To the people of the Soviet Union they were known as iakomysliashchie (people who think differently); in the west they were called “dissidents.” The bane of the communist regime and the darlings of western journalists, human rights activists, and governments, they were hardly known in the vastness of their own country and were much more influential in the west, where they found “their most receptive audience and source of support” (15). Their founding idea, first formulated by the eccentric mathematician Aleksandr Volpin, was that Soviet people should insist on their legal rights as stipulated in the 1936 Constitution and other Soviet legislation. Challenging a tyrannical government, the dissidents demanded that the state live up to its own principles of equality, justice, and protection of civil and human rights. Refusing to conform or acknowledge the state’s right to prevent him from writing and speaking, the author of the strategy of legalism, Volpin, suffered incarceration in prison, four stays in mental hospitals, exile abroad, and public vilification as “scum,” “sick,” a slanderer of the Soviet system, and an ungrateful traitor to the USSR, “which gave him everything in life” (41).

What made the dissident movement possible was the death of Iosif Stalin in 1953, the subsequent cultural “Thaw,” Nikita Khrushchev’s not very secret speech in 1956 denouncing the crimes of Stalin, and the end of arbitrary state terror and the dismantling of the Gulag that had been fundamental to the Stalinist system. The heirs of Stalin were determined to reform, at least in part, and shift from coercion to persuasion. The regime, now a predictable police state, no longer arrested people for nothing; there was a resuscitation of “socialist legality.” Indicative of the times, though not referenced in this work, when masses of people openly demonstrated in Erevan, the capital of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, on the centennial of the 1915 Genocide, demanding lost lands across the border in Turkey, the only repercussions were dismissal of party officials who had failed to prevent such manifestations. A year later the Armenians repeated their protests.

The late Soviet KGB, distinctively different from the Stalinist NKVD in its soft approach to the dissidents, had been defanged but still had teeth strong enough to send the recalcitrant to prison, exile, psychiatric hospitals, or forced emigration abroad. In hundreds of thousands of “prophylactic conversations,” policemen attempted to persuade those called in to give up their oppositional activities. When they failed, they punished those they could not tame. In February 1974, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel prize winning novelist and compiler of The Gulag Archipelago, was summarily, against his will, expelled from the Soviet Union. He had prophetically proclaimed that “For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.”Footnote ¹ The first government of the Soviet Union feared his influence within the country they ruled.

The personal costs for dissent were great but less inevitably fatal as in the Stalin years, and brave idealists able to withstand the isolation and punishment were willing to take the risks. Rather than isolated individual insubordinations, dissidence as a movement began after the arrest in 1965 of two writers, Andrei Siniavskii and Iulii Daniel, who had dared to send their works abroad for publication. As a graduate student on the cultural exchange between the USSR and the US, I had arrived in Moscow the same month as their arrest and remember the shock experienced among my cohort in the Moscow State University dormitory in Lenin Hills when we learned of their detention months later and of their trial and imprisonment. I was equally shocked when a close Soviet friend, a brilliant student of physics, told me that he thought they should be shot as traitors. Even a relatively liberal literary giant, the popular poet Aleksandr Tvardovskii, who opposed harsh punishment, confided to his diary that Siniavskii “deserves contempt and social ostracism” (102). Belief in the Soviet system and its historical role was still widespread and deep, though the early signs of decay would appear as the dissident movement and the inertia of Soviet development persisted. The intelligentsia would later defect, but in the mid-1960s intellectuals still hoped for reform in a generally liberal direction.

Within the Soviet Union friendship mattered more than politics, and people who knew dissident writers like Siniavskii and Daniel wrote letters and prepared petitions to win their freedom. “Soviet society,” writes Benjamin Nathans, the author of this mammoth and magnificent account of the movement, “was a loose assemblage of such face-to-face communities, whose strong internal bonds were both cause and effect of the weakness of broader social trust” (78). Volpin, who did not know Siniavskii and Daniel personally, organized what he called a “transparency meeting” on December 5, 1965, Soviet Constitution Day, to call for an open trial of the writers, as allowed by that infrequently enforced document. The KGB quickly dispersed the friends as well as strangers who gathered for the demonstration and arrested a few, among them Volpin. “The transparency meeting,” Nathans argues, was part of the process whereby social trust hesitantly emerged from the fearful shadows of Stalinism” (97).

