Benjamin Nathans, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause

From February 1966, when the Soviet regime under Leonid Brezhnev put two writers on trial for publishing “anti-Soviet” work abroad, through March 1985 with the ascent to power of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet dissident movement gained widespread attention in Western news coverage. Despite the inevitable focus on East–West relations and the overriding concern of nuclear weapons and the prospects for détente, Western correspondents in Moscow found themselves preoccupied by an unexpected development: the emergence of individual activists representing a broad range of concerns within an enormous country whose people were assumed to be too cowed or too overcome by official propaganda to challenge a regime that dominated life in the Soviet state for nearly 75 years. “Western observers,” as Benjamin Nathans makes clear in his path-breaking history of the Soviet dissident movement, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause, were “unprepared for public manifestations of contrarian points of view” (p. 2).The Soviet human rights movement belied this assumption. When the regime arrested Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel in September 1965 for sending their literary work abroad, and under pseudonyms, it unwittingly unleashed a concerted effort by family members and friends to insist that the Soviet government hold an open trial. Nathans explores the origins of their protest with a fascinating opening chapter discussing the unlikely figure of Alexander Esenin-Volpin, an eccentric, brilliant mathematician (and the illegitimate son of the revered poet Sergei Esenin) who inspired a demonstration on behalf of Sinyavsky and Daniel on 5 December 1965—Soviet Constitution Day—when a few dozen supporters gathered in Moscow's Pushkin Square and quietly called for the regime to obey its own laws. Nathans, citing Volpin, refers to the demonstration as a “transparency meeting,” a call for glasnost or openness, the same term used two decades later for Gorbachev's reform campaign (p. 75).It is worth noting that Volpin and others did not initially appeal for the release of Sinyavsky and Daniel. Instead, they demanded a genuinely open trial. There was an instinctual fear that the trial would be “open” in the same way that the infamous purge trials of the 1930s had also been “open.” Back then, foreign diplomats and journalists were in the courtroom, watching as the defendants abased themselves by confessing to outlandish crimes. An “open” trial in 1966 would not preclude a kangaroo court, and no one knew how the defendants would handle themselves.This demonstration is now remembered as the first step in the Soviet human rights movement. By then, Volpin had already endured four separate confinements in psychiatric hospitals for his earlier acts of defiance, including for a volume of poetry and a philosophical essay that he had published in the West under the title A Leaf of Spring. He is the one who insisted that the best way to challenge Soviet officials was by calling on them to obey their own laws. This was not as simple a demand as U.S. citizens, brought up on the history of the civil rights movement, might expect. The regime, even at the height of the purges and Great Terror in the 1930s, hauled off vast numbers of people while relying on a façade of laws and trials to camouflage its repression.Many objected to Volpin's idea, convinced he was being naïve. They argued that the regime would not be deterred or embarrassed by such a demand. It is a credit to Nathans's approach that he draws the reader into Volpin's reasoning—which was heavily influenced by his immersion in mathematical logic and the emerging field of cybernetics—at the very outset of this book, grounding his narrative within the personalities and tensions in Moscow at that time and not assuming that a Western reader would take such an approach for granted and thereby assume that Soviet citizens would as well. As Nathans writes, “Volpin appears instead as the source of an idea that would come to serve as the movement's prime strategy as well as its central goal, an idea at once entirely consistent with the Soviet order and utterly foreign to many of those who grew up in it: that Soviet law should be taken seriously” (p. 23). What Volpin had in mind was, in a surprising way, more radical than the campaign of civil disobedience that characterized the civil rights movement. His version of “civil obedience” would come by “engaging in practices formally protected by Soviet law, such as freedom of assembly or transparency of judicial proceedings, but often subject to extra-judicial or even judicial punishment by the state” (p. 24).The young Vladimir Bukovsky was among those who answered Volpin's appeal. Detained in 1967 for organizing a demonstration on behalf of arrested friends—this was not his first arrest—Bukovsky soon came face-to-face with officials who could not understand why any Soviet citizen could take the laws seriously. As Volpin had insisted, Bukovsky and his friends acted as free, responsible citizens: they organized small, quiet demonstrations, documented political trials, and circulated non-conformist poetry in self-published anthologies. Such behavior confounded the regime, which preferred to contend with genuine conspiracies and even violence, as if convinced that all its enemies were similar to itself. Reluctant to bring Bukovsky to trial and thereby risk still more unfavorable publicity in the West, the regime subjected him to psychiatric abuse; he was said to be suffering from a mental disorder, hoping to discredit him and deter others from following his example. Cynical psychiatrists could be counted on to ascribe the dissidents’ tactics to mental illness. Bukovsky in his memoir, To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter, trans. by Michael Scammell (New York: Viking Press), p. 356, recalls having been told by a Soviet prison psychiatrist: “You keep talking about the Constitution and the laws, but what normal person takes Soviet laws seriously? You are living in an unreal world of your own invention, you react inadequately to the world