Dr. Yuri Yarim-Agaev, a physicist and one of the leaders of the human rights movement of the former Soviet Union, was forced into exile before the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow.
Upon his arrival in the United States, he continued his professional work in physics at MIT, Stanford University, and Bellcore, and later in financial analytics at Bankers Trust and Deutsche Bank in New York.
In 1984, he founded the Center for Democracy in the USSR, an advocacy organization for persecuted dissidents in the Soviet Union supported by the National Endowment for Democracy and various American foundations.
Dr. Yarim-Agaev continues his involvement in human rights issues around the world. His recent publications deal with the failure of democracy in Russia and politics in Iraq and North Korea.
The Epoch Times : At the recent Stanford conference, 'Soviet Dissident Movement and American Foreign Policy During 1980s,' you delivered a keynote address: 'The Dissidents' Conspiracy.' Could you please elaborate on it?
Dr. Yuri Yarim-Agaev : Non violent resistance to the most violent regime … at that time, it was not trivial. Everybody, including the Soviet government, considered us lunatics. No one could imagine that it was possible to deal with the violent regime with bare hands.
But the words appeared to be more powerful than any arms. It turned out to be the most productive and ingenious approach: The peaceful replacement of the regime without fire and shots.
Whatever the strategy chosen, the main thing is a spirit behind it. And this is the spirit of dissidence—conspiracy of dissidents, as I call it.
At that time, in different countries, including democratic ones, people of very similar and special spirit independently emerged.
They did not know each other personally, never coordinated their efforts—yet, they had so much in common in their character and philosophy that they acted in incredible synchronicity.
It was profound mutual understanding that united those people. Their acting in unison was due to the fact that they all were true dissidents.
The Epoch Times : If I understood you correctly, you include in their ranks people from the West, too.
Yuri Yarim-Agaev : I use the term 'dissident' in a very broad sense. I include in their ranks, among others, people from Reagan's administration such as Mark Palmer and Reagan himself, as well as John Paul II.
To me, all those people were true dissidents. Take Mark Palmer as an example. A high-level diplomat, Assistant Secretary of State, he challenged the conventional wisdom and the established rules. What were the established rules for high-level diplomats? Not to show too much initiative, in the first place.
But what did the diplomat Palmer do when he was on his assignment to Russia? On his own initiative, he took a public bus to a local prison and to everyone's utter astonishment, asked to show him how prisoners were being treated.
Later in his career, being an U.S. ambassador to Hungary, Mark marched in the first row together with the leaders of Hungarian opposition showing not a very traditional behavior of an American ambassador.
And what did Ronald Reagan do? Not only did he support Soviet dissidents, but against the conventional wisdom, he proposed that the Berlin wall had to be torn down. And voila, he has gotten everything he had asked for.
These are just two examples of many other people, who were ready to challenge the conventional wisdom and established rules.
The traditional image of dissidents presents them as noble and sacrificial people and although heroic but not intelligent, the ones who could not find their place in the world and as a result, resorted themselves to a kind of reckless behavior. Maybe it was not said directly, but I had felt it all the time during more than 20 years of dissident experience. But there is no truth to this image.
The Epoch Times : What are the true qualities of dissidents?
Yuri Yarim-Agaev : First of all, courage, but not only courage to withstand the severe persecution—years of imprisonment and psychiatric torture. I mean courage in a broad sense, the ability to be ready to be ostracized by your friends and your peers. And that often needs much more courage.
I mean the courage to stand for ideas, when everyone around you says that you are wrong; the courage to challenge conventional wisdom, the courage that manifests not only in actions but in thinking. The courage means that you do not recklessly throw yourself into the battle but that you pre-plan your actions, and being aware of the consequences, you still go for that. This is a real courage.
The second most important and absolutely essential dissidents' quality is intelligence. The dissidents won't survive unless they were not smarter than communist authorities. If you take a look at Moscow dissidents, you can barely find in history the group with such a high percentage of academics, professors, famous writers, artists.
The intellectual community does not want to acknowledge these qualities. It did not want to give us a credit for being courageous and intelligent because it challenged the comfortable status quo of their community. Their argument was: "We have to save ourselves for posterity. You go ahead and sacrifice."
The Epoch Times : But wasn't there a famous scientist Andrei Sakharov among dissidents?
Yuri Yarim-Agaev : Sakharov was one of the greatest challenges to the intellectual community because his credentials were the greatest and yet he stood with us in all the trials until the KGB had deported him to Gorky. He did not want to save himself for posterity, but rather behaved according to his conscience and morals, which were more important for him than anything else.
This brings up the next very important dissidents' quality—adherence to basic moral principles. For example, your friends are arrested and speaking on their behalf and trying to rescue them seems to be so natural that it is impossible to argue with it, but it was totally suppressed in the ideological communist society. So standing for basic moral principles is critical to dissident movement.
The remainder of this interview with The Epoch Times will be published in a separate, forthcoming article.
Feeds