Book Review: ‘To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause,’ by Benjamin Nathans

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Book Review: ‘To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause,’ by Benjamin Nathans

TO THE SUCCESS OF OUR HOPELESS CAUSE: The Many Lives of the ******* Dissident Movement, by Benjamin Nathans

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It is widely held that the beginning of the end of ******* totalitarianism arrived in the 1980s, when the general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev ushered in a ******* of democratic reform. Under his policies of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness), the state relaxed censorship laws, brought private enterprise further out of the shadows and stood back as one ******* satellite after another — Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and others — slipped out of Moscow’s orbit. Hundreds of political prisoners returned home and hundreds of thousands, including members of my family,

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for political offenses committed during the reign of Joseph Stalin.

But as the historian Benjamin Nathans makes plain in “To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause,” an exhaustive chronicle of the ******* dissident movement (based on more than two decades of a research into a mountain of K.G.B. case files, unpublished diaries and private correspondence), the ***** that would ultimately incinerate the U.S.S.R. was lit much earlier, in the ’50s, after the ****** of Stalin and the ascendance of Nikita Khrushchev.

The so-called Khrushchev Thaw, beginning with the new leader’s “secret speech” denouncing Stalin before the 1956 Congress of the ********** Party, put an end to four decades of state ******* and mass incarceration in the gulag, the country’s extensive network of forced labor camps. ******* authorities even cautiously allowed in a trickle of Western art, literature and cinema, contributing to what Nathans calls a general “loosening of inhibitions.” For millions of newly released ******* citizens, it felt, in the Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s indelible phrase, like “the return of breathing.”

Although de-Stalinization did not proceed in a straight line, the erosion of participatory dictatorship created an opening for ******* citizens to try out “new ways of living,” Nathans writes. The early ******* style of control through the specter of mass ******* had been put to rest. It was during this post-totalitarian “vegetarian epoch,” as the writer and educator Nadezhda Mandelstam once put it, that the ******* dissident movement was born.

Unlike their countercultural counterparts in Berkeley, Paris and Berlin, Russian dissidents were tired of their government’s tradition of mass rallies and popular marches. These first “children of the ******* system,” as Nathans calls them, were also laboring under repressive conditions without parallel in the West. Their main vehicle for protest took the form of self-published texts relayed hand-to-hand or sometimes flung from department store balconies, scattered in metro stations, and, with any luck, amplified by Western journalists and NGOs.

In ******** democracies, the word “movement” conjures images of mass marches and pickets and labor stoppages, of activists militating against unjust legislation. In contrast to the ********* tradition of civil disobedience, ******* dissidents took to “******** civil obedience,” Nathans explains, demanding that the state abide by its own legal frameworks, which guaranteed freedom of speech and judicial transparency. “They pretended that the constitution of the U.S.S.R.,” he writes, “was the law of the land.”

Police interrogators tied themselves in knots trying to pin an actual ****** on their suspects. In one typical exchange, an interrogator asks Alexander Volpin, the originator of the ******** obedience approach, why he came to Pushkin Square on ******* Constitution Day with a homemade sign that read RESPECT THE ******* CONSTITUTION. “So that people would respect the ******* Constitution,” Volpin replied in a characteristic deadpan style that his wife, who was very familiar with it, described as “absolutely precise and utterly devoid of information.”

Most ******* dissidents suffered awful fates — locked up in prisons or psych wards, exiled in Siberia. But even under questioning, many of them remained defiantly good-humored, an attitude that would have been unthinkable during the show trials of the ’30s. Confronted with evidence of politically suspect activity, such as signing a petition, dissidents routinely pleaded drunkenness. One scientist in Kyiv famously told authorities that he’d been seduced into signing a group letter by an attractive Ph.D., cementing into history one of the more memorable catchphrases among ******* dissidents: “I couldn’t turn her down.”

Although the movement, such as it was, had largely evaporated by the late ’80s, it successfully seeded the mainstream public discourse. Even Gorbachev dressed his reforms in the language of dissent, sprinkling in words like “democratization” and “transparency.” “We take no offense at Gorbachev and his associates for not citing us as sources,” the historian Ludmilla Alexeyeva wrote at the time. “We are happy that our ideas are acquiring new life.” The Russian leader did eventually acknowledge the influence, not long after resigning from his post as head of a defunct and discredited empire. ******** obedience had “left traces,” he wrote in his 1995 memoir, “if not in our political structures, then in our minds.”

The ******* dissidents did not directly cause the empire’s collapse, but they did much to drain the regime in Moscow of moral legitimacy. The movement presented a model, Nathans writes, for “the possibilities for public engagement under circumstances that appeared even more hopeless than our own.” In an unfree country, to paraphrase the essayist Andrei Amalrik, the first step is to act as if you’re already free.

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TO THE SUCCESS OF OUR HOPELESS CAUSE: The Many Lives of the ******* Dissident Movement | By Benjamin Nathans | Princeton University Press | 797 pp. | $39.95

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