In the Western popular imaginary, Soviet dissidents are typically pictured as a handful of noble intellectuals who bravely challenged a repressive system and were predictably defeated due to their disconnection from the reality of their country. In their smoke-filled Moscow kitchens, these heroes raised a toast to their doomed cause as their friends were one by one sent into internal exile, confined in prison and labour camps or forced to emigrate. Their tragic yet admirable fate confirms a universal truth of Russian history, according to which lone idealists are bound to perish in an unequal struggle against authoritarian rule and its passive-majority supporters. Since tyranny is Russia’s historical fate, any protest against it lacks political rationality and has an exclusively moral character. The dissident always loses, which is precisely what makes their life worthy of respect.
This image from the Cold War-era press has been given a new lease on life in the last decade, when it has become customary to refer to any critics of the Putin regime—from Alexei Navalny to the feminist punk band Pussy Riot—as ‘new dissidents’. This notion of an unbroken, homogeneous tradition of dissent ignores the complexity of Russian society, obscuring the differences in both form and substance between kinds of resistance that have emerged under different historical circumstances. Navalny, for example, undoubtedly shared Soviet dissidents’ moral understanding of their activities, as he noted in his letters from prison. But unlike them, he was a charismatic politician capable of mobilizing thousand-strong street protests. The famous performance by Pussy Riot at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in 2012—for which the group’s members paid the price with several years in prison—targeted the reactionary, patriarchal and clerical ideology of Putinism, which is diametrically opposed (at least rhetorically) to official Soviet doctrine.
Soviet dissidence was itself a multifaceted phenomenon. The idea of a courageous few locked in conflict with the tyrannical state was in part concocted for Western audiences, which were, as Benjamin Nathans observes in his Pulitzer prize-winning history, ‘hungry for stories of heroic resistance to totalitarian domination’. In fact, the term ‘dissident’ itself, Nathans notes, originated in the West; foreign journalists applied it to protesters of various stripes in the ussr, where it was then adopted by Soviet propagandists. Most critics of the Soviet regime did not use it to describe themselves (‘I’ve never cared for the term’, the nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov wrote). The word, especially in Russian usage, implies a distinction between dissidents and the majority—the Latin root dis-sidere means ‘to sit apart’. In her famous study Soviet Dissent (1985), Lyudmila Alexeyeva, an activist who appears as a protagonist in Nathans’s book, used a different concept—Inakomyslie (literally: ‘people who think differently’)—expansive enough to encompass everyone whose views did not align with the official ideology, from anti-Stalinist Marxists to Baptists and Crimean Tatars. A collection of declassified court documents titled Kramola: Dissent in the ussr under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, 1953–1982 (2005), broadened the scope, spanning the full range of manifestations of popular opposition to Kremlin policy. The idea of kramola (heresy) emerging from below—arising independently among thousands and taking the form of social protest—compels us to move beyond the dichotomy of a clique of intellectuals pitted against a despotic state. The ongoing debates over the nature of dissent in the ussr—especially since 2022, with the Putin regime’s transformation into a repressive dictatorship—are political in nature, and linked to pressing questions: how can resistance to the regime be organized? What forms might contemporary dissidence take? Is it always doomed to failure?
