How a 1965 Moscow protest demanding that the Soviet government obey its own laws helped launch the USSR’s dissident movement

Sixty years ago, a protest in Moscow received almost no coverage in Soviet newspapers but helped launch the human rights movement. Several dozen people gathered in Pushkin Square to demand that the state abide by its own Constitution. They sought neither a change of government nor political reforms. The organizer, mathematician and poet Alexander Volpin, decided to remind the authorities publicly, for the first time, of citizens’ right to an open trial. The rally lasted only a few minutes before the authorities dispersed it, but its consequences reached far beyond the square. Meduza looks back at how this first attempt at open protest came about in a country where public demonstrations had been suppressed for decades — and why it marked the start of the Soviet dissident movement.

This article was originally published in Russian in December 2025.

Anti-Soviet demonstrations: How the Bolsheviks suppressed protest

From their first years in power, the Bolsheviks made clear that they would not tolerate independent political demonstrations. On January 5, 1918, a peaceful demonstration took place in Petrograd in support of the Constituent Assembly. Students, office workers, and factory workers carrying red banners demanded that the elected representative body remain in place. The authorities responded by banning the march and shutting down newspapers that supported it. Red Guard units and machine guns were stationed along the marchers’ routes to block their passage. When the unarmed crowd moved forward, the guards opened fire. Dozens died, and many were wounded. What followed became a familiar pattern: The press accused the demonstrators of a “provocation,” and an investigation confirmed that the rally had been peaceful, but no one responsible for ordering the shooting was punished.

The same approach prevailed within the party itself: The leadership saw any independent demonstration as a threat to its control. On November 7, 1927, supporters of Trotsky and Zinoviev’s “United Opposition” in Moscow and Leningrad tried to march in separate groups during the anniversary demonstrations. They carried banners calling for “workers’ democracy” and criticizing the party’s policies. The authorities quickly stopped them: They broke up the opposition groups, tore down banners, beat some participants in Moscow, and instructed the security agencies to stamp out all factional activity. This was the last public demonstration within the party. By the end of the 1920s, all unauthorized protests had disappeared from political life, and street parades had become tightly controlled ceremonies.

After Stalin’s death, the political atmosphere began to change noticeably. The Thaw brought a cautious easing of restrictions and a sense that public life could revive after years of silence. Young people who sensed this change began looking for their own ways to participate in city life. One gathering place was an improvised “island of freedom” by the Mayakovsky monument in Moscow. People read poetry, discussed the news, argued, and got to know one another — a small but important space where they could speak openly after decades of silence.

But this freedom had strict limits. The Novocherkassk massacre in June 1962 was a harsh reminder that the Thaw did not mean people were free to stage mass protests. Workers took to the streets over rising prices and cuts to wage rates. It was an ordinary protest over living conditions, with no political demands. People expected a dialogue with the leadership, not a confrontation. Yet the authorities responded with force: They opened fire on the demonstrators, killing and wounding dozens. Closed trials followed, courts swiftly handed down sentences, and the authorities classified information about the tragedy. Novocherkassk showed that even in this new era, any mass demonstration could bring a harsh crackdown if it strayed even slightly beyond the rules imposed from above.

When Khrushchev was removed from office in October 1964, the country’s direction was unclear. Some expected a return to stricter rule; others hoped the policies of the Thaw would continue. New forms of cultural life began to emerge in cities. One was the literary group SMOG, whose name stood for the Russian words for “Courage, Thought, Imagery, and Depth.” Founded in January 1965, it brought together young poets who wanted to write without regard for official standards. They held readings by the Mayakovsky monument, published samizdat, and discussed subjects that Soviet censors would not allow. This was more freedom than the authorities would tolerate, and they soon intervened: Some members were expelled from universities, while others were forced out of Moscow. Despite the pressure, SMOG showed that young city dwellers wanted an independent space to socialize and create. The Sinyavsky–Daniel case emerged at a time when hopes for continued change clashed with the state’s determination to maintain control.

