The History of the Soviet Dissidents: Frequently Misunderstood

Why do some activists and intellectuals risk everything for the sake of a seemingly unwinnable struggle? To the dissidents of the Soviet Union, that question was so relevant that it became a famous and ironic toast. Supposedly introduced to dissident circles in the early 1970s by Naum Korzhavin, a Jewish poet radicalized by the 1966 trial of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, it went: “To the success of our hopeless cause.”

Under Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union had no lack of dissent or hopelessness, but there was nothing like a cause—at least in the sense of an organized movement. Autonomous civil and professional organizations had been systematically dismantled under Vladimir Lenin in the early 1920s, and organized opposition was rendered impossible even before the mass violence of the Great Terror in the late 1930s. But during Nikita Khrushchev’s Thaw of the mid-1950s, as the gulag was emptied and Stalin’s crimes condemned, a space also opened up for a cause, which was sparked to life after Leonid Brezhnev reversed Khrushchev’s reform communism. Even as the cause shaped the lives of thousands in the 1960s and ’70s, it was nonetheless plagued by a certain hopelessness. This was, after all, still a world in which public criticism could quickly lead to the end of one’s career, imprisonment, confinement to a psychiatric hospital, or exile.

Taking Korzhavin’s toast as its title, a new book by Benjamin Nathans dissects the history of the Soviet dissident movement from its rapid rise in the mid-1960s through its almost complete rout in 1982, just years before a second bout of reform communism, Mikhail Gorbachev鈥榮 perestroika, appropriated its key concepts of transparency (glasnost) and the rule of law. To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause sheds light on how this seemingly marginal protest movement, largely rejected by much of the society from which it sprang, nonetheless reinvented itself at key junctures and eventually to great effect. It also sheds light on the risk-takers themselves: an extraordinary cast of characters, many of whom remain largely unknown internationally.

Western journalists during the Cold War tended to focus on a handful of prominent dissidents, treating them as the leaders of a movement that saw itself as leaderless and misunderstanding them as anti-Soviet or Western-style liberals. But as Nathans shows, many of the Soviet dissidents were, in fact, instinctively anti-ideological and, beneath the surface of their opposition to Soviet hyper-politicization, strikingly diverse in their political and intellectual orientations. They demanded freedom from an overweening statism, and they demanded rights. However, the key to their outlook and unity was not any explicitly articulated loss of faith in socialism—some dissidents remained Marxists or Leninists, while others became liberals or nationalists only later—but rather that they understood the struggle for human rights as an alternative to politics: a way for individuals to escape the all-encompassing claims of an official ideology managed by the party-state. The dissidents never aimed for the overthrow of the Soviet state, and even after they turned to outright opposition, they remained shaped by the norms of Soviet society and inspired by the ideals of Soviet humanism.

If the dissident movement鈥榮 identity revolved around a shared understanding that it had no leaders, no political program, and no ideology, it did have something of a founder: Alexander Esenin-Volpin. The son of the famous lyric poet Sergei Esenin (who committed suicide in 1925), the unkempt Volpin—the unhyphenated name on his passport, as he was born out of wedlock—was an outspoken eccentric who could sometimes be seen walking the streets of postwar Moscow in his tapochki, or house slippers.

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