Review: Opposing authoritarianism
Benjamin Nathans’s history of the Soviet dissident movement has important lessons for today.
It’s a reflection of the precarious position prominent Russian exiles occupy today—leaders in the political opposition, civil society, academia—that meetings typically take place in quasi-secrecy, even those convened in Western capitals by government agencies and major foundations where attendance is by invitation only and meetings are held off-record.
Concern about Kremlin infiltration is only one reason. Hostility among the general public, another: There’s little sympathy for Russians in Europe and the United States these days, certainly less than ordinary Soviets received during the Cold War. Even some of President Vladimir Putin’s earliest, most implacable critics have been caught up in collective blame for having failed to topple him and fleeing the country instead.
Never mind the fate of those who stayed to fight. Many have been killed—poisoned, shot or tortured to death in one or another sadistic way—over the quarter-century of Putin’s rule. Many more are languishing in prison, until recently including the eloquent opposition leader Vladimir Kara-Murza, who survived two near-fatal poisonings before returning to Moscow from his home in Washington to criticize Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He was freed from a 25-year prison sentence in a prisoner exchange last year.
In Putin’s neo-Soviet pastiche state, Russians are more-or-less free to travel abroad, unlike during the Cold War. They may own property and private businesses, and buy foreign goods in a country that—aside from pilfered Communist Party rhetoric and imagery—is closer to a nativist fascist state. But the inexorably mounting political repression of its Mafia-like regime exceeds the USSR’s of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. The climate of fear stoked by today’s arbitrary, draconian punishments—with students once again snitching on teachers, alleging treason—is modeled on earlier Stalin-era terror.
With the Kremlin justifying its authoritarianism by destroying Ukraine, undermining Western elections and otherwise confronting liberal democracies in this highly consequential year for global developments—now aided by the White House’s charge to dismantle the US-led post-war order—is Putinism finally here to stay? Among the questions, especially from their remaining Western sponsors, is how much sway the opposition and independent media in exile have with the public back home. Is there any real hope they can encourage a repeat of the late 1980s, when many Soviets rejected Communist Party rule ahead of its collapse in 1991?
In this review:
To the Success of our Hopeless Cause:
The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
Princeton University Press, 2024
by Benjamin Nathans
So the awarding of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction to a new history of the Soviet dissident movement couldn’t be more timely. A sweeping feat of scholarship by the University of Pennsylvania historian Benjamin Nathans, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton University Press)—its evocative title taken from a common toast among Soviet dissidents—provides rich material for comparison. How did they go about opposing authoritarian rule in their day, what gave rise to their ideas, how were they received at home, what role did the West play?
Given the many existing first-person accounts, biographies and histories about a period still in living memory, it’s an ambitious undertaking. Nathans accomplishes it by threading an intellectual history of the dissident movement into a lively narrative that brings the central characters, their internal struggles and relationships to life. A thick tome grounded in context about general Soviet and Russian history, with meticulous endnotes describing the colorful ways he obtained this or that telling document, it’s accessible to general readers and a pleasure to read.
Rather than approach his subject through the lens of Cold War rivalry, focusing on dissidents’ roles in the Soviet collapse and Russia’s short-lived 1990s democratization, Nathans explains, “I want to suggest that the story of Soviet dissent illuminates a deeper and more universal struggle between hopelessness and perseverance in the contemporary world.”
Central to his framing of the movement—which arose after Stalin’s death in 1953 ended mass terror—is the idea that the dissidents were products of the going system, their opposition “constructed largely out of ingredients taken from the Soviet world, especially from Soviet law… Every orthodoxy houses the seeds of its own potential disruption, and Soviet socialism was no exception.”
Set in motion by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of his predecessor’s crimes during his so-called Secret Speech of 1956, the USSR’s post-Stalinist second act was motivated by a desire to save the system from the totalitarian fear and violence that had consumed the Communist Party. The following years, Nathans writes, were characterized by “constant uncertainty over the boundaries of permissible behavior.” The dissidents set about probing them.
Protest did not take shape in the kind of civil disobedience championed by Thoreau, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. but what Nathans terms “civil obedience,” calling out violations of the authorities’ own stated laws. The mathematician Alexander Volpin, seen as the first post-Stalinist dissident, established the movement’s central logic of undertaking actions formally protected by Soviet law. That approach was not without its contradictions. Dissidents pursued a “curious form of liberty, one that demanded its own kind of make-believe,” Nathans writes. “They pretended that the constitution of the USSR, with its guarantees of freedom of speech and assembly, was the law of the land.”
That logic taps into an older tradition of Russian dissent according to which critics tended to direct their ire not at the going tsarist system but at individuals for failing to carry out their expected duties. It also reflects broader cultural traditions, including the longstanding suspicion of individualism in a country with a hostile climate and vast, forbidding geography, where the need to overcome great odds for survival has reinforced the importance of the collective in the public imagination. Acting alone or against the all-important leader has been seen as a threat to the group, the most viable basic human unit.
