In Dissent

Prague, the baroque district of Malá Strana near the bank of the Moldau, Tuesday evening, August 20, 1968. The fifty-five-year-old art historian Miloslava Holubová had gathered friends in her apartment. They tried to persuade one another that it would certainly not come to an invasion. Stalinism was over; the Soviet Union could no longer permit itself that kind of aggression. Holubová had lived through the Nazi occupation of the Czech lands; she had seen dead bodies on the street during the Prague Uprising; and she had sat in prison in the Stalinist years. Those times, she believed, would not—could not—be repeated.

Holubová took a sleeping pill after 3 a.m. and was still asleep in the morning when the phone woke her. It was the psychologist Eva Stuchlíková, a friend.

“We’re occupied, Miluška.”

Holubová said to herself: “Nonsense, such things don’t occur twice in one lifetime.”

Then she looked out her window. Opposite her building stood a tank, whose gun appeared to be pointed directly at her. She saw young people in open trucks driving toward the tanks with signs written in Cyrillic: “Why Have You Come? Whom Do You Want To Kill? Are You Not Ashamed?”

One thousand miles or so away in Moscow, a thirty-three-year-old poet and translator named Natalya Gorbanevskaya came to Red Square pushing a baby carriage. Her infant son, Yosif, was sleeping on top of homemade banners, among them one in Czech saying, “Long Live Free and Independent Czechoslovakia!” and another in Russian saying, “For Your Freedom and Ours.” The latter was a slogan of those who had fought the tsarist regime, who—Gorbanevskaya explained—“came to understand in the course of the previous century that a people that oppresses others cannot itself be free.”

Gorbanevskaya was one of eight Soviet citizens—not including baby Yosif—who came to Red Square on Sunday, August 25, to protest the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The others were Konstantin Babitsky, a linguist; Vladimir Dremlyuga, a student; Vadim Deloné, a young poet; Tatyana Bayeva, the daughter of a Gulag survivor; Larisa Bogoraz, a linguist whose father had been sent to an Arctic Gulag in 1936; Pavel Litvinov, a physicist and the father of Yosif; and Viktor Fainberg, a philologist from Kharkiv, who at Leningrad State University had recently written a thesis on Holden Caulfield of The Catcher in the Rye. It was a sit-down, silent protest; the eight held the homemade banners transported in Yosif’s baby carriage. Someone shouted at them: What are you hooligans doing?

And Gorbanevskaya answered: “In twenty years or so you too will understand and then you’ll be ashamed.”

Plainclothes police agents descended upon the silent protestors. “They’re all yids!” “Beat the anti-Soviets!” “The whore’s got herself a child!” Within moments blood was gushing from Litvinov’s head, and four of Fainberg’s teeth had been knocked out. A female police agent pushed Gorbanevskaya and her baby into a car. Gorbanevskaya rolled down the window and she shouted, “Long Live Free Czechoslovakia!” The policewoman punched her in the face.

It all lasted a total of fifteen minutes. Bayeva evaded arrest by pretending to be a bystander. Deloné and Dremlyuga were sentenced to a labor camp. Babitsky was exiled to Komi in northeastern Russia; Bogoraz and Litvinov were exiled to Siberia. Fainberg was confined to a psychiatric prison, where he was beaten and injected with antipsychotic drugs for years. Gorbanevskaya, editor of the undergroundjournal Chronicle of Current Events, was released, only to be arrested the following year and confined to a psychiatric hospital. In the interim she managed to smuggle a letter out of the Soviet Union, which was subsequently published in the New York Times:

We were able even if briefly to break through the sludge of unbridled lies and cowardly silence and thereby demonstrate that not all citizens of our country are in agreement with the violence carried out in the name of the Soviet people.

Among some seven million people then living in the Soviet capital, eight came to Red Square to protest the invasion of Czechoslovakia. What did it mean then that those eight people were there? And what does it mean now?

This is the question lurking beneath each line of Benjamin Nathans’s weighty new history of the Soviet dissident movement. Nathans tells the story of how the movement emerged and the paths it took, including the brief but fateful protest at Red Square. He follows ideas and personalities, friendships and networks, improvisations and strategies, successes and failures. His book is a history of ideas but also of actions, a history that looks at dissent as both theory and practice.

This history of Soviet dissent begins more or less as Stalinism ends. Stalinism had been a “participatory dictatorship” with no space to stand aside; silence, too, could be deadly. For those who were of an age to remember the Terror, 1937 shaped their entire lives. No one passed through that year intact. Nikita Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 created a break in time and initiated a top-down project of disentangling the “cult of personality” from Marxism-Leninism. The dissident movement emerged in the aftermath of that not-so-secret Secret Speech.

