Judged against other world empires, the Soviet Union had a short lifespan. The communist regime did not even last a full century: only a mere sixty-nine years passed from the Russian Revolution to the dissolution of the USSR. That is one year less than the Jews’ biblical exile to Babylon. And yet, the history of some aspects of that brief existence is only now coming to light. The USSR was a notoriously closed, secretive place. My grandmother, who was born in the 1920s and lived into the early 2000s, noted late in life that silence was safest. Working on her history of the Gulag, Anne Applebaum found the same. Teasing out information was easier from written sources in archives, at last finally accessible in the late 1990s, than from talking to people who remained as tight-lipped as ever, just as likely to deny knowledge of, well, anything. Old habits, after all, die hard for those who worked hard not to die too early of unnatural causes. 

　　And now, in his new book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, historian Benjamin Nathans approaches an even more difficult task: uncovering the stories of dissidents that the Russians themselves, after the dissolution of USSR, have thought insignificant. Nathans reports a Russian colleague asking him, “Why are you wasting your time on those people?” It seems that the dissidents themselves felt at times that maybe they were wasting their time—or, at least, that they were unlikely to be successful. Thence their toast, which Nathans adopts as the book’s title: “To the success of our hopeless cause.”

　　Nathans offers an answer, nevertheless, to his skeptical colleague and his readers: We should study the dissidents because their history tells a story that is larger than just the dissidents themselves—a story larger than just the Soviet Union. It is a story of human hope and resilience in the face of evil that was at times bureaucratic and banal, other times deeply violent and murderous. Nathans writes that it is a story of the pursuit of intellectual freedom, openly expressed, as a human right: “The story of Soviet dissent illuminates a deeper and more universal struggle between hopelessness and perseverance in the contemporary world.” He surveys the rising tide of authoritarian politics threatening to engulf the modern world in technological terror, and concludes that the experiences of Soviet dissidents might teach us—the living—something about “the possibilities for public engagement under circumstances that appeared even more hopeless than our own.”

　　So what did this public engagement look like? How do you express unorthodox ideas in a repressive regime while trying to preserve at least some chance of survival? For some in the USSR, this meant writing boldly under pen names. Such was the story of literary critic and novelist Andrey Sinyavsky, who wrote damningly of the lying failures of the Soviet literary imagination for nearly a decade as Abram Tertz. His works were published abroad to much acclaim, precipitating an investigation into the author’s identity. Finally, he was arrested along with his fellow writer friend, Yuli Daniel. After a show trial behind closed doors, they were sentenced to seven and five years of hard labor respectively. The year? 1966. 

　　There is a reason Nathans begins his story with them, in the mid-1960s, rather than with the better-known and more brutal Stalinist purges of the 1930s, which cost so many writers and poets their lives. The old dissidents of the 1930s were established thinkers, in many cases, long before the Revolution took place. Their opposition to the Soviet regime came, therefore, from knowledge of what could be possible—hopes for a different sort of revolution, less totalitarian in nature, more open to free expression of ideas than under the Tsars. Not so for the younger ideologues Nathans considers. Ultimately, he sees this book as a story of “how orthodoxies generate their own heresies.” All of the dissidents he considers were, after all, Soviet people, first and foremost—born, raised, and made in the environment they then came to try and clumsily escape or reform through their words. Those sixty-nine years of USSR, while but a blip in human history, were a long enough stretch to shape several generations who had known nothing else. 

　　Understanding the dissidents’ motivation is key. What were they after? It seems, to put it simply, they were after truth—the ability to tell it freely, fully, and at times foolishly. A prime example is the dramatically failed August 1968 dissident demonstration against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. It took place in the most public place possible—Red Square in Moscow. And then there were the less dramatic and somewhat anemic “annual transparency meetings on Moscow’s Pushkin Square on Soviet Constitution Day (December 5),” for which small groups of dissidents gathered for a moment of visibility and solidarity. Actions like these remind us that the dissidents’ desire “was not to overthrow but to set limits on Soviet state power.” In this regard, we should see many of the dissidents as citizens in love with their state—a state whose entire educational system indeed involved teaching patriotism quite intensely to all from the earliest age. 

　　The dissidents were people of ideas and ideals, desperate for intellectual honesty and the ability to express their thoughts openly, but without a clear answer to a question: What then?

　　The old cliché that insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results is borne out, fittingly, by the stories Nathans assembles. The reader finds writer after writer trying to push for change—for freedom of speech and criticism—with the predictable results of either trials and imprisonment or apathy and ignoring. Idealistic to an extreme, the dissidents had a desire for dialogue, but “the dissident movement’s hopes of initiating a dialogue with the Soviet government did not succeed. There is nonetheless a kind of dialogic quality—highly asymmetrical, to be sure—in the relationship between the two.” After all, the state wanted everyone to remember, “The People and the Party are One.”

