[Reverb Effect’s theme music, lively and interrogative, plays behind the voice of a narrator, interspersed with historical clips of other voices]
Narrator [a woman’s voice]: How do past voices resonate in the present moment?
Man A: …hear the stories of your parent’s…
Woman A: yeah
Man A: …and your grandparents’ and stuff, so I’m living through them or the stories they told.
Narrator: And how do we make sense of those voices?
Woman B: No, and that’s the story of my life [echo]
Man B: And a case has been made!
Woman B: No I am not trying to void the question, I am trying to clarify the position…
Narrator: What were they trying to say? And whose job is it to find out? This is Reverb Effect.
[Intro theme slowly fades out]
Paige Newhouse: On June 12, 1982, one million people gathered in Central Park to protest nuclear armaments. Following rallies across Western European cities in autumn 1981, the Central Park demonstration became one of the largest in American history. Notably, it was a grassroots effort led by Civil Rights leader Jack O’Dell, and feminist and antiwar activists Cora Weiss and Leslie Cagan. Forty years after the protest, Leslie Cagan wrote in the Nation, “the dangers of nuclear war remain all too real. Russia’s war against Ukraine has reawakened public awareness of how close we are to nuclear catastrophe. Just one bomb dropped—whether deliberately or by accident—could lead to indescribable horror,” end quote.
The anti-nuclear protest in New York and demonstrations across Western cities in the early 1980s were part of a larger movement that also involved Soviet citizens. In this episode of Reverb Effect, Alex McConnell interviews Olga Medvedkova, a Soviet woman arrested for her antiwar activism in 1983. Medvedkova became the focus of world news after accompanying Ann Pettit and Karmen Cutler, members of England’s Greenham Common movement, to a meeting with the Soviet Peace Committee. Two ABC newscasters were even detained by Soviet police at the Moscow courtroom that held her trial. What can we learn from Medvedkova’s story in light of renewed global anti-war protests?
Welcome to Season 5 of Reverb Effect, a podcast brought to you by the History Department at the University of Michigan. I’m Paige Newhouse, this year’s season producer. This episode’s producer, Alex McConnell, received his PhD from the History Department in 2023. He is the 2023-2024 postdoctoral fellow at the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies.
[fade in and fade out: Protesters chanting “Net voyne!” (“No war!”) in Moscow on February 24, 2022]
Alex McConnell: In the early hours of February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine aimed at toppling the government in Kyiv and, in the words of Vladimir Putin, “de-militarizing” and “de-Nazifying” the country. Almost immediately, demonstrations against the invasion erupted around the world, including within Russia itself. The weeks to follow saw thousands of protestors arrested in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and more than fifty other cities. Subsequent crackdowns, however, effectively stifled organized opposition to the conflict. Liberal media outlets were shut down, while prominent activists fled the country or were arrested. Even the words “invasion” and “war” were functionally banned from public discussion of what the Kremlin preferred to call its “special military operation.”
Nearly two years into the conflict, Russian peace activism has largely faded from the headlines. Calls by celebrities like the Russian rapper Oxxxymiron for a popular movement inspired by American protests against the Vietnam War have not been taken up by most ordinary citizens, who remain supportive of their government and wary of the costs of open dissent.
Yet the Vietnam analogy arguably overlooks a more relevant historical precedent: that of underground Soviet peace activism in the last decade of the Cold War. Forty years before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in June 1982, a group of ex-hippies and artists gathered in a Moscow apartment to announce the creation of an independent peace organization—the first of its kind in the Soviet Union. But before we can tell that story, we have to go back a little further, to 1949.
[fade in and fade out: “Soviet Songs about Friendship & Peace”]
Alex McConnell: “Peace” was among the values most consistently and fervently championed by the government of the Soviet Union. The slogan “Miru—mir!” (or “Peace to the World”) became famous after the writer Ilya Ehrenburg used it to conclude his speech at the 1949 World Congress of Peace Partisans, a precursor to the Moscow-backed World Peace Council, a Cold War counterweight to American-led peacekeeping through the United Nations and other international organizations.