The Sinyavsky–Daniel case: How the authorities underestimated the response to repression

The Sinyavsky–Daniel case was the first major public trial of writers in the post-Stalin Soviet Union. Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel could not publish their writing in the USSR: It went beyond the bounds of “socialist realism” and would not have passed censorship. After Boris Pasternak was hounded over his novel “Doctor Zhivago” and prevented from accepting the Nobel Prize, it was clear how an attempt to publish “unwelcome” fiction at home might end. So Sinyavsky wrote under the pseudonym Abram Tertz and Daniel under the name Nikolai Arzhak, sending their work abroad. Their novellas and short stories used grotesque and fantastical elements to deliver sharp critiques of Soviet life: fear, lies, bureaucratic cruelty, questions of guilt and responsibility for repression, and the danger of a renewed cult of personality.

After the campaign against Pasternak, it became clear that “unwelcome” fiction would not be published in the USSR, and some authors began looking for ways to publish abroad. In 1956, the publishing house Posev, which was associated with NTS, used the journal Grani to call on writers and scholars in the Soviet Union to send work banned by the censors. A network for tamizdat — the publication of Soviet authors’ work in the West — gradually developed. Sinyavsky and Daniel took this route, sending their work to the West, where the American publisher Inter-Language Literary Associates published it under the pseudonyms Tertz and Arzhak.

Despite their precautions and use of pseudonyms, the KGB identified the writers and moved against them. Sinyavsky was arrested on September 8, 1965, and Daniel on September 12. For many in the USSR, the arrests came as a complete surprise: Both writers were known within a small literary circle but were not considered outspoken “opposition figures.” The authorities, however, decided otherwise. Daniel and Sinyavsky were charged with “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” — effectively for publishing fiction abroad that would not pass Soviet censorship.

The response within the Soviet Union was far more visible than the authorities had expected. The case alarmed Moscow’s intelligentsia. In editorial offices and research institutes, and among young writers, people began saying that it was a step backward, an attempt to restore fear and ideological discipline. People began drafting letters defending the arrested writers, first personal letters, then open letters. These included the “letter of the 62,” signed by many prominent authors, including Bulat Okudzhava, Vladimir Voinovich, Lydia Chukovskaya, Varlam Shalamov, Konstantin Paustovsky, and Ilya Ehrenburg. For Soviet cultural circles, this was an almost unprecedented step: Publicly opposing a prosecution meant risking one’s career — and sometimes even one’s safety.

The international response was louder still. PEN, Arthur Miller, Heinrich Böll, Alberto Moravia, Graham Greene, and dozens of other leading writers from Europe and the United States came to Daniel and Sinyavsky’s defense. The Western press characterized the trial as ideological and incompatible with the Thaw. It became the first major political case of the post-Khrushchev era and brought people together in a new social movement — from the first letters of protest to the rally for an open trial in Pushkin Square.

The rally for an open trial: From an idea to a demonstration

Alexander Volpin, the son of Sergei Yesenin and translator Nadezhda Volpin, was a mathematician and poet known in Moscow for insisting, with a persistence rare for the time, that the state follow its own laws to the letter. Volpin had already faced court proceedings and understood how easily legal provisions in the USSR could become mere formalities. He later recalled that in the fall of 1965, after Sinyavsky and Daniel’s arrests, he spent a long time walking through a grove in Golitsyno, trying to work out what could be done: “Those devils are bound to hold the trial behind closed doors. So now’s the time to demand an open trial!” Volpin’s reasoning was simple: The more often the authorities were forced to hold trials publicly, the harder it would be for them to conceal arbitrary decisions. This led him to propose a public rally on December 5 with a strictly legal demand rather than political slogans: Hold an open trial, as the Constitution required.

Volpin’s legal approach caused serious disagreements even among his closest allies. Many dissidents believed that invoking the Constitution and the law was pointless in a country where the authorities themselves ignored them. Others feared that attempts to “teach” the state its own rules in public could only make things worse for the arrested writers. Volpin, however, insisted that upholding human rights enshrined in law should be the central aim of resistance. He told friends that even the harshest regimes had to create laws that at least partly matched society’s ideas of justice; otherwise, the state simply could not function.

The problem was that the authorities had no intention of following these rules and did not expect citizens to demand that they do so. Volpin argued that this was precisely where resistance was possible: Citizens could “use the authorities’ own laws to trap them” and force them to act openly. Many found this approach unfamiliar. Lyudmila Alexeyeva, who would become a prominent human rights advocate, recalled: “We didn’t know what would happen to those demonstrators, but we thought it would end badly — they’d grab people. And what they’d do to them after that, I couldn’t even imagine. Maybe things would turn out all right, maybe they wouldn’t. They might just arrest everyone. The last thing we needed, on top of Sinyavsky and Daniel, was another dozen people under arrest. What was the point?”

