamizdat, demonstrate both the sustained critique by Trotskyists, neo-Leninists and neo-Bolsheviks, often linked to workers’ protest, and the call for cautious democratisation and liberalisation which, from 1968 until the late 1980s, formed the political agenda of many scientists and intellectuals, including a substantial part of the KPSS elite (Saunders 1974: 19–34, 399–401).

This explains why the USSR changed so quickly in the late 1980s: release of political prisoners, quasi-unlimited freedom of conscience, speech, discussion and publication, and the chance to establish independent organisations and associations share a sense of liberation and relief (Savranskaya 2019: 77; Zubok 2019: 57). Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachëv (b. 1931), whose grandfathers had served GULag time, allowed a nation-wide self-critique.