The council’s activities abroad, specifically its funding of left-wing groups across Europe and agitation against the Vietnam War, led to its reputation in the West as a tool of Soviet foreign policy. In the words of a declassified CIA report from 1971, the World Peace Council was, quote, “a Soviet-sponsored international communist front,” end quote, rather than a genuine pacifist movement.
This view was shared by many Soviet dissidents, the underground community of writers, artists, human rights activists, and others who resisted the state’s authority. In his 1982 brochure Pacifists Against Peace, for example, the dissident Vladimir Bukovsky accused European peace activists of simply repeating World Peace Council talking points, quote “as though they were under hypnosis,” end quote.
As an international organization, the World Peace Council was made up of smaller committees from its nominally independent member states. The Soviet delegation, known as the Soviet Peace Committee, was the government’s official organ of peace promotion and thus the only formally sanctioned outlet for aspiring pacifists in the USSR. For many regular citizens, however, working with the Soviet Peace Committee was a total non-starter.
Olga Medvedkova: Many Western peace activists considered the Soviet Peace Committee as a grassroots organization, which it was anything but. And I just wanted to convey this message to the world: You are dealing with the wrong people.
Alex McConnell: That’s Dr. Olga Medvedkova. Today, she lives in Ohio, where she is a professor emerita of geography at Wittenberg University. Back in the early 1980s, she was a researcher at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow. It was there that she and her husband Yuri, also a geographer, became involved with the underground peace movement.
Olga Medvedkova: I was born, raised, and educated in the Soviet Union. I went to Moscow State University and got my master’s [degree] in geography, and then I got my PhD in the Institute of Geography of the Academy of Sciences. And after that, I was working in the Institute of Geography, Academy of Sciences, until summer ’86.
Alex McConnell: Medvedkova’s parents were both doctors who met at a frontline hospital during the Second World War. She herself was born shortly after the war in 1949.
Olga Medvedkova: I was raised in a very regular Soviet family when parents don’t question anything, and if you have any questions, [or are] too curious, this curiosity is suppressed for your own good. I’ve had just a regular childhood … When I went to Moscow State University, things started changing, and Moscow State really was an amazing place when some kind of free thinking and discussions, at least, between classmates and some faculty even, have been possible.
Alex McConnell: For many in the Soviet sixties generation, or shestidesiatiniki, the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 was a political awakening.
Olga Medvedkova: I went to Moscow State in, I think it was ’67, and in ’68 the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia. And that was the first shock, when I started thinking out of the box. And then it just took off. I started meeting with people who thought a lot, discussing issues [with them]. And of course, the more you read and the more you discuss and the more you learn, the more you see the other side which is completely covered by Soviet propaganda … So it was an early awakening. But the real awakening was during the Soviet invasion into Afghanistan.
[Audio excerpt of Jimmy Carter Speech on the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, January 4, 1980]: “Fifty thousand heavily armed Soviet troops have crossed the border and are now dispersed throughout Afghanistan, attempting to conquer the fiercely independent Muslim people of that country. This invasion is an extremely serious threat to peace because of the threat of further Soviet expansion into neighboring countries in Southwest Asia and also because such an aggressive military policy is unsettling to other peoples throughout the world.”
Alex McConnell: In December 1979, the Soviet Union sent troops into Afghanistan in support of the communist government that had taken power in Kabul a year earlier. Intended as a rapid intervention to stabilize the government and wipe out the Islamist rebels, or mujahideen, who threatened it, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan dragged on for a decade, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in the process. The invasion ended a period of détente between the Soviet Union and United States, who backed the mujahideen financially and militarily, renewing fears of direct conflict between the Cold War superpowers. Across the West, these fears manifested in a resurgent anti-nuclear movement and a crisis over the so-called “Euromissiles” that NATO planned to deploy in range of Soviet targets.
[Clip of BBC Report]: “The first American cruise missiles are now in Britain. It was only this morning, at Greenham Common RAF. base in Berkshire, that a United States Starlifter landed with its cargo of missiles.”
Alex McConnell: Within the Soviet Union itself, Afghanistan was the breaking point for those who already harbored doubts about the government’s professed commitment to world peace.