　　I was thinking by the book’s end that perhaps they really were. A dysfunctional abusive relationship par excellence, whereby the dissidents wanted to love their state and form it for freedom, even as they only knew freedom from books they read and ideas they wrote rather than the lives they lived. The relationship was also oddly codependent: Dissidents could not exist without the oppressive state against which to use their rhetorical talents.

　　There were exceptions to these rules—dissidents who were seen as more hostile outsiders, enemies of Soviet rule who deserved suspicion. Such was the case, in particular, with Jews, who experienced persecution and suspicion on and off all through Soviet existence. But closer examination of them as well suggests more conformity than separation. It required developing a strong “us versus them” identity, which stuck: “Dissidents were Soviet people, and to be Soviet during the post-Stalin era meant having a version of the West forever in mind.”

　　So what precisely were the dissidents’ goals? At closer look, they appear surprisingly minor—even as the punishment inflicted on so many, from Sinyavsky on, was severe. The dissidents were people of ideas and ideals, desperate for intellectual honesty and the ability to express their thoughts openly, but without a clear answer to a question: What then? What if they were allowed to express these ideas openly with no repercussions? I was left with the impression that perhaps, ironically, it was the fear and thrill of repression that drove the desire to speak out. Repression only generated more dissidents. Nathans quotes Andrei Sakharov in poignantly summarizing this strange dream: “There is a need to create ideals even when you can’t see any way to achieve them, because if there are no ideals, there can be no hope and one would be left completely in the dark, in a hopeless blind alley.”

　　Sakharov, a brilliant nuclear physicist dubbed by some the “Russian Oppenheimer” because of his work on the Russian atomic bomb team, was a strange dissident at first glance. Why would a privileged scientist with direct access to such leaders as Brezhnev turn dissident? The answer has to do with that very Western ideal—freedom of speech. Sakharov was outraged by the arrests of samizdatchiki, writers whose works were denied official publication but who proceeded to publish them underground anyway. Sakharov’s prominence as a scientist meant that he felt confident expressing his views, writing directly to Brezhnev about his displeasure. The repercussions—an abrupt demotion from academic leadership and the cutting of his salary in half—were meant to teach him a lesson. 

　　Nathans sums up the path to dissident status that privileged individuals like Sakharov followed at times inadvertently: “Becoming a dissident invariably involved a personal stumbling block connected to Soviet power: an unjust punishment, a morally compromising demand, an egregious gap between theory (or propaganda) and reality.” Unlike the state, the dissidents were remarkably consistent in their demand for reconciling theory and reality—as we can see from the varying treatment of different writers whose works were banned for a time. 

　　Indeed, if there is a chief similarity, it is that dissidents were, first and foremost, lovers of words. They were lovers of words set free, words used to express fully and honestly ideas, desires, critiques, dreams—whether in novels, short stories, memoirs, or poetry. Like all artists, the dissidents wanted freedom to craft the art they wished—and to see this art circulate freely. Finally—and most crucially—they desired to see a corresponding degree of honesty from their government, mired as it was in secrecy and lies. Sakharov wrote his Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom to articulate these very desires. Alexander Solzhenitzyn, while most famous for other works, wrote his own call to intellectual freedom: Live Not by the Lie, calling in vain on the Soviet government “to renounce all forms of lying.” Western dreams were these, through and through; dreams doomed to fail on Russian soil.

　　And that is why, “three decades after the Soviet collapse, the story is not yet over.” Some aged dissident bards are still singing—like Yuli Kim, whom Nathans brings into the narrative multiple times. The son of parents who were declared enemies of the people in Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, his wistful ballad on summering at the Black Sea I know so well myself from the “Songs of Our Century” project, recorded in the late 1990s. The nostalgia-laced project gathered a number of bards, some of them former dissidents, performing not only their own songs but those of older bards, no longer alive at that point. Watching footage of the live performances is striking, as the audience of people who had lived most of their lives under the Soviet Union sing along, weep, and are moved to the deepest recesses of their souls. For how can one listen and not weep at the wistful memories of chasing fog and the smells of the taiga?

　　But I also wonder when listening: Have things really changed so much since the end of USSR? A former KGB leader is dictator again, just as in the old days. Disappearances, defenestrations, and other mysterious deaths of his enemies happen with alarming frequency.

　　Nathans agrees. He appropriately concludes the book with a grim look at the past repeating itself in the present: Putin’s repressive regime and its vicious policing of any opposition since the invasion of Ukraine. Still, he believes that studying the stories of the Soviet dissidents gives a blueprint for the future: “It took West Germans three decades, and the cultural watershed of the 1960s, to embrace those who had actively opposed Nazi rule. Should Russians find their way to political pluralism and the rule of law, they too will need a usable past. The story of the Soviet dissident movement will be waiting.”So thanks for the memories, Grandpa Lenin. One hundred years later, the past still isn’t over. As the cliché goes, it isn’t even the past.