milestones of the dissident movement of the 1960s included: Public readings of poetry at the Mayakovsky Square in downtown Moscow, where some of the underground writings critical of the system were often circulated; some of these public readings were dispersed by the police; The trial of poet Iosif Brodsky (later known as Joseph Brodsky, the future winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature) who was charged with 'parasitism' for not being officially employed and sentenced in 1963 to internal exile; he gained widespread sympathy and support in dissident and semi-dissident circles, mostly through the notes from his trial compiled by Frida Vigdorova The trial and sentencing of writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel who were arrested in 1965 for publishing their co-authored work abroad under pennames and sentenced to labor camp and internal exile; opposition to this trial led to a campaign of petitions for their release that was signed by thousands of people, many of whom went on to participate more actively in the dissident movement Silent demonstrations on Moscow's Pushkin Square initiated by Alexander Yesenin-Volpin on the Soviet Constitution Day of Dec. 5, 1965, with posters urging the authorities to observe their own Constitution Petitioning campaigns against the downplaying of Stalin's terror after the removal of Nikita Khrushchev and the resurgence of the cult of Stalin's personality in parts of the Soviet government bureaucracy The launch, in April 1968, of the underground periodical, 'Chronicle of Current Events', documenting violations of human rights and protest activities across the Soviet Union The publication in the West of Andrei Sakharov's first political essay 'Reflections on Progress and Intellectual Freedom' in the spring and summer of 1968 The rally of protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia to suppress 'the Prague Spring'; was held on August 25, 1968 on Moscow's Red Square by eight dissidents including Viktor Fainberg, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Pavel Litvinov, Vladimir Dremlyuga, and others The founding of the Initiative on Human Rights in 1969 The 1970s Our history shows that most of the people can be fooled for a very long time. But now all this idiocy is coming into clear contradiction with the fact that we have some level of openness. (Vladimir Voinovich) The heyday of the dissenters as a presence in the Western public life was the 1970s. The Helsinki Accords inspired dissidents in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland to openly protest human rights failures by