Existential Resistance in Soviet West

There are different forms of dictatorships, of non-democratic rule, and they give rise to different paths away from dictatorship as has been shown in the literature. A major theoretical idea in this paper is that different forms of dictatorship also create, and give rise to, various types of resistance among those that they rule over (cf. Linz & Stepan, 1996, Kitschelt, 1995, 1999, Hadenius and Teorell, 2007).The totalitarian dictatorship, and its evolutionary successor the post-totalitarian system, that was in place in the Soviet Union, comes to power with the intent to establishing total control of both political, economic and social structures and societies. The response given to a regime wanting to control the very soul of its subjects, came in the form of existential resistance, and what mattered at a societal level was such resistance exercised in collective form. Even though resistance at times demonstrated political and social content also in the Soviet realm, it was resistance that was existential in nature that is most important to understand when it comes to the USSR in particular. By creating or re-claiming alternative ways of seeing human existence; through art, music, literature, poetry, drama, language, history, religion and self-education, a sphere of existence was created that opened-up for reflection and perspective (cf. Fitzpatrick, 1979, Alexiev, 1983, Falk, 2003; Kenney, 2003). These were the weapons of the weaker in Scotts terms, in the totalitarian setting, and these weapons in a later stage proved to be important in also overthrowing the system (Scott 1985, 1990). Understanding civil resistance in the Soviet West – in Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Western Ukraine with Lviv as a center of intellectual resistance - in the period delimited by the “thaw” after Stalin´s death and the “glasnost” politics of Michal Gorbachev is the focus of the paper. By studying patterns of collective resistance, links between pre-democratic ways of resisting the regimes and the characteristics of the transition could possibly be identified. The cognitive, ideational and social resources created under these decades constitute formative forces in shaping these authoritarian and post-totalitarian regimes, also having affected and been significant for – even today continue to affect not least in the post-Soviet region – elite behavior, party formation and state and society interaction under the new regimes that replaced the Communist ones. The paper focuses on the former Soviet Union in the territories annexed the latest, the three Baltic States Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (Aarelaid-Tart, 2000, Ruutsoo, 2002, Levits, 1990, Prigge, 2004, Misiunas, 1990, Misiunas and Taagepera, 1993, Parming 1977, Bennich-Björkman 2006, 2009, 2012) and Galicia, Bukovina, and Volhynia (usually today denoted as Western Ukraine), with its capital Lviv (Lwow in Polish, Lemberg in Habsburg time) (see Sporluk, 1977, 1999, Risch, 2011, Bennich-Björkman and Kurbatov, 2019, forthcoming). The argument is that in the Soviet West, and most strongly so in Estonia, horizontal relations, that the party-state and its authorities wanted to break and replace with a sole vertical relation to the state, existed to a larger extent than is previously known.