Olga Medvedkova: I don’t think I knew anything about the peace movement when I was in Moscow State University. I think I got into all this stuff when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, which was in ’79. I remember that it was like the last straw for me. I remember, every two weeks we had a brainwashing meeting in the Academy of Sciences and in our Institute, just like in any other working places or universities anywhere [in the Soviet Union]. I never was a member of the Communist Party, but even more so [for this reason], I had to be brainwashed to make sure I think correctly. And the Party leader was reading us an article from the newspaper, Pravda, explaining [to us] what a [gesture of] brotherhood help [sic] it was when the Soviets went to Afghanistan. And usually people don’t pay attention to that. You know, people in the Academy of Sciences, at least some of them, can think on their own. Somebody just grading papers, somebody proofreading their articles; you have to be present there. And I was doing something like that too. And all of a sudden, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I just thought: what she’s saying is total B.S. And we know that what she’s saying is B.S., and she knows that we know that it’s total B.S. And so it goes in circles. And I just put aside my papers and I left.
Alex McConnell: This small act of dissent was nothing in comparison to what Medvedkova and her husband would soon undertake.
[Short musical interlude: “The Morning Glory (Theme)” by LogicMoon]
Alex McConnell: Within their circle of friends and acquaintances in the Soviet intelligentsia, there was an increasing sense of urgency about the danger posed by the arms race and international tensions over the war in Afghanistan.
Olga Medvedkova: It was brewing in our circle where we had artists and scientists, and some others. It started in a more or less intellectual circle, but then it broadened. And anybody who shared our ideas was welcome, we never kept membership because it was dangerous and it was not our idea. It’s not an organization. It’s a movement. And if people want to join, they join, if they decide to leave us, they leave us … so that’s how it started. Many dissident movements in the Soviet Union were really exclusive. Everybody had to be checked out in order to become part of the group. They didn’t want any outsiders, well, for these reasons. But we had nothing to hide. We hadn’t been against the Soviet Union, we hadn’t been against the government. We just didn’t believe that it’s only government who had to do the job, to work towards peace.
Alex McConnell: In 1982, three years into the Soviet-Afghan War, the underground peace movement went public for the first time. On June 4, eleven members of what was now calling itself the Group to Establish Trust Between the USSR and USA announced their existence at an extraordinary press conference, held in the Moscow apartment of the non-conformist artist Sergei Batovrin. Later, as the group’s mission broadened in scope, it dropped USSR and USA from its name in favor of East and West.
Olga Medvedkova: Not in ’79. I think it started in the ’80s … when we announced the establishment of our Group for Establishing Trust Between East and West, or trust builders, or peaceniks; people called us differently. And then we invited foreign correspondents for this opening, and Soviet correspondents. The Soviets, of course, never came.
Alex McConnell: At the June 4 press conference, Batovrin, the trust group’s spokesperson, read an “Appeal to the Governments and Peoples of the USSR and Soviet Union.” Copies of the appeal were also sent to the General Secretary of the Communist Party, Leonid Brezhnev, US President Ronald Reagan, and the Soviet Peace Committee. Over the next month, as more people added their names, the number of signatories to the original document grew to 170. The appeal opens with a dire assessment of the international situation as it appeared in 1982:
Quote, “The USSR and the USA have the means to kill in such proportions that would end the history of mankind. A balance of terror cannot be a reliable guarantee of safety in the world. Only trust between peoples can create a firm assurance of the future,” endquote.
Olga Medvedkova: In those times, Russians and Americans saw each other as enemies. And how can you talk about disarmament if people don’t trust each other? So it’s just not going to work. It’s not like you put, “check,” okay, we talk about disarmament. You have to start establishing a relationship and not be like the government on its own. We were advocating people-to-people diplomacy, children going to summer camps in each others’ countries, staying in each others’ families, students going abroad, exchange programs, joint ventures, joint research amongst scholars, joint medical programs. All things which can bring people closer together and people can start trusting each other. They see that Americans don’t have horns and neither do Russians. So we just thought that this is the foundation for any possible reduction in the arms race.
Alex McConnell: Not all of the appeal’s signatories were equally committed to its pacifist orientation. Oleg Radzinsky, a personal friend of Sergei Batovrin and his wife, was by his own description an outlier among the trust group’s coalition of doves.
