Boris Rabbot and the "Shestidesiatniki:" The Forgotten Liberals of the 1960s
Boris Rabbot, a journalist and sociologist, was in the vanguard of the pre-perestroika "shestidesiatniks," influential intellectuals and party leaders who vigorously advocated a policy of liberalization within the Soviet system. A high-level advisor to Central Committee member Alexei Rumyantsev, he crusaded for improved relations between Russia and the United States in the first half of the 1970s during the initial period of détente. Denounced politically as a result of his activities, he spent two years as a refusenik before receiving permission to emigrate in 1976 and went on to lecture and write widely in the United States. His widow, Lynn Visson, Visiting Adjunct Professor and Visiting Associate, Monterey Graduate School Institute of Translation and Interpretation, retired UN interpreter and co-compiler of Boris Rabbot: An Unheeded Voice of the 1960s, discussed how he and the intellectuals of his generation presaged the reformers of the Gorbachev era.