Barbara Martin's Dissident Histories is a fascinating exploration of the lives and works of four writers who struggled against official historiography in the Soviet Union after Stalin's death: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, Aleksandr Nekrich, and Roy Medvedev. Martin tells the stories of the writing of these authors’ principle works about Soviet history, and discusses in rich detail the readings given to them both by the party and by the intelligentsia.

Martin focuses on the way these men operated within the particular cultural apparatus constructed and supervised by the Communist Party. Her prodigious research enables her to paint vivid images of the situations that these men faced and constructed for themselves as they acted on the encouragement expressed by the Twentieth and Twenty-Second Party Congresses to investigate in more depth and without preconceptions crucial episodes in Soviet history. At the heart of their concerns were the creation of the “gulag archipelago” and Stalin's role in leading the Soviet armed forces during World War II. She shows how taking the party at their word powerfully inflected the life course of each man, how their decisions to pursue these historical blank spots and silences led to traumatic events like arrest, prison time, exile, inner emigration, and an exhausting dance with the party's censors.

We are shown in wonderful detail the intricacies of the party's ideological apparatus, which included not only the ideological supervision by the party's Central Committee, but also the readings, opinions, and judgments of Soviet academics, reviewers, and editors who managed the production of the written word in late Soviet times. We are also presented with the pathos of dissident life, with all its anxieties over personal loyalty, trust, career, and livelihood. To her credit, Martin's portrayals are not one-dimensional, but vivid and engaging; she provides meticulous descriptions of just how each writer struggled with the inheritances of family history, wartime experience, and ideological enthusiasm, to engage in what they viewed as vitally necessary truth telling. She comes to the conclusion that their significance lies less in the accuracy of their histories, than in the moral authority they acquired and displayed in writing their “dissident histories.”

Martin's choice to focus the book on the experiences and lives of these four writers leaves the reader with a number of productive questions, some of which have to do with the actual historical terrain she writes about, others of which have to do with concepts and methods. For example, throughout the book she makes reference to the “Soviet public,” and yet the book itself says almost nothing about who this public was and how they interacted with these writers’ works. We wonder, in other words, about the connection between these overlapping circles of official and dissident writers and different audiences. We also wonder about how these works might be read in connection to other modes of reflecting on the past in, for example, film and popular culture. We wonder, were these intelligentsia circles as isolated from the broader society as they appear here? A similar observation could be made about the international context that surrounded these issues. “The West” appears either as a place to escape to or someplace where their books could be published without party supervision; one surmises that in myriad ways “the West” exerted much more agency here, both practical and ideological, than Martin suggests.

This brings up another important question about the choices Martin made to tell her story. The richness of her tight focus comes at the expense of reflecting more deeply on the connection between Soviet history and historiography writ large. For example, we are given many citations of reviews and critiques of these mens’ writings, but we are rarely given actual passages that would convey their tone and sensibility. The closest Martin comes to these larger, conceptual issues is in a few passages where she almost apologizes for the content of these works by saying that the circumstances of their lives made it impossible for them to live up to standards of western historiography. This then raises the interesting question about truth-telling, history, and memoir. For the books leaves us with yet another of the paradoxes at the heart of Soviet culture. If the power of these works lies not in being better histories, but in being masterful compilations of stories, sorted fragments of written and unwritten memoirs that complicated official claims, then perhaps they are better understood as dissident myths, than dissident histories.