Left-Wing Underground Movements in 1970-s Soviet Union through "Current Affairs Chronicles" Perspective

In this research, the coverage of left-wing underground political activity in the 1970’s USSR in the “Current Affairs Chronicles» human rights bulletin is considered. It is common that nationalistic, religious and liberal underground political movements are examined much more often than underground left-wing movements, which criticized soviet system from Marxist positions. Unorthodox Marxists and socialists believed that the state-capitalist system dominated in the USSR, in which class antagonism and alienation between state bureaucracy and proletariat existed. Despite declared absence of bias and descriptive character of materials, “CAC” not only reflects the actual situation with underground activists’ rights violations of any ideological position, but also, mentions of left-wing activists may have been too short. The aim of the research is to reconstruct the image of the Soviet "left opposition" created by one of the most important information uncensored bulletins in the USSR. To achieve the following goal, the following tasks were set: 1) to study the process of gathering information for the «Current Affairs Chronicles», the features of the editorial policy, the mechanism for distributing the bulletin's issues. 2) to consider the major trends of the development of the "left" circles, which were mentioned in the "CAC» 3) Identify the specifics of the representation of the "Left Opposition" in the editions of the Chronicle of Current Events. The main source in this work are the issues of the human rights bulletin "CAC", issued from 1970 to 1979, as well as some archival materials, interviews with activists, as well as their memories.