Nathans’s first main protagonist is the analytical philosopher Alexander Volpin, who was described by a peer as “the solitary knight at the beginning of our liberation movement.” The son of the poet Sergei Esenin and the translator Nadezhda Volpina, Volpin was still a baby in 1925 when his thirty-year-old father committed suicide.

He was first arrested when he was in his mid­twenties on charges of “anti-Soviet activity.” He was imprisoned in the infamous Lubyanka in Moscow, then confined to psychiatric hospitals, then sent into exile in Karaganda. Amnestied after Stalin’s death in 1953, Volpin returned to Moscow, rebellious as ever. He was a philosopher of language who believed in the power of the word and considered the fundamental task of ethics to be the eradication of lying. The political form this took was a kind of civil disobedience based on defiant adherence to the letter of Soviet law. His key concepts were zakonnost, legality, and glasnost, transparency. (Glas means “voice,” and –nost is a Russian suffix akin to the English “-ness”—glasnost could also be translated as “openness” or “publicity.”)

Volpin’s strategy was to read Soviet laws literally and insist that they be taken seriously to the letter. For instance, accusations of slander required that both falsehood and the author’s awareness of the falsehood be proven. When interrogated, the accused were entitled to write down their own responses to questions. Soviet citizens had a right to freedom of assembly and access to court proceedings. Volpin organized “transparency meetings” and insisted that those who took part demand only what was legal under the Soviet constitution. At demonstrations, he held banners such as “Respect the Constitution of the USSR!”

Those who came to Volpin’s transparency meetings were socialized into a milieu of dissent. Friends invited friends, and dissent progressed by means of a “chain reaction.” Practical strategies developed. For instance, Larisa Bogoraz was allowed to attend the trial of her husband, Yuli Daniel, and secretly transcribed the proceedings. A practice evolved of creating unofficial trial records.

In time other practices developed, such as petitions in defense of political prisoners. This inspired the neologism podpisant, “one who has signed”—suggesting not only a signature but also an internal drama of conscience, one later set to the stage in Václav Havel’s 1978 Protest. A subculture developed around samizdat, “that which is self-published.” Dissidents worked through the night producing copies of texts by typing through multiple layers of onion paper. Everyone typing or reading or distributing was taking a risk. Later dissidents would also produce manuals with instructions on how to interact with the state and how to behave under interrogation.

As the movement grew, dissidents had to negotiate the relationship between individual rights and national independence movements, which played an especially strong role in the Lithuanian and Ukrainian Soviet republics. Dissidents also had to negotiate their relationship to the West. They smuggled news out to Western radio stations, which then broadcast the smuggled news back into the Soviet Union. They had to decide where they stood in the great power politics of the Cold War and how much to cooperate with Western NGOs like the London-based Amnesty International. Later, after the 1975 Helsinki Accords, dissidents would form their own “Helsinki Committees” dedicated to the enforcement of the human rights provisions agreed to by the Soviet government.

Intertwined with the arc of dissident practice was an arc of dissident theory: from legal formalism and transparency to human rights. Nathans points out that most dissidents tacitly accepted socialism; many even embraced it as an idea. Normative among them, though, was an ethos striving for an engagement transcendent of the political. Human rights became an alternative to politics as such and a response to what the historian Samuel Moyn describes as the “crisis of utopianism.”

Nathans writes in a voice of “distanced empathy,” a phrase he invokes to describe Amnesty International’s “peculiar blend of engagement and detachment.” He is evenhanded; his sympathy never slides into idealization. Time and again he circles back to the same dilemmas: the strengths and weaknesses of relying on networks of friends, “spontaneity” versus “consciousness” (that is, informality versus structures), the fraught relationship between the intelligentsia and “the people.”

Dissent—he makes clear—was a phenomenon of the intelligentsia, which formed a kind of middle class between the Soviet elite on one hand and peasants and workers on the other. This is related to the fact that Jews were overrepresented among dissidents, just as in the previous generation they had been overrepresented among Communists. Not infrequently these dissidents were the children of Bolsheviks who had fallen victim to the terror of the system they themselves had created. Other Jews responded to this history by taking an interest less in reforming their country than in escaping it; often they attempted to emigrate but were denied permission to leave the Soviet Union. These Jews became known as “refuseniks” and could be said to occupy a position “adjacent” to the dissidents.

