This section profiles Soviet and Russian dissidents: scientists, writers, clergy, and human rights activists who challenged the Communist Party and, later, the Putin government. For the security services, dissent was treated as a counterintelligence problem. From 1967 the KGB’s Fifth Directorate, created under Yuri Andropov, was charged with suppressing ideological subversion, and dissidents faced surveillance, internal exile, forced psychiatric confinement, deprivation of citizenship, and smear campaigns run at home and abroad as active measures. Entries cover individual dissidents and the methods used against them.
