Nigel Doggett on Soviet dissidents
To the Success of our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans published by Princeton University Press
This comprehensive account covers the period in the Soviet Union from the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 to the mid-1980s, which was relatively benign compared with over 25 years of Stalinist terror, post-Soviet chaos and now resurgent repression under Putin. Optimism under Nikita Khruschev was signalled by successes in the space race and a political thaw by his “secret speech” in 1956 to the Communist Party Congress denouncing Stalin’s crimes. However, later under Leonid Brezhnev (1964-82), the country stagnated as economic, technological and political challenges mounted.
Despite its 640 pages (plus notes), it is an engrossing read, including a useful discussion of the nature of the Soviet Union, totalitarianism and its becoming “post-totalitarian” in Vaclav Havel’s description.
For most people, survival necessitated a suspension of reality, observing the formalities and pieties of Soviet life while keeping any disloyal or critical thought private. The intelligentsia, or what remained of it after Stalin, in contrast to the pre-revolutionary generation, “seemed to shun and even despise politics” as monopolised by the Party.
Shoots of dissent sprouted in Khruschev’s thaw, mainly but not exclusively in the intelligentsia, leading to a cat and mouse game of pushing the regime’s limits, in the cause of fulfilling the promise of the Socialism in which most still believed, rather than liberal “freedom” in the dominant Western narrative. Some professed belief in Marxism or Leninism. The term “dissident” was not one they welcomed, but it is hard to find a more suitable one. Whether Leninism as well as Stalinism was discredited was a moot point. Mikhail Gorbachev claimed to be a Leninist even while espousing social democracy.
Dissident methods included clandestine literature and news (Samizdat), pop-up demonstrations and verbal sparring in interviews, interrogations and court appearances. These put the authorities on the spot, calling their bluff in terms of legal rights supposedly “guaranteed” under the 1936 “Stalin” constitution, including freedom of conscience, religion, speech and assembly. The regime’s response shrank to self-preservation as its claims to lofty ideals had become discredited, not least by military interventions in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968).
In the absence of independent institutions or civil society, the government could crack down with impunity, but was sensitive to its international reputation as a beacon of progress, not least for anti-colonial movements and Western Communist parties; dissident appeals prompted declarations of support from the international anti-Stalinist left. But the odds against change still appeared insurmountable, hence the book’s title.
Whilst earlier oppositionists and even those merely suspected of deviation were shot or endured decades in remote “Gulag” camps, dissidents still faced harassment, interrogation, exile or confinement in psychiatric institutions for questioning the beneficence of “actually existing Socialism”, as it was known. Never more than a tiny minority, while the Soviet masses and even middle classes remained quiescent, they were particularly active in Moscow and Leningrad, where publicity was amplified by the presence and support of the Western press.
Did they hasten the fall of the Soviet Union? Not directly; the dissident groups sputtered out by 1989, but they influenced the final generation of CPSU leaders, notably Gorbachev, by inspiring his policy of Glasnost (openness) and reforms that echoed the 1968 Prague Spring. Some eventually re-engaged with the system as it opened up, notably eminent scientist and dissenter Andrei Sakharov, who was elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989.
Successors such as Memorial, founded to record past crimes against humanity and foster the protection of human rights, were tolerated from 1999 by Putin until a new clampdown on protests against electoral fraud in 2011, followed by the 2012 “foreign agent” law aimed at NGOs receiving support from abroad, and fresh repression since the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the war in Ukraine. Memorial was shut down completely in 2022.
The Russian Empire historically contained but a small oasis of modern political culture, which imbued many revolutionaries who spent long periods of exile in the West (with the notable exception of Stalin). The top-down government and culture prevented opposition movements from changing it directly until the power structure became hollowed out and lost all credibility. Then, as in the abolition of serfdom, the 1917 revolutions and finally the collapse of the USSR, its defenders largely melted away.
It’s not clear that Putin, bolstered by “useful idiots” and enablers across the East, West and the global South, is yet vulnerable. There are no visible cracks in the regime, and we may have to wait beyond Putin’s death for a new thaw. Yet just as the disastrous 1905 war with Japan ultimately contributed to 1917, the damage done to the people and economy since 2022 by the Ukraine war, whatever its outcome, will surely start to undermine the Putin regime.