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THE NEW RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONARIES by John B. Dunlop

THE NEW RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONARIES

By

Pub Date: July 7th, 1976
Publisher: Nordland Publishing (85 Evergreen Way, Belmont, Mass. 02178)

In February 1964, the ""All-Russian Social-Christian Union for the Liberation of the People,"" or VSKhSON, was founded by four advocates of the ""armed overthrow of Communist enslavement,"" which they proposed to replace with universal individual landholding, Corporation Council-ruled industry, and a revival of Orthodox Church culture. In the three years before their apprehension by the KGB, they recruited 24 others and circulated anti-Soviet works from the West. Dunlop considers them important because their Slavophile ""third way"" has an alleged appeal to Great Russians, Byelorussians, and Ukrainians in particular; the book likens the VSKhSON to the 1825 Decembrists and suggests that ""Soviet leaders probably fear few things more than an opposition based on Russian nationalism and the Russian Orthodox Church."" However, the government did not show great concern and, considering that the group planned an armed uprising in Leningrad, gave them modest sentences; several members have returned to responsible jobs as engineers or technicians. A footnote to broader studies of 1960s ""dissident"" formations, amplified by the VSKhSON program, bibliographic data, and an index of the group's secret library.