
The Soviet dissident movement fell short of their aims. Their impact went beyond what they could imagine.
In the 1960s, an improbable band of Soviet citizens achieved global renown by writing and circulating banned texts, holding unauthorized public meetings, and openly petitioning the Communist regime to change its ways. Unsatisfied with the transition from Stalinist brutality to softer but stabler forms of repression, they demanded deeper changes. Benjamin Nathans, the Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term Professor of History in Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences, tells their dramatic story in a new book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement. The book takes its title from an ironic toast that became popular among these stalwart men and women, who risked and frequently suffered ruination in the most quixotic of quests: to live like free people in an unfree country. Nathans spoke with Gazette senior editor Trey Popp about the book in October. Their conversation has been edited for concision.
Given how much attention Soviet dissidents attracted in the West, it’s easy in retrospect to regard them almost as a historical inevitability. But you write that when dissent emerged within the USSR during the 1960s, it caught everyone off guard. What made it such an unexpected development?
The dominant model through which most people in the West understood the Soviet Union was totalitarianism. Everything that people knew from the Stalin era was that people who publicly disagreed with the government were dead in the water. They just had no chance, and people were so fearful that they wouldn’t dare to engage in public dissent from the party lines.
So who were the dissidents? And what was their actual goal?
What I discovered in my research is that almost without exception, none of the so-called dissidents liked that term—which was popularized by Western journalists. And they especially didn’t like it when the Soviet government used the term, which to a Russian ear sounds foreign, to stigmatize them. The term that I think they liked more was rights defenders.
Also, in the West the term dissident was used extremely promiscuously. So Russian nationalists were termed dissidents, and Jews who wanted to leave the Soviet Union were dissidents, and Christian believers were dissidents. Basically, anybody who had a gripe with the regime and was willing to talk about it or act on it was a dissident. But in the Soviet setting, dissident really refers to people who wanted to promote the rule of law—and who specifically wanted to pressure the Soviet government to obey its own laws.
You write that dissidents in fact tended to be “high-minded Soviet people” whose dissent was fueled precisely by how sincerely they embraced Soviet ideals—as opposed to the reality of the Soviet state.
One of the things that they were not aiming for, and frankly couldn’t even imagine would be possible, was to overthrow the Soviet government. That country had just survived the greatest military onslaught in history—Hitler’s invasion of June 1941. It had withstood the stress test of all stress tests. So with a tiny handful of exceptions, dissidents did not imagine that that government could be overthrown. And they wanted to distance themselves from any of the kind of revolutionary violence that they thought would have been required to overthrow a government like that. So what the dissidents wanted was to make it a law-abiding system.
So how did this orientation influence their strategy and tactics?
This is where things get really interesting. The story really goes back to this rather eccentric mathematician in Moscow named Alexander Volpin. He belonged to a cohort of scientists and mathematicians in the middle of the 20th century who were interested in the field of cybernetics, whose goal was to translate all forms of knowledge into a quantifiable series of algorithms or feedback-and-response loops. Volpin wanted to create a perfect language of communication—free from all the ambiguity of natural languages, a language that had the same qualities as mathematics, where you could make statements that were absolutely clear and that could be proven beyond the shadow of a doubt.
After having been arrested in the Soviet Union for writing irreverent poems, and having spent time in a psychiatric institution against his will, and having been exiled to Central Asia for a bit, he became a kind of jailhouse lawyer. So he began to investigate the Soviet Constitution. And what he discovered there was the language of law, which is all about making as clear as possible what you are allowed to do, what you are forbidden to do, and what you must do: prohibitions, permissions, and injunctions. And he realized that this wasn’t a perfect language, but it was a good approximation.
So he came upon this idea of, if we could only make the Soviet Union obey its own constitution—which contained very appealing civil liberties like freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly—if we could only make that language real, we would be a long way towards creating the rule of law. And this became the grand strategy of the movement: not to topple the Soviet state, not even to transform the Soviet state, but a kind of a minimalist program to just get the government to honor its own laws.
How did that work out for them?
That strategy failed over and over again. People who engaged in free speech and free assembly were arrested, put on trial, inevitably found guilty, and sentenced to years in prison or in labor camps. And all of the open letters and appeals to the Soviet government signed by dozens or hundreds of Soviet citizens, none of them ever received a written response. And in the wake of the failure of that strategy, the strategy shifted.
