Soviet Dissent, or Dissent in Soviet Russia?

Nathans Benjamin. To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024. xiv + 797 pp. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-6911-1703-4. Current trends in Russia include downplaying the crimes of Stalin and human rights abuses in the Soviet Union after his death, celebrating the role of the security services in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, and increasing restrictions on civil liberties. The term “dissident” in present-day Russia thus rarely refers to Soviet dissidents, but rather to individuals such as the late Alexei Navalny or others harassed, and often arrested and imprisoned, because of their criticism of, or opposition to, the political regime headed by President Vladimir Putin and his associates. It is not surprising that memories of the Soviet dissident phenomenon have faded in Russia. The dissidents of Soviet Russia have passed away or are elderly, and their modest legacy is of little interest to Western students of present-day Russia or, for that matter, to most of its population. Few dissidents from the Soviet period had a significant impact on political developments in post-Soviet Russia, and if they are remembered it is often as eccentric figures somewhat detached from reality. As a result, the theme of dissent in the Soviet Union is not currently a popular one in Russia or the West, and few interesting and insightful books or articles about dissent in Soviet Russia have been published in the last few years. Recent publications on this topic tend to focus on specific aspects of dissent or individual dissidents, or they are highly descriptive.1 No meaningful efforts have been made to provide new, original treatments of the dissident phenomenon in Soviet Russia. This neglect is unfortunate, since the Soviet dissidents included a great variety of fascinating individuals. Their activities represented a partial rebirth of civil society and of public opposition (even if it was limited) to the powers that be, and the Soviet dissidents became a significant focus of Cold War politics. A work such as the one under review is thus very welcome. Benjamin Nathans’s book provides a detailed and comprehensive overview of the backgrounds, activities, and significance of the Soviet dissidents, with a heavy emphasis on Soviet Russia and Moscow in particular. No one has studied and analyzed the Moscow dissident milieu in as much detail as Nathans, and he provides important insights into the origins of this milieu (with a focus on the somewhat eccentric figure of Alexander Volpin), the motivations and strategies of its major actors as well as their successes and failures, and their complicated interrelationships. For example, he devotes considerable attention to controversial figures such as Victor Krasin and Petr Yakir, how they were broken by the KGB, and how their behavior demoralized other dissidents. He also discusses dissident relations with the KGB and the dominant political authorities in the CPSU, the place of the dissidents in Soviet society, and how the outside world, including organizations such as Amnesty International, viewed and interacted with the dissidents. The only interesting topic he neglects is the experience and behavior of the dissidents who were imprisoned after they were arrested and sentenced for their activities, although considerable attention is devoted to those who were forcibly detained in psychiatric institutions. Nathans’s book was clearly a labor of love, involving exhaustive research using a wide variety of written sources as well as extensive use of archival materials, and although Nathans is critical of some aspects of their activities, he treats Soviet Russia’s dissidents with the respect and empathy they deserve. As for his heavy focus on the Moscow dissident community, this is easy to justify. Moscow’s status as the highly privileged capital of the Soviet Union led to a heavy concentration of governmental and educational institutions in this city, which generated numerous dissident activists and provided a large potential audience for their activities. In addition, the presence of Western embassies and journalists in Moscow facilitated publicizing dissident activities in the West. As discussed below in more detail, however, Nathans’s discussion of developments outside of Moscow is deficient. But who exactly were the Soviet dissidents, the focus of this book? Most attempts to define Soviet dissidents are fairly broad, characterizing them as individuals who engaged in nonconformist civil, cultural, academic, religious, national, political, or socioeconomic activities that involved open, public, and nonviolent insubordination toward to the authoritarian communist system, as well as the defense of the rights of others or the exercise of one’s own rights.2 I will adhere to this broad definition in this review. For the purposes of his book Nathans uses a more succinct definition: “those who conducted protests publicly in defense of civil and human rights” (p. 15). He does not, however, provide a more detailed discussion of definitions or the methodology behind