When Soviet Dissidents Disappoint

To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans, Princeton University Press, 816 pages, August 2024

Professor Benjamin Nathans thinks Soviet-era dissidents don’t get enough respect in modern Russia. A 2013 Levada poll found that fewer than one in five Russians could name “any dissidents from the late Soviet era,” according to Nathans’s new book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement. The word “late” presumably excludes mid-century dissidents like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose works are studied in the standard Russian school curriculum. A Russian textbook from 2023 implies that “so-called dissidents” were tools of the CIA: “The West ‘took good care of them’ … and therefore their activities were closely watched by the organs of state security.”

But what exactly about the Soviet dissident movement should be celebrated? There are two ways a dissident movement can be a success: Either it brings down the regime, or it serves as a remnant preserving noble ideals for a better day, in the meantime offering a moral example and a trenchant critique of the system.

The Soviet dissidents were obviously a failure in the first sense. Nothing they did brought the demise of the Soviet empire closer by a single day. The USSR collapsed from its own economic dysfunction. To the extent that widespread disillusionment played a role, the dissidents did nothing to instigate or even guide it. They were too isolated from the population. One of the themes emphasized by Nathans is that the dissident movement was confined almost entirely to the elite and specifically the intelligentsia. Nearly half of the signatories of one anti-government petition from 1968 were employed in higher education.

The attitude of the Russian man on the street to the dissident movement can be guessed from an exchange quoted by Nathans between Valeria Gerlin, a schoolteacher who lost her job for signing a petition in support of four writers on trial for anti-Soviet agitation, and her school board director. Gerlin said she was exercising her rights as a citizen. Her boss replied:

Who among us never has grievances against Soviet power? It happens with everyone. This person didn’t get an apartment, that person wasn’t paid a bonus, and so on. Everyone has some issue. But what do we do? Well, we come home, we grumble a little in the kitchen, but that’s it. We take our grievance no further than the kitchen. But she—she writes it up!

Interestingly, Gerlin was a child of the Soviet aristocracy. Her father was a high-ranking NKVD official with an apartment on Lubyanka Square. This kind of background pops up frequently in Nathans’s cast of characters. The most prominent female dissident, Larisa Bogoraz, had an uncle in the NKVD and her parents were professors. Other dissidents included the descendants of Litvinov and Sverldlov, as well as lesser known Bolsheviks like the Red Army hero Yona Yakir. 

There are several possible explanations for this genealogical connection. Perhaps the luxury of dissent is only possible for those who enjoy a certain level of privilege. Or perhaps these men and women were simply carrying on the family tradition. Nathans notes that dissidents were “part of a generation that became the first adults in history who were not immigrants to socialism (voluntary or otherwise), but native born, the first indigenous speakers of its language.” They did the same thing their parents and grandparents had done, just to a different regime. Bogoraz made the connection explicit between her prominent communist family and her career as a dissenter: “Public activism was apparently in my blood. There was a feeling of being connected to society, of responsibility for what was happening in society.”

If that is the case, then the dissidents were not opponents of revolutionary communism but its true heirs, literally and figuratively. 

Certainly there was an ideological resemblance. With few exceptions, the dissidents in Nathans’s book were all socialists. None of them criticized the Soviet regime from the position of free-market capitalism. They were very poor analysts of the problems that made the USSR unsustainable, namely its economic pathologies. The rights that most interested them were the free speech rights of the intelligentsia or the freedom to emigrate. They cared far less about the daily humiliations to which ordinary Russians were subject. The populist conservatism of Solzhenitsyn was an outlier; the vast majority of dissidents were typical urban liberals.

The true priorities of the dissident movement can be gleaned from the kinds of activism these individuals pursued after communism fell. The flowering of NGOs that occurred in Russia in the 1990s took direct inspiration from, and involved many of the same people as, the dissident movement. These NGOs focused on liberal issues familiar to their Western counterparts: women’s rights, gay rights, domestic violence, free speech, the rights of criminal defendants, the rights of ethnic minorities and refugees, the right to refuse military conscription. 

Not coincidentally, they drew most of their funding from Western sources, including foundations such as the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundation, as well as outgrowths of the U.S. government such as USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy. Here may be a good place to mention that the KGB was, in fact, correct to accuse the Soviet-era dissident movement of having extensive links to the CIA.

Eventually Vladimir Putin cracked down on these NGOs, starting around 2006. His objections were, first, that they received foreign funding and colluded with foreign intelligence services (there was a famous instance when the British embassy’s human rights liaison was caught using a fake stone in a park as a transmitter) and also that these groups used “human rights” as a cover for interfering in politics, usually in alignment with Western priorities. Putin, like his KGB predecessors, saw an uncanny convergence between the foreign policy interests of America and the issues that Moscow liberals pursued, such as opposition to the Chechen war.

Veterans of the NGO movement look back on the 1990s as a golden age, a nostalgia that is extremely revealing. Apparently, if you want to picture a world where the dissident movement came to power, it would look a lot like the Yeltsin era: maximum political and social freedom for urban liberals; maximum economic freedom for international corporations and their Russian oligarch allies; for ordinary Russians, poverty, exploitation, humiliation, and the erosion of national independence. The vast majority of Russians remember the Yeltsin years as a nadir.

The USSR was an ugly regime, so it is tempting to assume that the Russians in opposition to it must have been right. Yet judging from Nathans’ 800-page history, the dissidents were not very acute in their diagnosis of what exactly made the USSR ugly. One can oppose communism and still find little merit in the dissidents’ liberalism, just as one can dislike the Putin government and still find very little merit in the critique of it offered by the performance artists Pussy Riot.