Levada had long ago suggested that Soviet society moved, pendulum-like, between periods of extreme oppression and relative liberalization, as under Khrushchev and early on under Gorbachev, and that these cycles followed a pragmatic logic. The periods of liberalization allowed pent-up frustrations—and, more important, the people who would articulate them—to bubble to the surface. With the potential troublemakers visible and active, the crackdown that inevitably followed eliminated them.