around you.” Bukovsky concluded that “we were born so that Kafka could live” (ibid., p. 272). Nathans writes that “between 1960 and 1991, 674 cases of involuntary psychiatric confinement of individuals alleged to have committed various anti-Soviet acts have been documented” (p. 413).Telling the history of the Soviet human rights movement—or the dissident movement, as it is often called—poses a unique set of challenges. Enormous quantities of archival material and other primary sources are now available for a historian to explore, including well over a hundred memoirs by individual participants, shelves of samizdat documents, collections of declassified Soviet State Security (KGB) reports, and the files of independent organizations like Amnesty International that conducted their own research into the efforts of these activists and the reprisals they endured. One can also conduct interviews with veterans of the movement, even though many have died. In addition, there is the challenge of sorting out the tensions and misunderstandings that inevitably arose within a movement that involved a broad set of goals, whose government could at any moment target a particular individual or group and dispatch them to prison, a labor camp, or a psychiatric hospital. It is a tribute to Nathans's painstaking research that he has integrated an immense amount of material into a compelling account that combines a poignant and detailed portrait of the movement and many of its participants with an acute analysis of how and why they acted as they did.In a long and often eloquent book, Nathans takes us from the arrest and trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel, who were convicted of “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” and sentenced to seven and five years in the labor camps, respectively, to the emergence of a spontaneous movement of activists who rallied to defend others with petitions and demonstrations—the “chain reaction,” as he calls it; the creation of its first samizdat journal, The Chronicle of Current Events; the emergence of Andrei Sakharov as a leading voice of conscience; and a lonely demonstration of eight principled activists who unfurled handmade banners on Red Square to protest the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. All this in just the first three years of the movement's existence.It is here that the depth of Nathans's narrative takes shape. A “chain reaction” grew to include a series of demonstrations, political trials, and appeals. A group of activists emerged whose personalities and courage gained the attention of people inside and outside the country. Pavel Litvinov, Larisa Bogoraz, Andrei Amalrik, Aleksandr Ginzburg, Per Yakir, Vladimir Bukovsky, Natalia Gorbanevsakya, Anatoly Marchenko, Petro Grigorenko, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Andrei Sakharov, to name several of the best known—each of whom came to embody the outspoken courage of the dissidents. Under the most difficult conditions, they organized petition campaigns and demonstrations in public squares; met with foreign correspondents; visited friends in far-off places of exile; and supported the families of those who had been carted off to jails, prisons, and labor camps—all under the watchful eye of KGB agents who wiretapped their telephones, bugged their apartments, and followed them on buses and subway trains. The dissidents, in turn, prepared themselves for interrogations by consulting manuals that Volpin, Vladimir Albrekht, and others prepared—and that Nathans discusses in some detail—basing their advice on provisions of the Soviet legal codes that, at least on paper, guaranteed their rights to stay silent, deflect certain questions, or otherwise avoid assisting the police and prosecutors.One notable activist, the young physics teacher Pavel Litvinov (who was the grandson of the famous Soviet foreign minister Maksim Litvinov), was warned by the KGB not to circulate the transcript of two trials in 1967. Litvinov did more than ignore the warning; he published in the West an account of his talk with a KGB official, defying the regime and daring the Kremlin to react. By then, Moscow activists had established reliable contacts with Western correspondents, ensuring that news about the trials and further reprisals would reach not only Western publics but a growing Soviet audience, who could tune in to Radio Liberty, the Voice of America, or the British Broadcasting Corporation for news about their country that the Kremlin wanted to suppress. As Nathans observes, the dissident movement “excluded a host of other techniques commonly used by twentieth-century non-violent movements in other settings, such as strikes and labor shortages, pickets, civil disobedience, boycotts, street theater, and public processions” (p. 234). They never lost sight of where they were living.The year 1968 marked a turning point for the movement and its supporters. Here, again, Nathans provides an in-depth account, relying on memoirs, newspaper accounts, and even “KGB surveillance records” (p. 250) to clarify the drama and despair of that year. Three events deserve to be mentioned, if only briefly. Two years after the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel, the movement was maturing. Natalya Gorbanevskaya, with the help of others, began preparing the uncensored Chronicle of Current Events, in which she and her colleagues collected news of protests and reprisals from around the country, relying on a network of contacts in numerous cities to relay the information to editors in Moscow before compiling an issue and offering it for circulation. Here, the genius of samizdat took over. Without recourse to copying machines, let alone computers and the Internet, individuals committed themselves to making multiple copies of documents like the Chronicle using typewriters, onion skin paper, and carbon paper. They, in turn, handed copies to friends who reproduced the material in the same way, expanding the network of readers in a kind of geometric progression. Readers of the Chronicle could then see for themselves how public expressions of dissent were spreading around the country and how determined the regime was to stamp it