Biographies of Signers of Protest Letters in USSR in 1965–1968

XX and XXII Congresses of the CPSU, it seemed, marked the beginning of a new era in the history of the Soviet Union. The departure from Stalin's "personality cult" was understood by many as a turning point in ideology. Public acknowledgment of the crimes of the former leadership - crimes that most of the country knew not from hearsay - was, in essence, a serious step in the opposite direction from "mass terror." Samizdat documents are a valuable source of information on many topics from the period of Soviet Russia, the former republics of the USSR and other countries of the "socialist camp". The appearance of collective letters testified to the emergence of protest activity, which was relatively massive on a Soviet scale and in Soviet realities. This is the most valuable source on the history of dissent in the USSR in the second half of the 1960s - that is, in the early years of the emergence of the dissident movement. The purpose of this study is twofold: on the one hand, to write biographies of several previously unknown signers of (the petitions) the collective letters and to enrich the history of the dissent with the names and fates of these people; on the other hand, this research aims to add to the international vocabulary of different forms of peaceful protest.