Viktor Fainberg spent his youth in Kharkiv, Buzuluk, Almaty, and then again in Kharkiv, being beaten up time and again by antisemitic classmates. “I got used to being alone,” he said in an interview. The Polish Jew Isaac Deutscher, himself a Trotskyite, famously argued in his 1958 essay “The Non-Jewish Jew” for the epistemological advantages of marginality: For Deutscher it was precisely the liminal position of Jews like Spinoza, Marx, and Freud—Jews who had broken with their traditional communities and moved on the edges of societies to which they did not fully belong—that facilitated ingenious insights. One could also ask—and not only in relation to non-Jewish Jews—whether there might be moral advantages to marginality as well.

Soviet dissidents, Nathans argues, “were not born but made, and made with Soviet ingredients.” Shaped by a vast social engineering experiment, they repurposed the norms of the experiment that shaped them. As such, they also faced the physical and moral risks of Soviet people: years of imprisonment, threats to their families, psychiatric incarceration, internal and external exile. And then there was guilt. The very existence of dissidents induced guilt, as they were “the bad conscience of Soviet society.” There was the guilt of asking people to sign petitions, the guilt of not signing, and the guilt of signing and putting one’s family at risk. The dissidents functioned in a country where no one could be innocent.

The secret police had their own mechanisms by which they induced dissidents to compromise themselves and one another. There was always a risk of betrayal under duress. “The organs” posed as omniscient; Natalya Gorbanevskaya insisted this was only a ruse. “They’re far from knowing everything,” she wrote, “and you shouldn’t fear them. You should fear yourself.”

Gorbanevskaya knew this from experience. She had been a first-year student at Moscow State University in 1956 when two of her friends distributed leaflets protesting the Soviet invasion of Hungary. She was pulled out of a lecture hall and taken to Lubyanka, put in prison fatigues, and held in a cell. A day and a half later, she broke and informed on her friends, who were sentenced to several years in prison.

As Gleb Pavlovsky, a dissident from Odesa, wrote: “The main threat is inside yourself.” He himself was broken by his interrogator and betrayed a friend. The KGB also broke Petr Yakir and Viktor Krasin, both survivors of a youth spent in the Gulag. Yakir and Krasin visited Bogoraz and Litvinov in Siberian exile in 1969; with other dissidents in prison or in exile, they became de facto leaders of the leaderless movement.

Yakir, a bold, charismatic bohemian prone to excessive drinking, had a personal dialogue with the ousted Khrushchev and close relations with foreign journalists. He was arrested in June 1972 and broken by the KGB, who threatened to arrest his twenty-four-year-old pregnant daughter. Krasin succumbed, too, the KGB having exploited the fact that his young wife had also been arrested. “Yakir and Krasin delivered a dozen chess sets’ worth of pawns to the KGB,” Nathans writes. At their trial they called on their fellow dissidents to join them in repentance. Krasin obediently testified:

We represented no one but ourselves: a small group, separated from the Soviet public and coming out against its interests, a group whose activities had been inordinately played up by reactionary propaganda for its own purposes. This is precisely why a situation developed where Western hostile circles lauded us to the skies, but the Soviet people looked upon our activities with anger and indignation.

The KGB officers praised themselves for their “masterful use of ‘logic and psychology.’”

When Gorbanevskaya came to Red Square on August 25, 1968, she did so in atonement for having betrayed her friends a dozen years earlier. Her decision to put herself at risk was “almost egotistical,” she said. The banner she hid under her sleeping baby—“For Your Freedom and Ours”—invoked the legacy of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia, which was, from the beginning, a marginalized demographic of intellectuals condescending toward “the people,” from whom they felt alienated, for whom they longed, and whom they resented. For better or for worse, Soviet dissidence, which is part of this larger history, developed as a deeply antipopulist movement. Bogoraz felt rage toward her fellow Soviet citizens, those “unfeeling cattle” who supported the invasion of Czechoslovakia. “We used to idealize the people,” wrote one dissident author in a samizdat essay. “Now we have lost respect for them.”

Yet there was always the hope of a gradual coming to consciousness. In 1968 Gorbanevskaya’s message to “the people” was this: “In twenty years . . . you’ll be ashamed.” But would they?

“Because of their way of life, the overwhelming majority of citizens in a communist society feel no need for civil liberties,” explained the Soviet logician-turned-novelist Alexander Zinoviev in 1979. “And precisely for this reason they don’t have those liberties. To put it crudely, they need civil liberties like a fish needs an umbrella.”

