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Anti-Sovietism or anti-Soviet sentiment are activities that were actually or allegedly aimed against the Soviet Union or government power within the Soviet Union.
Three common uses of the term include the following:
During the Russian Civil War, whole classes of people, such as the clergy, and former officers, were automatically considered anti-Soviet. More categories are listed in the article "Enemy of the People". Those who were deemed anti-Soviet in this way, because of their former social status, were often presumed guilty whenever tried for a crime.Yevgenia Albats and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. The State Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia - Past, Present, and Future, 1994. .
The Soviet Union made extensive use of the term "enemy of the people" (). The term was first used in a speech by Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first chairman of the Cheka, after the October Revolution. The Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee printed lists of "enemies of the people", and Vladimir Lenin invoked it in his decree of 28 November 1917: (1999). 9780674076082, Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674076082
Other similar terms were in use as well:
In particular, the term "enemy of the workers" was formalized in the Article 58 (RSFSR Penal Code), "Article 58", an online excerpt and similar articles in the codes of the other Soviet Republics.
At various times these terms were applied, in particular, to Tsar Nicholas II and the Imperial family, aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, , business entrepreneurs, anarchism, , monarchism, Mensheviks, Esers, Bundists, Trotskyism, Nikolai Bukharin, the "", the army and police, , sabotage, wreckers (вредители, "vrediteli"), "social parasites" (тунеядцы, "tuneyadtsy"), Kavezhedists (people who administered and serviced the KVZhD (China Far East Railway), particularly the Russian population of Harbin, China), and those considered bourgeois nationalists (notably Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Armenian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian nationalists, Zionism, Basmachi).
Since 1927, Article 20 of the Common Part of the penal code that listed possible "measures of social defence" had the following item 20a: "declaration to be an enemy of the workers with deprivation of the union republic citizenship and hence of the USSR citizenship, with obligatory expulsion from its territory". Nevertheless, most "enemies of the people" suffered labor camps, rather than expulsion.
Later in the Soviet Union, being anti-Soviet was a criminal offense, known as "Anti-Soviet agitation". The epithet "antisoviet" was with "counter-revolutionary". The noun "antisovietism" was rarely used and the noun "antisovietist" () was used in a derogatory sense. Anti-Soviet agitation and activities were handled by the Article 58 and later Article 70 of the RSFSR penal code and similar articles in other Soviet republics. In February 1930, there was an anti-Soviet insurgency in the Kazak Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic village of Sozak.
After the end of the Second World War, there were Eastern European anti-Communist insurgencies against the Soviet Union.
A rally "Getting Rid of Soviet Heritage" taking place on March 20 was attended by approximately 5,000 people, while a counter rally by Latvian Russian Union was prevented from taking place by security forces, claiming threat to "public security".
A list of 93 street names still glorifying the Soviet Union (such as 13 streets named after the Pioneer movement), as well as 48 street names given during the Russification at the end of the 19th century (like streets named after Alexander Pushkin), has been compiled by historians of the Public Memory Center and sent to the corresponding municipalities who were recommended to change them.
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