GABOR TAMAS RITTERSPORN create favourable conditions for those aspects of their professional activities which are compatible with the maintenance of the system and consequently of their distinct and more or less privilcged social status. The appearance of the dissident movement in the USSR corresponds to a historical period in which the numerical increase in the size of the middle layers along with the diversification and specialisation of their professional tasks make manifest not only crucial changes in the political role of a social category but also the contradictory nature of the techniques and institutions which reproduce the system and whose application, improvement and popularisation is unthinkable with the skilled and committed contribution of this category. 1t is during this period that it tums out that the development of the various techniques and institutions does not necessarily assure the optimal adaptation of the specialists in them to the political demands of their social fonction. At the same time it is also during this period that it has become increasingly obvious that, although the development of techniques and institutions is impossible without a certain political emancipation of the experts in them, that emancipation cannot but be limited and consequently insufficient to stimulate an optimal development. For whilst the historical experiences of this period have shown that authentic representation of the interests of the middle layers in the most important political decisions only leads to increasingly hard to control conflicts of particular interests of different professional and institutional hierarchie~, and to almost unrightable disequilibria in economic, social and political development, they also prove that the finally inevitable limitation of this representation puts a brake on institutional and technical development and gives rise to the open manifestations of the discontentment of certain elements of the intermediary layers. The appearance of the dissident movement is thus only one of the most obvious symptoms of certain interna! contradictions in the USSR's social and political development, the aggravation of which is one of the most important phenomena in the historical evolution of the country in the post-war period. lt is the increasingly serious antagonism between the system and the possibilities of developing the techniques and institutions called on to perpetuate it - one of the decisive elements of these contradictions - which stands out clearly 40
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