Oleg Radzinsky [Original Russian audio crossfades to Fedor Maksimishin reading in English]: Why did I sign the appeal? I wasn’t a pacifist and didn’t believe in the threat of nuclear war, although not because I had studied the subject in depth and thought it impossible, but rather because I was interested in human rights and nothing more. The nuclear threat, which Soviet people hear about from childhood and that, as we are told, carries with it the “aggressive actions of American imperialism,” seemed to me the usual lies of the Soviet ideological machine, the latest Soviet bogeyman. Nevertheless, I signed the appeal, the essence of which was foreign to me, as was the very idea of pacifism, of nonviolent resistance to evil … Perhaps I was the only one of the signatories who didn’t fully believe in the essence of the appeal. All the others may well have been pacifists, far more knowledgeable about the threat of nuclear war than me and concerned about the possibility. The state, however, didn’t believe in the sincerity of the trust group’s members and began repressions almost immediately after the press conference.
Alex McConnell: Radzinsky himself was arrested in June 1982, shortly after the trust group’s press conference. In October 1983, he was sentenced to one year in a maximum-security facility and five years of exile to a prison colony. Medvedkova, for her part, echoes Radzinsky’s characterization of the Soviet state’s attitude to the group.
Olga Medvedkova: We didn’t consider ourselves dissidents, but the KGB did, and we got everything from them for that.
Alex McConnell: On the other side of the Iron Curtain, a parallel grassroots movement was building against the American military presence in Europe. In 1981, a group called Women for Life on Earth walked 120 miles from Cardiff in Wales to the British Air Force base at Greenham Common, 55 miles west of London. There, they set up a camp to protest the stationing of American cruise missiles on British soil.
[Clip from BBC Report]: “The women’s peace camp at Greenham also represents the disquieting voice of rebellious women, a sisterhood of dissent. Anne Pettit was one of the women who started the whole thing. [Pettit speaking:] ‘We decided to call it a peace camp and decided to stay, asking for a public debate between everybody in this country about the siting of cruise missiles.’”
Olga Medvedkova: The Greenham Common movement started also in summer ’81, pretty much when we started our movement. And, of course, they achieved fantastic results … But the idea was that they cannot do it on their own. And the very famous British historian E.P. Thompson said to them, you really cannot do it on your own. You have to have another [group] participating in that. And there is an independent movement in the Soviet Union. Why wouldn’t you make some contact with them?
Alex McConnell: Because their protest was against an American military installation, the Greenham Women were lauded as heroes by the Soviet media. In May 1983, Anne Pettit and other leaders of the Greenham peace camp were officially invited to visit Moscow, where they soon connected with Medvedkova and members of the trust group.
Olga Medvedkova: And we had quite a number of get-togethers with our group and with them. And in a few days, they said, look, we were invited by the Soviet Peace Committee to come to this country. (That was the only way for them to come.) Would you like to join us? And I said, I would. Because a day before, or a couple days before, I heard on the BBC or Voice of America that one of the members of the Soviet Peace Committee was being interviewed. And she was asked about our group, and she said, “Oh, this group, it doesn’t exist. It’s a mirage of Western propaganda.” And I said, you know what? It’s getting on my nerves. We are doing great things, and they just don’t want to even acknowledge that.
Alex McConnell: Once inside the room, Medvedkova took matters into her own hands.
Olga Medvedkova: So we were invited to sit at a very long table, TV crew was there, the interpreter was there. It’s about ten members of the Soviet Peace Committee and four of us on the opposite side of the table. So the Soviets introduced them[selves] first and were talking about their input to world peace, and I said quietly to my comrades, “I’ll be the last.” So when it was my turn and all attention had been turned to me, and everybody was smiling in expectation, I spoke in the Russian language, quite aware of what I represented. And it was such a shock for a few minutes that I could lay out some of our program. After that, it was total chaos. [Oleg] Kharkhardin, who was a deputy chair of this committee (the chair was somewhere abroad), and Kharkhardin was a colonel, or rather, a general, at the KGB in his real job. He starts screaming, he starts banging on the table, “I’m the master here, be silent. No one is allowed to talk.” The Greenham Common [women], who had seen a lot in their struggle for peace in the UK, were in absolute shock.