his research, and this leads to certain ambiguities. Some definitions of the term “human rights,” for example, would include religious, linguistic, cultural, socioeconomic, and other collective rights. In the course of his book, however, Nathans makes it clear that his focus is on those who defended individual rather than collective rights, and who adopted a legalistic approach emphasizing adherence to the letter of the Soviet Constitution. Restricting the scope of the book in some fashion is understandable, since Nathans’s focus on dissident circles in Moscow has already resulted in a long, detailed work. But an emphasis on this dichotomy—the difference between individual and collective rights—not only hampers an understanding of the great diversity of Soviet dissent in the broad sense of the term, but is also misleading. It fails to take into consideration, for example, those individuals who were strongly committed to both a collective and individual rights agenda. A notable example is Gleb Iakunin, a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church and a defender of religious rights. Iakunin was a strong supporter of individual/human rights and the principle of freedom of conscience, an active member of the Moscow Helsinki Monitoring group, and a political activist (he was a deputy in the post-Soviet Duma in the first half of the 1990s).3 Problems also arise when Nathans ventures beyond Soviet Russia. Nathans’s book is an excellent case study of the activities and impact of Soviet dissidents in Russia, Moscow in particular, and his generalizations about this category of dissidents are thoughtful and judicious. There would be little to criticize if Nathans had not decided to devote some attention to developments outside of Russia. He thus conducted some research for his book in Lithuania, and includes a separate chapter (chap. 18 – “Rights-Defenders among the Nations”) dealing with dissent among non-Russians in the Soviet Union. His cursory treatment of this complex issue, however, raises numerous questions. Nathans portrays most national rights activists as heavily preoccupied with issues of language and culture, and quotes Russian dissident Lyudmila Alexeyeva’s patronizing (and incorrect) generalization that Ukrainian activists were interested in “the defense of only one right—the right of equality on the basis of nationality” (p. 516). And when he was asked, during a presentation about his book, why he devoted so little attention to national and religious rights activists, Nathans replied that he was interested in those who sought to reform the Soviet Union, and intentionally did not discuss those who, “without exception [?], were not interested in reforming the Soviet state.”4 Here the case of Ukraine, which had a large and active dissident community, provides an important corrective to Nathans’s treatment of Soviet dissent. The mainstream dissidents in Soviet Ukraine were hardly stereotypical nationalists who focused almost exclusively on language/cultural issues and were committed to the collapse of the Soviet Union. And although Ukraine lacked a prominent civil rights promoter such as Volpin, in some respects the evolution of a dissident movement in Soviet Ukraine paralleled developments in Moscow. Thus, after the death of Stalin, in their activities a majority of the leading dissidents in Soviet Ukraine, like the Moscow dissidents, adhered to a legalistic approach, calling upon the state to fully observe the norms of Soviet (“Marxist-Leninist”) legality, and ensure greater intellectual freedom as well as greater autonomy for Ukraine within the Soviet Union. The case of Ivan Dziuba is instructive. This dissident’s well-known book, Internationalism or Russification, written in 1965, engaged in a neo-Marxist critique of Soviet nationalities policies (he copiously referred to V. I. Lenin throughout his text), and argued for a more autonomous Ukraine within a reformed Soviet Union. Dziuba’s text, and similarly Vyacheslav Chornovil’s important book-length condemnation of the repression and trials of Ukrainian dissidents in the mid-1960s (published in English in 1968 as The Chornovil Papers), were both addressed to various official bodies in the hope that they might influence moderate elements within the communist party establishment of Soviet Ukraine. They clearly reflected a reformist mindset. And although most of Ukraine’s dissidents were strongly committed to the defense of the Ukrainian language and culture, they were by no means narrow-minded individuals. Most (including leading figures such as Chornovil, Dziuba, Ivan Svitlychny, Yevhen Sverstiuk, Mykola Rudenko, and so on) disliked being identified as nationalists, strongly criticized all forms of xenophobia and intolerance (including anti-Semitism), and espoused social-democratic or national-democratic views. Some Ukrainian dissidents (for example, Valentyn Moroz) could be regarded as typical nationalists, but such individuals were in a definite minority in Ukraine’s dissident community. True, initially Ukraine’s dissidents had limited knowledge of the theory and practice of human rights in their non-Soviet