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I'm not sure if he was a dissident. He was an actor and a wonderful poet. Dissidence is a position and, one way or another, it is propaganda. Great musicians and poets are not engaged in propaganda, they are above it all. Of course, many people get involved in politics and propaganda in their youth, but they quickly switch to truly eternal things. For example, even Brodsky was not a dissident, despite emigrating. That's why the Great Ones are loved by everyone.
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Yeah what I meant to say is that Vysotsky was an icon and inspiration to the dissidents, a very central presence in dissident culture.
It's also true that Brodsky didn't think of himself as a dissident, but as a spiritually free man in an unfree society.
Btw one could even say that the dissident movement, or at least parts of it, were not what we normally understand by a "political" movement: they sought freedom from the constant intrusion of politics into their lives under the Soviet regime. So their attitude to the whole idea of politics was different than what we take for granted today.