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.