Review: Christian Caryl on the Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
There may be barely a trace of anti-Soviet dissidence in its birthplace, Moscow, but does its influence linger?
As I was wandering around downtown Kyiv during a recent visit, I happened across a small museum devoted to the Ukrainian human rights activists of the 1960s. The most striking exhibit in the place turned out to be the former office of the famous nationalist leader Vyacheslav Chornovil, who agitated for Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union at a moment in history when this seemed like a utopian goal. The room is filled with display cases of artifacts and documents charting his progress through Soviet prisons and labor camps right up into the 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms finally allowed the airing of once-taboo subjects—such as sovereignty for the ethnically defined republics that made up the USSR. Today’s democratic Ukrainian state regards him as one of its founding fathers.
Ukraine isn’t the only place on the old Soviet imperial periphery where pro-democracy activists left a lasting imprint. The three Baltic republics are now liberal democracies firmly ensconced in the European Union; Georgia and Moldova, although they struggle to maintain their democratic institutions, aspire to join the Western democracies. It all seems rather ironic, considering that the Soviet human rights movement was centered in Moscow. All of its most prominent activists lived there; so, too, did the foreign press corps that made their dissident activities known to the world. Yet today there is no museum there telling the movement’s story to Russian citizens. There were once several, but Vladimir Putin’s government has shut them all down.
However embattled the legacy of the Soviet human rights movement in the 1960s and 70s may be, its story is worth telling—and Benjamin Nathans does a marvelous job of it in his new book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause. As Nathans explains, the years following the death of Stalin in 1953 saw a gradual but palpable shift in the way the Soviet state ruled its citizens. While the government of Nikita Khrushchev zealously maintained the Communist Party’s monopoly on power, it also did away with the mass terror of the Stalin years. The so-called “thaw” raised hopes among the recently terrorized population that the Soviet regime was actually capable of reform—a yearning that ran smack into the Party’s extreme suspicion of any form of independent thought.
One member of the new generation, an eccentric mathematician and poet by the name of Alexander Esenin-Volpin, whose contrariness had attracted the attention of authorities, suggested that would-be reformers operate according to a simple insight: the key to fighting for human rights in the Soviet Union, he argued, was to take its own laws seriously. In 1965 he was able to rouse a group of Moscow intellectuals otherwise wary of defying the state to a “Transparency Meeting,” proclaiming the slogan “Respect the Constitution (the Fundamental Law) of the USSR!” An early participant in the group, Andrei Amalrik, who later gained worldwide fame for his book Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984, wrote of these early dissidents, “in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.” These activists, who came to be known as the “Sixtiers” (Shestidesyatniki), would influence subsequent cohorts of those agitating for greater freedom.
On the face of things, this approach wasn’t quite as quixotic as it sounded. On paper, the Soviet constitution in effect at the time made a great show of democratic principles. It guaranteed freedom of speech and assembly, free and fair elections, and even—as Chornovil and other nationalist leaders never tired of pointing out—expansive self-determination for the USSR’s myriad ethnic groups. Yet the Transparency Meeting and other attempts by the new dissidents to assert their faith in Soviet law triggered a harsh response from the Politburo and the KGB, which cracked down hard. Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, two writers put on trial for the crime of “anti-Soviet agitation,” ended up serving years in the Gulag for the sin of crafting absurdist fiction. The handful of activists who took to Red Square to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 all met with harsh penalties. “The Bolsheviks had never accepted the concept of loyal opposition,” Nathans writes. Though the post-Khrushchev leadership of the USSR never fully reverted to Stalin’s methods, he notes, by the end of the 1970s those who advocated for change were dead, imprisoned, or in exile.
The Communist Party’s fanatical defensiveness seems even stranger when you consider that the dissident movement in the entire USSR, with its population of 250 million, probably never surpassed more than a few hundred people. Indeed, the movement’s own members were often forced to acknowledge how little their efforts seemed to resonate with most of the Soviet population. Nathans shrewdly concludes the practice of samizdat, literally “self-publishing,” in which a far-flung, decentralized network of volunteers laboriously hand-copied and disseminated forbidden texts, had vastly greater reach than organized opposition to the state. Western-sponsored radio stations that beamed content into the USSR, such as the Voice of America, amplified the texts by reading them aloud to millions of listeners. “No text could count as definitively suppressed so long as a single copy remained at large,” Nathans writes. “In contrast to the Internet, there were no central platforms or servers from which the dissemination of texts could be blocked. Every typewriter was a virtual private network.”
Most of the dissidents never intended to challenge the Party’s fundamental right to rule. They saw themselves as good Soviet citizens who preferred the communist system to the depredations of predatory capitalism (which, actually, none of them had experienced in person). Their well-intentioned Western supporters tended not to notice what the activists were really on about, typecasting them as “freedom fighters” even as their Russian friends insisted they were just pushing reform of the existing system. “All that matters [to them] is whether that murderous regime is obeying its own lying laws,” snarled Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who never really fit into the movement. To him, the dissidents, with their Western-style insistence on rights and a rules-based order, failed to locate the evil where it lay, in Marxism-Leninism itself.
So why look back at this threadbare movement whose case for honest government never took hold? Nathans, who renders a suitably sober verdict about their real-world achievements, nonetheless credits them with setting a powerful precedent. They had succeeded in showing—precisely from their loyalist perspective—that authoritarian regimes didn’t practice what they preached; the progressive ideals that the apparatchikscodified on paper bore little relationship to the actual practice of its dictatorial leaders. The next generation of resistance to Soviet rule would exploit this gap with the help of the Helsinki Accords of 1975, which were signed by communist leaders who evidently didn’t notice that they were pledging to uphold the noble promises enshrined in their constitutions. Vaclav Havel, Adam Michnik, and other rising leaders subsequently used this point to aggravate an ultimately fatal crisis of legitimacy for the Soviet-sponsored governments of the Warsaw Pact. The most famous personality of the human rights movement inside Russia, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Andrei Sakharov, returned from internal exile to new prominence in the 1980s, when he became the most visible pro-democracy critic of Mikhail Gorbachev.
It is striking that the late Aleksei Navalny, who for a time was seen as the great hope of the opposition to Putin, rejected the label of “dissident” as a self-descriptor. He aimed to depict himself as a pragmatic man of action rather than one of those ineffectual 1970s intellectuals who never quite found a way into the hearts of the masses. (One could argue, perhaps, that his own emphasis on corruption was itself a twist on the dissidents’ calling out of elites for breaking their own rules.) Justified or not, his scorn reflected a fundamental truth: within Russia the legacy of these intrepid souls is gradually fading into oblivion. One can’t help recalling the Gospel of Luke: “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown.” Let’s hope—for the sake of Russia and its neighbors—that these voices will once again be heard, and that remembering their stories might help clear the way.
Christian Caryl is the author of Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century. He has worked as an Opinions editor at The Washington Post and an editor and columnist at Foreign Policy. He was stationed in Moscow from 1997 to 2004, where he was bureau chief of Newsweek from 2000 to 2004. He is working on a biography of the journalist Gitta Sereny. He has written for Book Post on Colin Thubron, Werner Herzog, Jósef Czapski, Edward Gorey, and a dystopian novel on North Korean armageddon, among other subjects.
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