Alex McConnell: Medvedkova seized the moment.
Olga Medvedkova: So, [after] a while, I said, “It might sound strange, but it looks like only I can stop this chaos. And because I’m for dialogue, since it cannot be in my presence, I’m leaving.” And I told my friends that if I’m not in the garden in front of the Peace Committee, it means I’m arrested. And before clos[ing] the door, it was like a movie moment. I turned around, and I said, “But please, don’t [say] anymore that we don’t exist or that we are a mirage of Western propaganda.” And I shut the door.
Alex McConnell: Remarkably, Medvedkova was not arrested for this brazen show of defiance before the Soviet Peace Committee. Her first detention came five months later, in October 1983, at a demonstration during Oleg Radzinsky’s trial. Although she was released, Medvedkova was arrested again in December and charged with a far more serious offense: assaulting a Soviet police officer during the October demonstration.
Olga Medvedkova: So I was accused of beating a policeman, which of course I never did … I got a lawyer who was a very prominent lawyer [and] used to defend dissidents. And he told me, why do you need me? Your sentence is predetermined. I said, I need you to defend me against the accusation of hooliganism. I don’t need you to deal with politics. I will deal with that by myself.
Alex McConnell: Medvedkova was pregnant when the trial took place in March 1984, amid a storm of international protest and media attention due to the obviously fabricated nature of the changes. She feared being sent to a labor camp, where her newborn child would likely be taken from her.
Olga Medvedkova: So I was announced guilty and I was expecting three years in jail, and I had with me dry bread and woolen socks and, you know, the least you can bring with you to prison. And when they had to announce the sentence, it took probably half an hour. The judge came out and he said that, according to articles such and such (I don’t even remember that article), they give me a suspended sentence. And I could not believe it. Of course, I was relieved. Are you kidding me? I cannot believe it, because never in political cases it would ever happen.
Alex McConnell: Medvedkova credits this surprising outcome to the efforts of the Greenham women as well as the Soviet government’s desire to avoid an international scandal over her imprisonment.
Olga Medvedkova: Well, I think that on one side, the support of peace activists, in particular the Greenham Common women, they did amazing things on my behalf. They staged demonstrations. They did a sit-in strike in the Soviet Embassy in London. They were actually preparing—and I didn’t know this at the time—to come to Siberia, to my camp. Like they would be allowed, but that was amazing. On the other side, I was pregnant, and it allowed them to save their faces.
Alex McConnell: In September 1986, Medvedkova and her husband were summoned to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, told they were being stripped of their citizenship, and given 48 hours to leave the country. Taking two suitcases each, the maximum that the Soviet authorities would allow, the couple and their young children fled to Austria, where local activists helped them stay temporarily. Eventually, they departed for America, where the family settled, this time for good, in Columbus, Ohio.
Oleg Radzinsky was pardoned in 1987 as part of the liberalization initiated under Mikhail Gorbachev and likewise emigrated to the United States, where he studied at Columbia University and later worked as an investment banker. Тhese days, Radzinsky lives in London, where he is a writer and a leading voice in the Russian émigré community. Beyond his literary activities, he is also the managing director at True Russia, a non-profit benefiting Ukrainians and Russians displaced by the war. In spite of his youthful ambivalence towards pacifism, Radzinsky is perhaps the strongest living link between Soviet and post-Soviet peace movements. His non-profit, classified by the Russian government as a hostile “foreign agent,” has raised over 1 million pounds for the charity Disasters Emergency Committee.
[Short musical interlude: “The Morning Glory (Theme)” by LogicMoon]
Alex McConnell: Olga Medvedkova’s showdown with the Soviet Peace Committee was merely one episode in the long struggle for recognition and reform waged by peace activists in the Soviet Union. Her abrupt expulsion from the country in September 1986, more than a year after Gorbachev came to power, is a potent reminder of how change that looks inevitable in hindsight can be harder for contemporaries to see. By 1987, as Gorbachev’s reform campaigns picked up steam, it became not only possible but even desirable, at least in some cases, for independent groups to engage with their official counterparts. At an event sponsored by the Peace Committee in May of that year, for example, a representative of the Moscow Trust Group spoke to delegates from both Western and Eastern Bloc countries for fifteen minutes. This allowance for an independent speaker from Soviet civil society, if still rather constrained, was unprecedented at a Peace Committee meeting attended by foreign guests. It caused a sensation among those present, who, as the scholar Irina Gordeeva, represented, quote, “a historic moment in the development of the peace movement in the USSR,” end quote.
