The Dilemma of Soviet Man: A Study of the Underground Lyrics of Bulat Okudzhava and Aleksandr Galich.

The Soviet phenomenon, variously known as the Underground, Dissident, or Democratic Movement, came to the fore as a counter-measure to the tightening of controls after the Twentieth Communist Party Congress in 1956. The task of this loosely organized and essentially leaderless crusade was to disseminate, by a sort of osmosis, within the Soviet Union, a sense of decency, morality, and justice. The primary vehicles for bringing this cause out into the open were open letters of protest, public demonstrations, disruption of Soviet political trials, and the creation of an illegal press known as Samizdat. The movements significance, in terms of its social impact, was the fusion of two previously nonrelated groups the literary intelligentsia and the scientific elite. Together they fought the system within the system that is, they devoted most of their attention to resolving the discordance between the Soviet political complex and the question of individual rights.