The freethinking Soviet dissidents who tried, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, to make space in their society for opinions and activities not authorized by the ruling Communist Party included a few genuine giants, most notably the physicist Andrei Sakharov and the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Many others remain largely unknown, but dozens of them appear in Benjamin Nathans’s history of the dissident movement, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause. In the struggles they waged for more than twenty years against a repressive dictatorship and its relentless political police force, the KGB, they won no memorable victories. Only the transformations of Soviet society initiated or permitted in the 1980s by a new and unexpected leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, brought the liberalization they had long advocated.
By the time the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991, the dissidents were already part of history. Most of them had abandoned their “hopeless cause” before Gorbachev began to grant the basic rights they had sought. Hundreds of thousands of people took advantage of the new freedom to travel that made it possible for Soviet citizens to leave in droves in the 1980s and 1990s. The emigration of dissidents and a simultaneous exodus of Soviet Jews significantly depleted the intellectual and cultural life of the country, especially in its biggest cities. These departures eventually meant that many of the dissidents of the 1960s and 1970s who lived into the twenty-first century died in Israel, the United States, and Western Europe.
Involuntary exile was painful but certainly preferable to the fate of their forebears, including more than half a million early Bolsheviks who were executed by Joseph Stalin. His successor, Nikita Khrushchev, abandoned terror as a means of enforcing the Communist Party’s authority. He also made a little room for dissidence, and a small cadre of extraordinary individuals found the courage to squeeze into it. More such freethinkers appeared after Khrushchev was replaced in 1964 by Leonid Brezhnev.
Many of the early dissidents, Nathans explains, were inspired by Alexander Volpin, an eccentric, now long-forgotten mathematician and philosopher. In the early 1960s Volpin used an unlikely text to encourage dissident thought and action: the Soviet Constitution of 1936, known as the Stalin Constitution. This implausible document purported to guarantee rights to all Soviet citizens, including freedom of assembly, religion, speech, and the press. In reality these rights never existed, but their presence in the much-ballyhooed constitution prompted Volpin to pretend they were real. Early dissidents used its promises to embarrass the regime. Censorship was a favorite target of their protests; arbitrary harassment, including the arrests and prosecutions of their colleagues and allies, was another.
Andrei Amalrik, among the brightest and most eloquent of the early dissidents, later wrote that Volpin was “the first to understand that an effective method of opposition might be to demand that the authorities observe their own laws.”1 Volpin was also the first successful organizer of dissident protests. He and those who followed him demonstrated a surprising capacity for bold thoughts and brave, if usually fruitless, actions. In a society that had been stultified for decades by fear, they somehow found the strength not to be afraid. To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause gives them their considerable due.
Nathans, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, has written an ambitious, elegant, and readable book about intrepid people and their persecutors. His eighty-three pages of footnotes indicate that he spent at least two decades delving into the vast array of sources from the Soviet era that became available during the Gorbachev–Yeltsin thaw of the 1980s and 1990s, when the Communist system crumbled and the KGB lost control of its files. Nathans cites the published and unpublished letters and memoirs of at least 150 dissidents, as well as government documents now held in libraries across Europe and the United States. He read through scores of transcripts of KGB interrogations of dissidents and detailed reports on searches of their apartments. And he mined the once-secret memos and letters exchanged by senior Soviet leaders and the transcripts of sensitive official meetings, including sessions of the ruling Politburo of the Communist Party.
Happily, Nathans is an academic who writes elegantly. His stylish presentation of his rich research and rigorous analysis makes an eight-hundred-page book feel engaging and entertaining. On May 5 it was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
Nathans calls the dissident phenomenon of the 1960s and 1970s a movement, but there is room to quibble with that label. It implies a shared goal, which the dissidents didn’t really have; nor were they well organized. Rather they were a diverse, anarchic lot that included ethnic nationalists in the non-Russian Soviet republics, Orthodox Christians, Jews who wanted to immigrate to Israel, civil libertarians, radical philosophers, avant-garde artists, and nonconformists of many kinds. But if they weren’t exactly a movement, they certainly were historically important. The dissidents, especially the writers whose works were not officially published in the USSR but nevertheless had huge audiences at home and abroad, helped to unravel the dictatorship of the Soviet Communist Party and the empire it had created—and thus to change the world.