In To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause—the title a ‘favourite toast’ among dissidents—Nathans, a historian of Imperial and Soviet Russia at the University of Pennsylvania, adopts the ‘narrower meaning’ the word carried ‘in the Soviet lexicon’, where it referred not to the full gamut of dissidence but to one especially visible and dominant strand: the civil and human rights movement that emerged in Moscow in the ‘post-totalitarian’ 1960s and lasted roughly until the late 1970s, when the kgb crushed it, arresting or deporting or otherwise silencing many of its leading figures. To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause is, first and foremost, a history of Soviet dissidents in this period as a distinct cultural group that coalesced around common practices, such as signing collective petitions and illegally distributing self-published texts, and which was bound together by a shared sense of moral duty in defence of universal values, consciously inspired by the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia who had opposed serfdom and tsarism. Nathans describes an informal, close-knit circle, ‘overwhelmingly’ cosmopolitan intellectuals, mostly professionally established rather than students. In contrast to the Civil Rights movement in America, Nathans notes, with its marches, boycotts and strikes, the primary vehicle of the Soviet movement was samizdat, as well as radio broadcasts. He draws on the wealth of textual traces it thus left—not only samizdat publications but over a hundred and fifty autobiographies by dissidents, unpublished diaries and private letters, as well as records of kgb interrogations, internal memos and casefiles—to produce a detailed reconstruction of the movement’s turning points and idiosyncratic philosophy. Within its narrow 1960s and 70s parameters, Nathans’s book presents what is likely the most comprehensive and accessible analysis of Soviet dissidence in English.
In accordance with its focus on the ‘rights-defenders’ (pravozashchitniki), as some preferred to be known, Nathans’s account begins after de-Stalinization (‘the Thaw’) swept through broad segments of Soviet society in the wake of Khrushchev’s report to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in 1956. The human rights movement was both a symptom of the Thaw—testing the limits of the new dispensation ushered in by the repudiation of Stalinist terror—and to a large extent a reaction to its defeat, as hopes of social and political transformation gave way to a struggle for personal dignity and inner freedom. Nathans briefly sketches this political context but it serves chiefly as background to his central interest, the emergence of dissident subjectivity with its distinctive ethos; the biographical trajectories of individual activists occupy a prominent place in the book.
It opens with a portrait of the intellectual progenitor of the movement, Alexander Volpin, ‘an eccentric mathematician’ and ‘bookish Muscovite’, imprisoned and exiled during the Stalin era. Volpin’s central idea was that ‘Soviet law should be taken seriously’, as Nathans puts it, and this legalistic strategy became foundational to the movement, which was based on highlighting the fundamental contradiction between the letter of the law and the practice of state power in Soviet society. The Constitution of the ussr, enacted under Stalin in 1936 and in effect until the late 1970s, formally ranked among the most democratic of its time. It proclaimed fundamental civil liberties, such as freedom of speech and assembly, and the right to privacy; it recognized the right of every national republic to secede; it affirmed the authority of the Soviets, elected by universal secret ballot; and it did not acknowledge the ruling party as the source of political decision-making power. The critique of the disjunction between these declared principles and the reality of a hyper-centralized bureaucratic dictatorship lay at the heart of the ‘counter-intuitive’ strategy of ‘civil obedience’ proposed by Volpin. Inspired by the ideas of the early Wittgenstein among other Western thinkers whose work was beginning to enter the ussr, Volpin, Nathans notes, ‘approached rights and the rule of law not through classic liberal ideas of contract and self-interest, with the right to private property at their core, but through ideal language philosophy and the “exact methods” of cybernetics.’
Nathans’s story begins in earnest in 1965, when Volpin and several others organized a public rally in Moscow’s Pushkin Square in response to the arrest of the young writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, who had been publishing under pseudonyms abroad. Volpin saw an opportunity to issue a ‘manifesto of our rights’, proposing a ‘glasnost (transparency) meeting’, making a simple demand: ‘that the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel be open to the public as per the Soviet Constitution’. The ‘Civic Appeal’ Volpin helped to draft would become, Nathans notes, ‘the founding document of the Soviet dissident movement’. During the protest, ‘Volpin silently unfurled a homemade banner stowed under his coat: “Respect the Constitution (the Fundamental Law) of the ussr!”’—a slogan that was soon widely adopted. The first such protest in the ussr since the 1920s, when supporters of the Left Opposition held an alternative demonstration to commemorate the anniversary of the revolution, ‘the transparency meeting sent shock waves through Moscow and beyond’, Nathans writes, broadcast to millions of listeners on Western shortwave services such as the bbc and Voice of America.