If one lesson of this story is the power of persistence, another must be the need for dialogue. Or, more precisely, the necessity of someone to dialogue with—a partner, even an ideological adversary, with whom you can speak and argue in a common language. Medvedkova’s meeting with the Soviet Peace Committee, after all, was only possible because there was a Soviet Peace Committee in the first place. It was the effusive official commitment to peace, however hollow or distorted in practice, that enabled activists in the trust group to mobilize around a shared socialist ideal. This is a version of the dissident strategy that the historian Benjamin Nathans calls “radical civil obedience,” or the demand that the Soviet state follow its own laws.
In contemporary Russia, by contrast, there is no such commitment, no state-funded apparatus of peace promotion with any real influence on the country’s leaders or credibility beyond its borders. Tellingly, the most effective domestic opposition to the Russian government’s conduct in Ukraine has come from those calling for an even harsher prosecution of the war, such as the ill-fated rebel Evgenii Prigozhin. In a twisted version of “radical civil obedience,” Prigozhin and other paramilitary figures have demanded that the state pursue its war aims to the fullest extent, using bellicose rhetoric to denounce generals perceived as weak or incompetent.
For aspiring anti-war activists, the threat of repression is compounded by the absence of any Soviet-style dedication to the idea of peace on the part of the Russian state. Medvedkova herself sees little hope for a sudden outbreak of protest.
Olga Medvedkova: [Sighs] It’s a tough question. The thing is, in our times, at least in official Soviet propaganda, the Soviet Union was for peace, right? Russia has now launched a totally unjust war. There is no rhetoric about peace that exists right now. How can there be? I don’t know. I don’t know. It would be totally suicidal … So it’s simply very, very dangerous for regular people.
Alex McConnell: To Ukrainians under constant threat from Russian bombs and bullets, such laments about the dangers of political resistance may ring hollow. For some observers, talk of peace itself is misguided, distracting from efforts to support Ukraine and playing into Putin’s hands. Yet with losses mounting and the conflict entering a prolonged phase of stalemate, there are growing signs of unrest on the Russian homefront. In November, wives and mothers of soldiers deployed in Ukraine held demonstrations throughout the country to protest the continued mobilization of their male relatives. These protests recall silent vigils by women at the graves of Soviet soldiers killed in Afghanistan, a form of “patriotic dissent” against the dominant war narrative. As Olga Medvedkova’s story reminds us, women have typically been at the forefront of peace movements both past and present.
Olga Medvedkova: I don’t want to sound sexist, but women, by their nature, are usually more peaceful than men. Women do deliver children. And to imagine that they want those children to go to war, it’s impossible … I think women brought much more to this peace movement than their [male] counterparts, though, by the end in the Greenham Common camp, men were also accepted. But most of all, it’s been just thousands and thousands of women who took it on and who fought for that.
[Short musical interlude: “The Morning Glory (Theme)” by LogicMoon]
Paige Newhouse: Thank you for listening. Thank you to Alexander McConnell for producing this episode. Thank you to all who made this episode possible. Thank you to Olga Medvedkova for her interview and to our voice actor Fedor Maksimishin. Thank you to Hannah Roussel, who helped produced this episode and to Justin Schell, who helped record Alex’s interview with Medvedkova. Additional funding and support for this episode was provided by the Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies at Arizona State University.
Our editorial board is Amir Marshi, Ennrieth Martinez Palacios, Talitha Pam, Cheyenne Pettit, and Sophie Wunderlich. Gregory Parker is our executive producer, and I’m your host and season producer, Paige Newhouse. Please join us for our next episode for more stories about how the past reverberates into the present. This is Reverb Effect.
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