One of the dissidents’ earliest frustrations was the difficulty of sharing their protests and petitions with a broader public. At first they used primitive tactics, for example leaving copies of their petitions or calls to action in the lavatories of academic institutions where they might be read by sympathetic people. But in the mid-1960s they discovered a better way to spread their writings and news of their activities. They relied on foreigners—specifically foreign shortwave radio stations broadcasting political and cultural news in Russian into the Soviet Union. Nathans describes this new communications strategy well. I know about it because I was part of it myself.
For much of the 1970s my life was intertwined with the story of the Soviet dissidents. I studied the Russian language for eleven months to prepare for three intense and exciting years as The Washington Post’s Moscow correspondent from 1971 to 1974. I later wrote a book based on my experiences, Russia: The People and the Power (1976). The dissidents were both sources and subjects of the book, which included long sections on Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, both of whom I got to know. I met and interviewed many of those who appear in Nathans’s book. A dozen active dissidents and their friends and relatives became personal friends.
Among them were victims of KGB harassment and criminal prosecution who seemed, when I got to know them, to be ordinary people rather than exotic enemies of the Soviet regime. A memorable example was Zhores Medvedev, a biologist and agronomist whose twin brother, Roy, a Marxist historian, had joined him in successfully challenging the KGB in 1970, a year before I met him.
Zhores, a gentle, modest man, was also a stubborn freethinker and troublemaker. As a serious biologist he understood the damage to Soviet science done by T.D. Lysenko, a biologist glorified by Stalin for theories of evolution and genetics that pleased the dictator but had no scientific validity and made Soviet biology look ridiculous to foreigners. Zhores agitated to expose the damage Lysenko had done. He wrote a book about the scandal and managed to send it to the West, where it was published in English in 1969.
In 1970 the KGB forced Zhores into a psychiatric hospital for involuntary treatment. This was one of the KGB’s cruel punishments, entirely extralegal and arbitrary. Roy quickly organized an impressive group of Soviet scientists and other intellectuals to write letters of protest. Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov joined the effort and persuaded other prominent figures to speak out publicly against the treatment of Zhores. Foreign scientists who knew his work also protested his detention, as did foreign psychiatrists.
Amazingly, the protests worked. Zhores was freed just nineteen days after he was confined—a highly unusual outcome for a dissident protest.2 But his defiance was soon harshly punished. In 1973, while on a fellowship in England, he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship. He died in London forty-five years later.
Another such figure who became a friend of mine was Pavel Litvinov, a grandson of Maxim Litvinov, a prominent Bolshevik and friend of Lenin. For most of the 1930s Maxim was Stalin’s commissar for foreign affairs. He and his English wife, Ivy Low, were members of the elite in Stalin’s Moscow. Maxim died in 1951, but Ivy lived until 1977 and knew personally many of the dissident intellectuals of the 1960s. I met her in late 1972, when she was a spry and alert eighty-three. I also met her children, Misha and Tanya, then in their fifties. These were warm, curious people who knew a great many freethinking intellectuals, including active dissidents and sympathizers. Members of the extended Litvinov family were among my favorite and most important contacts in Moscow.
But in 1972–1973, when I got to know them, I couldn’t meet Pavel, the son of Misha and his wife, Flora. Pavel, a teacher of math and physics, was the family’s absent hero. A dissident since 1967 whose activities are described in detail in Nathans’s book, he was nearing the end of a sentence of five years’ internal exile in a central Siberian village, his punishment for participating in perhaps the most famous demonstration of the dissident era.
The Prague Spring of 1968 was a moment of triumph for Czech reformists and the liberalizing party leader Alexander Dubček, who ended censorship and began to indulge his own local dissidents who were demanding liberalization. Dubček terrified the old guard in Moscow and throughout Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. Brezhnev and like-minded comrades decided they had to remove him by force. On August 25, 1968, days after Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia and deposed Dubček’s regime, Pavel was one of eight young dissidents who staged a sit-down protest in the middle of Moscow’s Red Square, steps from the onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral and the gates of the Kremlin. They were quickly arrested and put on trial in October. Pavel’s sentence was relatively gentle, but it was long for a man who was only twenty-eight.