Writing was the Soviet dissidents’ main product, distributed as samizdat, or “self-published” work retyped and circulated mostly within intelligentsia circles. Those prominent or lucky enough to have work smuggled abroad found their widest reach in readings on the Voice of America and other international shortwave radio broadcasts that reached millions of secretly listening Soviet ears. Later, private rights organizations, chiefly Amnesty International, provided a conduit for some dissidents to become global figures.
Although dissidents clashed over philosophy and tactics, well-justified worry about KGB infiltration and personal relations, friendship provided the main bond connecting the movement. Depicting the development of the central cast of characters—including the writers Andrei Sinyaksky, Yuli Daniel, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Vladimir Bukovsky, physicists Andrei Sakharov and Pavel Litvinov, and linguist Larissa Borogaz, to name a few—Nathans draws on social movement theory. He describes “chain reactions,” dissidents’ own term characterizing networks coalescing around the kind of specific injustices necessary for expanding support.
Bravery, often obstinacy, were legion. Most dissidents were imprisoned, some died. One key moment followed the deeply demoralizing 1968 Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring, to which the dissidents had looked as a model for reform inside the USSR. Eight people staged a brief demonstration on Red Square to belie the propaganda that all Soviets supported the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Despite the apparent futility—some fellow dissidents criticized the protesters at the time for selfishly putting the entire movement at risk in order to clear their own consciences—it was the “most celebrated fifteen minutes in the history of the Soviet dissident movement,” Nathans writes, an important symbol of self-liberation transmitted around the world in news reports, even made the subject of a Joan Baez song.
Partly thanks to a general suspicion of hierarchy and fear of paper trails, the largely horizontal movement was slow to form organizations and call for political change. In the end, the dissident movement never achieved the aim of swaying or even reaching the majority of Soviets before fizzling out under a major crackdown in the early 1980s. Even enthusiastic readers of samizdat who privately shared dissidents’ criticism disapproved of their rocking the boat, or making them feel guilty for risking nothing themselves.
Many such critics feared a crackdown on the private freedoms that emerged in a state where lip-service loyalty increasingly replaced the real thing. The largest sphere of private activity was in the petty thievery and other widespread corruption that spread to society at large under Brezhnev, a means for the state to let off steam without enacting reform. The University of Chicago economist James Millar called that tacit social contract the “Little Deal.” When it collapsed in 1991, the Soviet Union was brought down mainly under the weight of its own inefficiency, fraud and pervasive societal cynicism.
What might history tell us about current dissidents’ prospects?
The death of its main leader Alexei Navalny in an Arctic prison last year struck the political opposition a body blow. So did the murder of the politician Boris Nemtsov, shot in the back near the Kremlin a decade ago. He was “the most remarkable human being I’ve ever known,” Kara-Murza told me. “The amazing thing was he always treated you like a human being regardless of status or position or age… he didn’t stereotype.” Both Nemtsov and Navalny rejected exile under the widespread belief it would make them irrelevant back home. But the death of the opposition’s two most charismatic speakers of truth to power has helped enforce the silence of all critical voices still outside prison in Russia.
What’s left of the opposition movement in exile, if it can be called that, is demoralized, laden with guilt for the war against Ukraine and riven by infighting. Like their Soviet predecessors, most of its members profess an aversion to formal hierarchies, saying any united organization would smack of the Soviet Politburo. Also like the Soviet dissidents, they have little hope of influencing the majority of Russians. Afraid of losing what they have under the going system, ordinary people don’t need to be instructed about what kind of country they really live in.
The chief contradiction in the first Soviet dissidents’ logic of following the rules was that the going system in Russia has almost always been informal, not least today. What outsiders see—the country’s political institutions and rhetoric—actually serve as a façade obscuring the real rules of the game along with its players. Like Soviet technological and industrial feats during the Cold War, Putin’s aggression abroad is also effective at home partly because of widespread shame over Russia’s backwardness and envy of the West, another cultural tradition.
If Russians’ rejection of their 1990s Westernizing reform in favor of a return to dictatorship may seem counterintuitive for destroying personal liberties and free speech, the resurgence of authoritarian leanings in Europe and the United States is even more incredible. The US president openly professes admiration for Putin and his form of rule; Russians, by contrast, are in much more familiar territory.
But if they had little to no influence at home, the Soviet dissidents found their biggest success in encouraging Western action. The organizations they eventually formed in the 1960s and 1970s culminated in the Moscow Helsinki Group, which helped prompt Congress to found the US Helsinki Commission, aimed at pressuring the USSR over its stated commitment to human rights.
Today’s dissidents have also been central to congressional action, even without the help of Cold War jockeying. Lobbying in Washington by the late Nemtsov and Kara-Murza was essential for enacting the Magnitsky Act—against the Obama Administration’s wishes—enabling Washington to institute sanctions against individual members of Putin’s internationally corrosive kleptocracy, and other regimes. In the global clash between authoritarianism and liberal democracy, we need to be listening to the Kremlin’s dissidents, even if behind closed doors, and supporting them.
Gregory Feifer is executive director of the Institute of Current World Affairs in Washington. A former NPR Moscow correspondent and author of Russians: The People Behind the Power, he is writing a biography of the Russian politician Boris Nemtsov.