In a time marked by uncertainty, fears were rampant that there might be a new frost, a return to the repressions of the Stalin years. The KGB worried about an erosion of “political fighting spirit, and class instinct, or simply, a political dissoluteness among a certain portion of the intelligentsia and above all the creative intelligentsia” (54). Daniel’s response to his police interrogator that his work was anti-Soviet was, “I wrote my works not against the Soviet system, but against violations of the Soviet system” (61). Interrogators and reviewers pointed out that in the west their works were received as bitterly, fiercely anti-Soviet. In the context of the Cold War, policemen and western pundits and politicians considered only two acceptable choices: pro-Soviet or anti-communist.

The Soviet state, like earlier Russian states, was a service state, that is, the people were obligated in one form or another to serve the state, either through military, civil, or labor. The post-Stalin state was, in Nathans’ clever phrase, a “lip-service state,” in which courageous people, who thought of themselves as loyal Soviet citizens—that is, people who possessed the right to have rights–were, more accurately, subjects–people who did not in practice have such rights. The state carried out a kind of lawfare against the dissidents, finding them guilty even before the sham trials that only confirmed what the state desired. The motto of the rulers was “Don’t touch us, and we won’t touch you” (307). Law was about order, not the rule of law.

An oppositional internationalism developed among the arrested and convicted in labor camps where legalists met religious defenders of their faith, Zionists, Russian nationalists, and advocates for the rights of other nationalities. Their inspiration was varied. They had all read about the heroic oppositionists to tsarism in their school textbooks. Many began with Marxism or Leninism and then moved on to civic and human rights. Religion and nationalism were also in the mix. The physicist “Father of the Soviet H-Bomb,” Andrei Sakharov, started out as “deeply socialist,” but, as Nathans muses, “Every orthodoxy houses the seeds of its own potential disruption, and Soviet socialism was no exception” (277). By protesting and accepting their punishment, as with the eight who demonstrated on August 25, 1968 on Red Square against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, these individuals became citizens if only for fifteen minutes. Their movement was a bulwark against the feared return to a dark past. As Sakharov put it, Soviet society had “started out on the path of self-cleansing from the foulness of ‘Stalinism.’ Drop by drop, we are squeezing the slave out of us” (288).

As courageous and idealistic as the dissidents were, their moral crusade did not reach masses of Soviet people. Indeed, they tended to be condescending, dismissive, even hostile to ordinary people. Jews were heavily represented among the dissidents, Russified intellectuals who had little to do with the refusnik movement of Jews who wanted to emigrate from the Soviet Union. Dissidents were “alone together,” in Yelena Bonner’s words, “foreigners at home” (523, 543). The audience for this loose, leaderless movement was primarily abroad, which they referred to as the “Global Public.” Their books and pamphlets, unavailable in their own country except in self-published samizdat, sold well in the international market, and to the dismay of the KGB it was in the west where they contributed most to the discrediting of the Soviet system, supplementing what the Soviets themselves were massively doing by prosecuting dissidents. One Central Committee member wondered, “How much longer will we keep shitting in our own pockets?” (396). A famous writer confided to his diary that his country was ruled by “our idiots” (672, fn 65).

Nathan’s story is of the small group of rights defenders told with sad sympathy for their hopeless cause, their brave example, and their futile efforts within their own country. His research is prodigious, his writing beautifully fluent and evocative. This is a triumph of post-Soviet, post-Cold War scholarship, in no way polemical: it explains rather than indicts. Within a system that knew not how to overcome its own limitations and undermined its own achievements by its unwillingness to realize its own stated ambitions and obey its own laws, cracks opened up through which dissidents revealed what might have been if aging leaders had had the courage to trust their own people. But, then, the dissidents also did not trust their own people.