Topic summary
Brezhnev Era
Extracted from the Wikipedia article History of the Soviet Union (1964–1982).
Dissident movement
Soviet dissidents and human rights groups were routinely repressed by the KGB. Overall, political repression tightened during the Brezhnev era and Stalin experienced a partial rehabilitation. The two leading figures in the Soviet dissident movement during the Brezhnev Era were Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov. Despite their individual fame and widespread sympathy in the West, they attracted little support from the mass of the population. Sakharov was forced into internal exile in 1979, and Solzhenitsyn was forced out of the country in 1974.