interpretation, not surprising given the isolation of Ukraine from the outside world. Harsh state repression, however, quickly politicized them and led to a growing awareness of the importance of civil/human rights. Furthermore, from the mid-1960s onward Ukraine’s dissidents began to increasingly cooperate with dissidents in Moscow, who had greater access to information from the West, and this contributed to changes in the views and tactics of the former. Some small groups in western Ukraine tried to create, usually unsuccessfully, clandestine organizations similar to those found in this region during the early post-World War II period, but Ukraine’s mainstream dissidents placed an increasing emphasis on public protests, the preparation of samizdat (samvydav in Ukrainian) materials publicizing state repression, and fostering ties with prominent figures who sympathized with some of their demands but were reluctant to openly support them. A significant example of this public activity was the creation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Monitoring Group (UHMG) in 1976, soon after the creation of a similar group in Moscow. The decision to create the UHMG was a difficult one, since in view of the highly repressive environment prevailing in Soviet Ukraine, membership in the UHMG meant almost instant arrest and imprisonment. Ukraine’s dissidents were typically sentenced to significantly longer periods of imprisonment than their dissident colleagues in Russia, and two members of the UHMG, Vasyl' Stus and Oleksa Tykhy, died while imprisoned. An examination of the case of Soviet Ukraine also contributes to a better understanding of the broader political significance of the dissident phenomenon. As soon as political circumstances allowed, Ukraine’s dissidents played a notable role in spearheading the national front (Rukh) movement which played a major role in promoting political and socioeconomic changes in Ukraine in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In spite of difficult conditions for campaigning (for example, limited access to the mass media), two former dissidents (Chornovil and Levko Lukianenko) came in second and third in the first democratic presidential elections in Ukraine in December 1991, and former dissidents (including dissident veterans such as Chornovil, Lukianenko, the Horyn' brothers Bohdan and Mykhailo, Les' Taniuk, Genrykh Altunian, and Iryna Stasiv-Kalynets', to name a few) constituted the core of a pro-reform lobby in Ukraine’s parliament (Verkhovna Rada) during the 1990s. The role of these former dissidents soon faded, and many local observers were disappointed that former dissidents did not play a more meaningful role in post-Soviet Ukraine, but they clearly played a more significant role than former dissidents in Russia. Developments outside of Russia also throw valuable light on the legacy of the Soviet dissidents. The dissidents of Soviet Russia are now largely forgotten, and efforts to honor their memory have run into official opposition. At the end of 2021 Memorial, Russia’s oldest and largest human rights organization, which did a great deal to document the history of dissent in the Soviet Union, was formally ordered to be “liquidated” by Russia’s Supreme Court, although it continues to operate informally. And “Perm-36,” a Russian NGO which ran a museum dedicated to one of the most notorious prison camps still operating in the 1980s, has been turned into a loyal, pro-regime institution that now avoids mentioning the dissidents once held there. The dissidents of Soviet Ukraine, in contrast, remain important symbols of civil society in present-day Ukraine, and their symbolic significance has grown as a result of Ukraine’s confrontation with Russia. In 2024 alone, two films with a dissident theme were released in Ukraine.5 Vasyl' Stus has become a cult figure of sorts: the soundtrack of the popular video game “S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl” includes four songs inspired by the poetry of this Ukrainian poet and dissident.6 Numerous documentaries and books about the dissidents of Soviet Ukraine have appeared in recent years, and Ukraine’s most important and active human rights organization, the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, has devoted considerable attention to collecting and publicizing information about the dissidents of Soviet Ukraine.7 This is not to say that Nathans should have tried, in his already lengthy book, to discuss the complex issue of dissent in Soviet Ukraine, which had a large and diverse dissident community. Nathans, however, does not clearly explain that his book is primarily a case study of a subset of dissent centered in Moscow. And since he also tries to briefly touch on dissent outside of Russia, readers may consider that the generalizations he makes apply to the entire Soviet Union. As I have argued above, this is not the case. Nathans provides an excellent account, with many valuable insights, of the activities and importance of a significant segment of the dissident community in Soviet Russia. Readers should be aware, however, of the book’s limitations.