Pavel returned to Moscow in 1973, when I first met him, and he concluded that he had to emigrate to avoid another round of arrest and punishment that would be much harsher than internal exile. I attended a moving farewell party for him in the big Moscow apartment that Misha had inherited from his father. Everyone there assumed that once Pavel and his wife, Maya, left for New York, their separation from Brezhnev’s Moscow would be permanent. No one at that party, including Pavel’s and Maya’s parents, expected to see them again.3
When I got involved with dissidents in Moscow in the early 1970s, the unusual news loop I joined was well established. The reporters who represented American and Western European publications and broadcasters—fifty-odd men and women, perhaps half of whom spoke and read Russian—were, by the time I arrived in 1971, paying close attention to “the dissident story.” Some of them, notably British and American correspondents, were eager to report on new manifestations of dissidence or the official crackdown on it.
Most Western reporting from the Soviet Union depended on cooperation from the government. Interviews with Soviet citizens and officials had to be approved by the press department of the foreign ministry; so did trips around the country or visits to Soviet institutions. The dissident story was more freewheeling, and decisions about how to cover it depended only on us and our contacts.
The dissidents came to realize that if a Western correspondent wrote about a protest or a petition or the arrest of one of them, the Russian-language services of the foreign radio stations would describe that dispatch on a broadcast that reached a large audience inside the Soviet Union. That arrangement transformed obscure events of which very few Soviet citizens were aware into stories heard by tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Nathans refers to these broadcasters as “the Voices,” the term the dissidents also used. They included the Voice of America, the BBC, Deutsche Welle, and Radio Liberty, a station funded by the US government and staffed largely by Soviet émigrés, including former dissidents. They provided Soviet intellectuals’ only access to Western news reporting and cultural programming. The combination of Western correspondents eagerly covering the dissidents and the Voices eagerly broadcasting their reporting back to the Soviet Union in Russian vastly increased the audience for dissident news and probably made it seem more important to some listeners than it actually was.
The foreign radio stations were also intrigued by and made extensive use of the dissidents’ one great invention: an uncensored medium for the wide distribution of news, opinion, prose, and poetry. This was samizdat—literally “self-published”—written material usually typed in multiple carbon copies on onionskin paper and passed from hand to hand. Moscow and Leningrad were the centers of samizdat production and consumption, but the shareable documents created by a small army of anonymous authors, editors, and typists circulated across the USSR. A samizdat publication might be a few typescript pages of the poetry of Joseph Brodsky, who was forced to leave the Soviet Union in 1972 and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987, or one of Solzhenitsyn’s novels unavailable there, Cancer Ward or The First Circle, both hundreds of typescript pages. (Solzhenitsyn also won the Nobel, in 1970.)
One important publication produced entirely in samizdat was the Chronicle of Current Events, which appeared sporadically from 1968 until 1982. It was a primary source of news about dissidents that was read by dissidents themselves as well as by diplomats, foreign journalists, the employees of the foreign Russian-language radio programs, and the Soviet citizens who listened to them. Like all samizdat, the Chronicle had to be typed in multiple copies. To be significant, the audience for any single edition had to include one of the foreign correspondents or another foreign resident of Moscow who would convey it to the Voices, which could then broadcast news about interrogations, arrests, trials, and confinements to camps, prisons, and psychiatric hospitals, or involuntary exile of dissidents of many kinds. Over its fourteen-year life span, the Chronicle reported on political trials that resulted in 753 convictions (and no acquittals) and tracked the involuntary confinement to psychiatric hospitals of another 164 people.
After crushing the Prague Spring, Brezhnev and the recently appointed head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, interpreted Dubček’s reforms as a warning to the Soviet leadership. Andropov’s mission quickly became obvious: he had to solve the dissident problem. He, Brezhnev, and their Politburo colleagues were baffled by the troublemakers but afraid of them. Nathans shows that they spent long hours debating how to respond.
The Soviet leaders saw dissidents as an alien presence in what they pretended was a maturing socialist society marching toward communism. When it reached that goal (imminently!), “new Soviet men” (and women) would lead idyllic lives in a nation whose state had withered away (as Friedrich Engels had put it). This was the Soviet utopia depicted in officially approved works of art and propaganda. It was also utter malarkey, as virtually every educated Soviet citizen privately realized—even members of the Politburo, no doubt. Its absurdities created and encouraged cynicism; cynicism bred dissidence.
The Soviet regime’s actions around the world in the 1960s and 1970s, especially the invasions of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979, alarmed many in the West and fed fears of Soviet “expansionism.” Brezhnev and his comrades in the leadership seemed to like the image of a fierce, unpredictable USSR—it helped compensate for the insecurities they felt as leaders of a superpower that couldn’t produce decent consumer goods, feed all its citizens, or compete with the soft power that made the United States such a dominant force in the world. The only attribute of a superpower that the USSR actually had was unusable thermonuclear weapons.
