Note: This is a translation of the abstract of my bachelor’s thesis.
This research examines collective petitions — defined here as petitions signed by more than one person — written and published during the specified time period. These collective letters fall into two categories: open letters and letters addressed to the authorities.
All collective letters share several core components: the addressee (the intended recipient or audience — either explicitly targeted or implicitly assumed, which may be an individual or a collective entity), the body of the letter, and the sender (if not otherwise stated, this is presumed to be the same as the signatory group).
Open letters may not specify an addressee by name but are always directed toward a particular audience. Letters to the authorities are addressed to government institutions or officials (collective or individual recipients).
The text of a collective letter is a complex phenomenon. Importantly, a collective letter does not necessarily imply collective authorship. This complicates efforts to reconstruct the textual history. In most cases, the letter's author is a single identifiable individual. Authorship can sometimes be traced through personal recollections or linguistic analysis. In rarer cases, different parts of the letter may have been written by different people — when this is corroborated by other sources, it becomes especially significant, as it may indicate varied motivations behind the text. The same applies when signatures are grouped under different parts of a document.
In theory, anyone who signs such a letter becomes a sender, regardless of whether they expect a response. In practice, the "response" often took the form of repressive measures directed at the signatories.
The second group of sources comprises memoirs and autobiographies written by dissidents and other participants in protest activities in the USSR. For this study, the author analysed approximately thirty such individuals who published personal accounts at various times, along with several additional documentary testimonies across genres. A set of guiding questions was applied to each text to help construct a composite portrait of the typical petition signatory.
The third group of sources includes digitised issues of the samizdat periodical Chronicle of Current Events. The Chronicle defined itself as "an information bulletin of all events related to violations and the protection of rights and freedoms in the USSR." Reports reached the Chronicle's compilers from across the Soviet Union. It played a central role throughout the dissident movement's existence, effectively serving as its backbone. Although first issued on 30 April 1968, the Chronicle often included information on earlier court cases and documented repressions against petition signatories.
The fourth source group consists of documentary records of political events from the defined period — specifically, compilations of criminal case materials. Created under Soviet censorship constraints, these collections were assembled by protest participants themselves, contemporaneously with the events described. They enable a documentary reconstruction of petition campaigns within the narrower context of major political processes such as the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial, the 5 December 1965 demonstration, the 22 January 1967 protest, the 1968 "Red Square" demonstration, and the Moscow trials. These compilations are noteworthy for the diversity and completeness of their materials, which are essential for reconstructing the historical reality of the time.