The dissident movement became increasingly oriented not so much towards Soviet law as towards international law, and particularly international human rights treaties and covenants going back to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and several other international agreements that Moscow had signed.
And how successful was that ?
The Western-oriented strategy was far more effective. Because in the context of the Cold War, the dissident habit of pointing out violations of international human rights norms got a lot more traction than the domestic protests had. But it was also a very dangerous strategy, because now dissidents were perceived, correctly, as inserting themselves into international relations—and the Kremlin was extremely sensitive to any challenges to its monopoly over the conduct of foreign policy. Dissidents’ evidence of violations of human rights norms became a toxic element in the Cold War. Ultimately, the turn to the West did not make the Soviet Union a more law-abiding state—but it got the dissident movement and its agenda a whole lot more of attention, both abroad and at home.
Were they able to convert that attention into anything positive from their perspective—or did it just win them even more trouble?
It won them more trouble. Even before the shift to the West, the Soviet government was arresting protesters and putting them on trial. And while the KGB and the government always got the legal result that they wanted—namely, a guilty verdict—the problem was that they rarely got the political payoff that they were after. Because the public relations impact of these trials was terrible for the Soviet government and often very good for the dissidents. It made them seem like martyrs, like Davids fighting Goliath. And the unintended result was that the KGB started relying less and less on courts and the Soviet legal system, and more and more on extra-judicial punishments, which are the most dangerous kind of all, because there are no rules and no boundaries.
So the net effect, at least in the short run, was that the Soviet government actually became less law-abiding, ironically, which was exactly the opposite of what the dissidents wanted. Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn became household names, and the two of them both won Nobel Prizes. But the interference in Soviet foreign affairs is eventually what caused the KGB to crack down for the final episode, and really to destroy the movement by about 1982.
So their short-term fate was dismal. What significance do you think they had in the longer run?
If their goal was to spread legal consciousness among their fellow citizens, I don’t think they were very successful. If their goal was to make the Soviet state more law-abiding, they weren’t very successful. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned studying history, it’s that the unintended outcomes are often just as significant as the goals, whether the goals are reached or not. And there were some extremely significant unintended outcomes of the movement.
One was that they helped drain the Soviet system of legitimacy by showing over and over again that this was a state that was either unwilling or incapable of observing its own laws. So it made the Soviet Union look really bad and archaic, and that hollowing out of legitimacy, I think, is a very significant factor—albeit not the only one, and probably not the main one—in what made the Soviet Union collapse so quickly when it did. Another probably more significant drainer of legitimacy was the increasingly dismal economic performance of Soviet socialism, especially by the late ’70s and early ’80s. But on a moral level, I think the dissidents did hollow out a lot of the system’s own claims about itself. So indirectly, they contributed to an outcome that they neither imagined nor directly worked for, and that was the collapse of the USSR during that breathtaking sequence of events in the second half of the 1980s.
The other unintended outcome is that some version of dissident ideas made their way into the upper echelons of the Communist Party. Namely Mikhail Gorbachev and some of the people who helped him articulate the reforms that were designed to renew and strengthen the system but which actually had the effect of making it unravel. When Gorbachev talked about glasnost, which means transparency or openness, that was right out of the dissident lexicon. And when he talked about democratizing the system, that too was a cornerstone of the dissidents’ agenda. In fact, the movement was often known in the Soviet Union as the democratic movement.
The Soviet dissident movement had a complex legacy. Do you think their example has anything to teach us today?
One of the things that got me interested in the dissident movement was I wanted to learn more about how people who live in authoritarian countries, and non-democratic societies, think about what their political options are—and also how they act on them.
But I think the more profound implication, for me, is that we are living in a time when certain fundamental problems often really appear to be insurmountable. We just don’t seem to have the mechanisms that could confront and overcome something like climate change, or the expanding forms and degrees of inequality that we face today, and the forms of social unrest that seem inevitable once we get past a certain tipping point. And what I admire about the dissidents is that they faced what I truly believe were, and appeared to be, much more profound and insurmountable problems—this Soviet regime that just seemed to be so powerful and so permanent to people living inside it. What I admire about them is that while they fully acknowledged the depth and the gravity of the problem that they were up against, they refused to become passive or apathetic or to engage in purely symbolic forms of resistance.
That, to me, is a very powerful thing: that they recognized that in some ways their cause was hopeless—although, as it turned out, it wasn’t—and yet they devoted much of their lives to fighting for it.