In December 1973 Solzhenitsyn fired his loudest and most damaging shot at the Soviet regime. He authorized the publication in France of the first of three powerful volumes on which he had worked for years, collectively titled The Gulag Archipelago. This detailed, passionate account of the vast network of prisons and camps created under Lenin and Stalin to enforce the Soviet system of terror caused an international sensation. Its publication was front-page news around the world, which helped make it the high-water mark of literary dissidence in the post-Stalin era. For Andropov it was apparently the last straw.
Using Kremlin documents, Nathans recounts how, days after the publication of Gulag, Andropov conspired with Brezhnev to abandon a Politburo consensus that Solzhenitsyn was to be convicted of treason at a dramatic show trial. Instead, and without any legal justification or proceedings, Andropov had Solzhenitsyn arrested in Moscow and immediately expelled to West Germany, where he soon found himself at the country house of his friend and fellow writer Heinrich Böll, who had won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1972. Thus began twenty years of restless, involuntary exile, mostly in Vermont, for the man other dissidents in Moscow referred to as “our classic.”
Nathans notes how this episode revealed the fateful ignorance of the Communist Party’s last generation of leaders about their country. In the Politburo discussions he quotes, Brezhnev and several colleagues express bafflement about how Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, and other outspoken dissidents could turn against the system that had reared them.
But by 1973, Nathans writes, even the KGB had lost interest in trying to answer such questions:
Giving up mass terror as an instrument of social control seems to have gone hand in hand with…a loss of desire to understand how and when certain Soviet citizens had gone wrong.
The objective had become maintaining the party’s control, not understanding a stubbornly nonconformist segment of the intelligentsia. Party control mattered because a huge body of state and party officials depended on it to maintain the comforts of their everyday lives.
This was enough to keep the regime in power through a prolonged period of “stagnation,” as Russians euphemistically called the last years of Brezhnev’s rule until his death in 1982 and the brief reigns of his aged successors, Andropov (fifteen months, from 1982 to 1984) and Konstantin Chernenko (thirteen months, until March 1985). All three died in office, a fitting symbol of the fate of the Soviet system. Stagnation had become rot.
At last the Politburo realized, after organizing three leaders’ funerals in just over two years, that it was time for change. As the next general secretary of the Communist Party it chose Gorbachev, a fifty-four-year-old provincial party leader whom Andropov had brought to Moscow just seven years earlier.
Well into the twenty-first century it is too easy to forget the enormity of Gorbachev’s accomplishments. In short order he brought down the Soviet Union. The USSR really had been an ominous power governed by an ideology that had won adherents all over the world. And then it was gone. Nathans acknowledges repeatedly that none of the dissidents’ petitions or protests were significantly involved in these developments or changed the course of history, perhaps because the dissidents who most interest him are not the writers but the brave citizens who protested, petitioned, and demonstrated for more freedoms. He is nevertheless determined to give them credit for their steadfast courage and occasional dramatic gestures. In my view the dissident writers deserve more credit for the collapse of the Soviet system. Gorbachev could not have changed the course of history without them.
Gorbachev allowed a free press, invited honest discussion about the darkest moments of Soviet history, and allowed both Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn to return from exile. He also allowed writers and scholars access to damning historical documents that exposed Stalin’s crimes and disastrous mistakes, and he permitted the publication of long-banned books by Solzhenitsyn, Mikhail Bulgakov, Boris Pasternak, Vladimir Voinovich, Vasily Aksyonov, and Yevgenia Ginzburg, among others. Some of these documents and books helped readers process the horrors of the Soviet era; others taught them to laugh at the preposterous system the Bolsheviks created. All of them helped to delegitimize the Soviet system.
The sudden disappearance of the old regime and Gorbachev’s embrace of the values of the dissidents produced a rich crop of jokes and quips—the typical Russian response to unexpected events. My favorite example captured the widely shared contempt Russian intellectuals felt toward Brezhnev as well as the respect they accorded to Solzhenitsyn, the most popular and influential dissident writer. This quip demonstrates how one man with a big imagination and a sharp pen can become a powerful historical force and can even salvage a hopeless cause.
A twenty-first-century Russian child asks a parent, “Who was Brezhnev?” The parent replies, “Wasn’t he some kind of politician in the time of Solzhenitsyn?”
English (US) · 