Together with her friend Miloslava Holubová, Eva Stuchlíková would go on to sign Charter 77, a 1977 letter calling on the Czechoslovak government to honor the human rights guaranteed in the Helsinki Accords. Like all the podpisanty, Stuchlíková would suffer the consequences of that decision. She believed that her fellow citizens, while generally sympathizing with the Charter signatories, above all questioned why they were upsetting the order. “They had reached a modus vivendi,” Stuchlíková explained, “like a dog chained to his house who doesn’t want to upset his master.”

In the 1980s, Czechoslovak sociologists Martin Bútora and Zora Bútorová described those like Stuchlíková and Holubová as practicing “positive deviance”—a counterpoint to the “negative selection” by which the Communist regime privileged the morally weak. Positive deviance was a way of overcoming alienation, escaping the “demons of helplessness.” For the dissidents, the need to escape those demons was not trivial. Karol Wojtyła, in a philosophical work he wrote before he became Pope John Paul II, described human action as both transitive and intransitive. That is, when a person acted, did something in the world, he also acted on himself. The dissidents could be described as those who felt this truth with particular sharpness. “We were defending ourselves from the unavoidable feeling—had we remained silent—of participating in a crime,” Gorbanevskaya explained. “To the success of our hopeless cause” was a frequent toast at dissident gatherings. They acted not out of the expectation that they would overthrow a tyrannical system. Rather, the very expression of dissent was the thing itself.

“How do individuals and societies emerge from totalitarianism?” Nathans asks. One could add: And do they?

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Gleb Pavlovsky became a political technologist and one of the designers of the postmodern “managed democracy” that became Putinism. Subsequently Pavlovsky, who died in 2023, spent the last decade of his life as a repentant critic of the system he had designed, horrified by what had emerged from his own experiment.

Three decades after the end of the Soviet Union, the filmmakers Ksenia Sakharnova and Kirill Sakharnov interviewed Viktor Fainberg, whose teeth had been knocked out in the 1968 protest in Red Square. He had settled and married in France. The daughter of Natalya Gorbanevskaya’s baby Yosif created illustrations for the film Madly in Dissent, in which the elderly Fainberg emerges as a luminous protagonist. Fainberg, born in 1931 in Soviet Kharkiv, died just after New Year’s in 2023 in Gien, France. He lived to protest the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The filmmakers followed Fainberg’s daughter, Sarah, as she traveled to Russia to see the psychiatric institution where her father had been confined in then-Leningrad. As she stood in front of the building, a policeman approached her. What was she doing there? She explained: “Moi otets zdes’ sidel neskol’ko let” (My father was imprisoned here for several years). The policeman corrected her: “Net, vash otets tam ne sidel, vashego ottsa tam lechili.” No, he said, your father was not imprisoned here; your father was treated here.

That short exchange effaces the border between the Soviet past and the Russian present. It provokes the question of how and whether societies do emerge from totalitarianism. Today Russia’s prisons remain full of political prisoners held in gruesome conditions. This is true in Belarus as well. Thousands of Ukrainian prisoners of war, including civilians, are subjected to beatings, electrocution, starvation, and execution.

For Russian oppositionists today, speaking the truth is less about laws and more about history. They have also abandoned their predecessors’ belief in the virtue, be it strategic or moral, of a nonpolitical stance. Today the mantra of the nonpolitical has rather been taken up by the complicitous. “I’m not interested in politics” is the frequent response of Russian citizens questioned about Russia’s carrying out of mass slaughter in Ukraine. The system of which Pavlovsky was an architect is less a participatory dictatorship than a postmodern neototalitarianism favoring the demobilization of its population. Yet, the violence and repression against those who dissent is no less grotesque than it was when the secret police descended on the eight protestors in Red Square.

Olga Misik was a preternaturally self-possessed seventeen-year-old in 2019 when she read the Russian Constitution aloud to riot police during protest rallies in Moscow. What she suffered from the Russian regime as a result left her in such a state that when she addressed the audience at the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize conference in Prague this past October, she was stuttering so much she could barely speak.

“Soviet dissidents understood themselves as actors in a drama unfolding on the world stage,” Nathans writes. “For Your Freedom and Ours” remains as on point now as then. Yet what one sees on this world stage today is an obscene failure to enforce human rights. If Amnesty International practiced well-intentioned distanced empathy, the United Nations today practices ritualistic enactments of its own impotence. What in Russia is called the “eternal question”—chto delat’? (what is to be done?)—remains open.