Without a thorough grounding in the pre- and post-1917 historical dimension of the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute, one will have difficulty comprehending the depth of sentiment, indeed passion, it arouses among the disputing parties, in this case among Armenians, whether inside or outside the Soviet Union.

The roots of prying Nagorno-Karabakh from Muslim control via Russian intervention go back to the seventeenth century when Armenian emissaries contacted the Romanovs and urged them to liberate fellow Christians from Muslim domination. This, in part, led to the eighteenth century Russian campaign to conquer Transcaucasia, the Tsarist court encouraged by the possibility of local Christian support. Through Muslim eyes (a conviction held to this day), this was an act of political sabotage casting the Armenians in the role of political collaborators in collusion with the new Tsarist overlords, a suspicion that finds its modern echoes today as Armenia and Azerbaijan compete for Moscow's support in determining the status of the autonomous region.

Before the 1980s one hardly spoke of any significant social movements in the Baltic republics. Political apathy, bordering on hopelessness, as far as the masses were concerned, and an emphasized apoliticism of the intelligentsia, whose members never tired of stressing that their only concerns are professional, cultural, maybe aesthetic, but not at all political—that was the social situation in the Baltic states most of the time under Soviet rule.

This overall image of apathy, complacency, and acquiescence was, however, not entirely correct. Underneath there were many things happening, as very few Balts indeed were total conformists and total loyalists of the Soviet regime. Most of them were, rather, “conservationists.” That is a special term I use for people outwardly loyal to the Soviet system, working within that system, trying to comply with the rules of the system, but at the same time using whatever position in the system they have to preserve their nation's economic, cultural, and historical heritage. They were trying especially hard to safeguard their nation's economic well-being, ecological situation and, of course, spiritual identity and heritage, by promoting art, literature and other activities, mainly under the slogan “national in form and socialist in content,” but more and more national in form and less and less socialist in content, as far as the circumstances allowed it. These people wore the disguise of Soviet loyalism for the benefit and the advantage of their own nation; that was the attitude I call conservationism in the Baltic states and that was the attitude that was prevalent among most native Balts.

The events presently taking place in the Baltic are so interesting that I am almost prepared to cede my time to Alex Shtromas. Pamiat’ is clearly a less intriguing phenomenon than the issues he has been discussing.

I have been asked to talk about Pamiat’ as a social movement and basically my response is that it is not one. It is not a social movement. Pamiat’ would like very much to be one, but recent events have made clear that the response of ethnic Russians living in the RSFSR to Pamiat’ has been very restrained. We know this due to various polls which have been published in the Soviet press and due to the elections to the USSR Congress of People's Deputies, which showed that Pamiat’ had little support. I suspect that the upcoming elections in March 1990 to the RSFSR Supreme Soviet will also demonstrate the same lack of support for Pamyat'. (They did so, conclusively.)

I will be focusing on unofficial or informal social-political activities that Soviet workers have been engaged in over the course of the last several years and, particularly, over the course of the last several months. But first, as a way of introducing that discussion of informal or unofficial activity, I would like to step back to 1987 and look at attempts on the part of the Gorbachev regime to preempt unofficial activity on the part of workers, both in order to be better able to control those activities and to use them for Gorbachev's own political purposes. From this discussion I would make the case that the failure of those attempts has lead more recently to the growth of unofficial activity among Soviet workers.

There has been a tremendous proliferation of informal groups in the Soviet Union, by which I mean any organization that comes into being that is independent of the state, where citizens come together, create a group, promote their various intersts, be they political or nonpolitical. Pravda estimates approximately 60,000 of them this year alone; it gave a figure of 30,000 just one year ago. This phenomenon is hard to measure and most Soviet commentators, writers and sociologists basically throw up their arms and say that there are thousands and thousands of these various groups popping up everywhere: some small, some obviously larger with greater networks. I would like to sketch out some of the problems that I found, some of the areas that are worth investigating, and put forward some proposals that we may want to tackle in the discussion subsequent to this panel presentation.

I am not entirely satisfied with the term “informal groups.” The terminology is borrowed from the Soviets; it is the term they use most frequently. Many of these informal groups are in fact very formal, they are very sophisticated with committees and subcommittees, agendas, charters, mechanisms for leadership turnover, for membership selection, and in a few cases, some of them are even registered with the State as officially registered unofficial informal groups. I tend to use the terms “social groups” or “social action groups.” Perhaps “unofficial groups” would be a better term.