Nevertheless, Volpin’s approach became the basis for the first human rights initiatives, including preparations for the December 5 rally. Leaflets distributed at universities and passed around small circles of acquaintances reflected this approach. They explained in detail that a closed trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel would violate the provision requiring public court proceedings and that any hearing “behind closed doors” left room for arbitrary decisions. They therefore proposed a “rally for an open trial,” with a single slogan: “We demand an open trial.” The authors said participants must act strictly within the law: They were not to shout political slogans or allow themselves to be provoked, and if the authorities ordered them to disperse, they were to comply after stating the purpose of the gathering. The emphasis on legality was fundamental: The rally was intended to show that citizens were demanding compliance with the rules the authorities had enshrined in their own laws, rather than a change of political system. They decided to hold it on December 5 — the anniversary of the adoption of the first Soviet constitution in 1936.

The dispersal of the rally: A few minutes that changed how people saw the struggle for human rights in the USSR

The rally on December 5, 1965, lasted only a few minutes. Among those gathered were people who had decided to raise banners and many who had come simply to watch — some out of curiosity, others out of sympathy. Viktoria Volpina, the chief organizer’s wife, recalled that everything happened almost instantly: “The banners shot up, then I saw hands reaching for them… the roar of cars, hands reaching, banners falling.” She recalled a tightly packed crowd of several dozen people that quickly broke into small groups when officers rushed in from the outer ring of onlookers. Volpina estimated that there were about 60 demonstrators; far more people stood around watching, not daring to join openly.

Lyudmila Alexeyeva also recalled how quickly and harshly it all ended. She estimated that no more than 50 people actually participated: “Volpin, [the artist Yuri] Titov, and someone else raised signs. They’d barely had time to raise them before they were grabbed.” Camera flashes went off throughout — both Western journalists and KGB officers were taking photographs.

Although the police acted quickly, they used little physical violence. Participants later attributed this to the lingering influence of the Thaw in 1965 and the authorities’ fear of excessive brutality amid the already considerable international outcry over the Sinyavsky–Daniel trial. Those detained, including Volpin, were questioned for several hours, but all were released that evening.

For most onlookers, the rally was a brief, tense moment when, for the first time after years of silence, several dozen people openly gathered in a square to demand that the state uphold the law. For the authorities, it was a warning sign. But for those who stood in Pushkin Square that day, even “behind the bushes,” as Viktoria Volpina put it, the rally also made the possibility of civic action in the USSR publicly visible for the first time.

The rally’s consequences: How the Soviet dissident movement emerged and developed

The next day, Soviet KGB Chairman Vladimir Semichastny told the Politburo that “some participants in the gathering began shouting demagogic slogans under the banner of upholding civil liberties.” His report also said “that among the most active participants in the gathering were seven people known to be mentally ill: Four of them (Volpin (Yesenin), [the poet Yuri] Galanskov, Titov, and [the worker Viktor] Khaustov) had previously participated in various antisocial acts.”

To combat future protests, a new Article 190-3 was added to the Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in September 1966. It made it a criminal offense to engage in the “organization of or active participation in group actions that grossly violate public order” or that involve disobedience to the authorities’ demands. The maximum penalty was three years in prison. The wording was broad enough to cover political demonstrations, strikes, student protests, and any gathering the authorities deemed “dangerous.”

Despite the authorities’ opposition, the rally had taken place. One participant, Dmitry Zubarev, later said: “For me, as for everyone I knew, December 5 marks a kind of historical turning point: the emergence of a new, open, nonviolent mass movement in the Soviet Union.”

A year later, the rally was held again, this time as a quiet reminder of the right to a public trial. At the appointed hour, people gathered in Pushkin Square, silently removed their hats, and stood looking at the Pushkin monument. Among them was Andrei Sakharov, a member of the Academy of Sciences who was not yet an outspoken opponent of the authorities. Steps like these set him on the path to becoming one of the leading moral authorities of the future human rights movement.

The rally’s long-term effect was greater still. People who had previously acted separately — scientists, students, young writers, and engineers — began coming together to demand open trials and compliance with the law. The rally showed that there were people in the country willing to speak publicly and nonviolently about rights. From these small groups and the onlookers who had stood “behind the bushes” that day, the dissident movement gradually grew.