How a 1965 Moscow protest demanding that the Soviet government obey its own laws helped launch the USSR’s dissident movement

Sixty years ago, a protest in Moscow received almost no coverage in Soviet newspapers but helped launch the human rights movement. Several dozen people gathered in Pushkin Square to demand that the state abide by its own Constitution. They sought neither a change of government nor political reforms. The organizer, mathematician and poet Alexander Volpin, decided to remind the authorities publicly, for the first time, of citizens’ right to an open trial. The rally lasted only a few minutes before the authorities dispersed it, but its consequences reached far beyond the square. Meduza looks back