out.Then, in June, a startling essay appeared in Moscow and quickly came to the attention of the West. This was Sakharov's first memorandum, “Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom.” Until that time, Sakharov, even though he was the principal designer of the Soviet hydrogen bomb and among the most highly decorated Soviet scientists, was a little-known figure inside and outside the country. But after his essay challenged the regime with its description of the continuing legacy of Stalinist dictatorship in Soviet society, he was deprived of his security clearance and barred from further work on nuclear weapons. On 22 July 1968, The New York Times carried the full translated text of his essay, enhancing its significance and the broader movement around him.At the same time, the Prague Spring (a remarkable period of liberalization in Czechoslovakia in 1968) was beginning to gain the attention of people around the world with its aspiration, led by a group of liberal, reform-minded Communist leaders, to create a society in Czechoslovakia based on “socialism with a human face.” In the end, Soviet leaders could not abide this challenge. In August 1968, Soviet and East European forces invaded Czechoslovakia and forcefully brought an end to the Prague Spring. The crackdown was a severe blow to Soviet dissidents as well, confirming their worst fear that the regime would never allow genuine, democratic reform to challenge its hold on power.But there were those who would not allow a feeling of hopelessness to undermine their resolve. On Sunday, 25 August 1968, eight activists gathered on Red Square at 12 noon and unfurled handmade banners against the invasion, including one that read “For your freedom and for ours,” the slogan of Russian democrats in the nineteenth century who came to understand that “a people that oppresses others cannot itself be free” (p. 251). They were quickly assaulted and hauled off by security personnel. Litvinov, Bogoraz, and Gorbanevskaya were among them. “The August 1968 demonstration in Red Square became the most celebrated fifteen minutes in the history of the Soviet dissident movement,” according to Nathans (p. 253). Litvinov and Bogoraz, along with Konstantin Babitsky, Vadim Delone, and Vladimir Dremlyuga, were brought to trial in October and sentenced to various terms of exile. Viktor Fainberg was instead dispatched to a psychiatric hospital; the police had knocked out four of his front teeth, making him “ill-suited for the courtroom” (p. 258). Gorbanevskaya was released altogether. As Nathans writes, “Gorbanevskaya, who authorities may not yet have realized was the editor of the samizdat Chronicle of Current Events, was released, either because no one wanted to put a nursing mother on trial or because she was likely to be as outspoken in court as she had been on Red Square—or both” (p. 260). The eighth, Tatyana Baeva, was arrested but “managed to convince the police that she was a bystander rather than a participant; she was released without charges” (p. 258).As Nathans makes clear, not all the dissidents were in their or They were not all One chapter in the is his of the that in an trial and in had emerged in the of the trial as one of the most activists in The son of the Red Yakir, who had been by in he had many years in a set for of of the In the after of in became a about the of the years. He then became involved in the dissidents’ at his Moscow where dissidents of all met to strategy (and the Soviet-led invasion of many activists became convinced that the movement to create an of some kind to challenge the regime and not on the spontaneous acts of individual and his Viktor who was also a from the led the effort to create the for the of which itself in from the the the and of and They without consulting other members and to petitions without the of people they were of of behavior among the to to the with as if he were to be a and to the regime itself. In with this way of that he would have the demonstration in Red he had the to avoid the arrest of such as Litvinov and Bogoraz, if the dissident movement were on a of rather than on by as Nathans (p. KGB was watching and and came to understand how they would be in their arrest in they in under had told his friends that he would not be to the of a many of with the they on more than others, a blow to the movement. It is a credit to Nathans's approach that he into this to and in a without from their of and and the their with the KGB on their In the end, they were convicted at a trial in August and then at a for more than Soviet and foreign journalists where they that and their had the law, the and so in with anti-Soviet organizations in the (p. The KGB in its To to the regime clear that it was now to arrest more in for issue of the Chronicle that to the movement and the Chronicle soon with at least some editors to take public for takes us through two more of the movement. In a he how the in by European country in to the and led unwittingly to the of human rights the Moscow supported the out of a to gain of the in the of that it had after the West insisted on a of which the Kremlin it could and then were used by activists in the Soviet and other to the Communist by their to with the human rights and of was the of the initially in they came to include in and of its own and found to them with the West, on the Soviet to the it had at least formally the Soviet regime carried out a crackdown on the members were under arrest by the of by the dissident movement in the Soviet to up for the of the The also the of human rights just as became of the and concern for human rights the of U.S. foreign Soviet invasion of in concerted crackdown on the dissidents. Sakharov objected so to the invasion that he was arrested and to in without even the of a trial. the few as Leonid Brezhnev was by and Konstantin of other dissidents were the Chronicle to be and other that to in of or were also for arrest or to the West. It was only the of to power in 1985 that the of human rights in the Soviet As Nathans the of his book, “The of the dissident movement is how so few people with so few to discredit so the to be a (p. have only one about Nathans's it is that his on the of the human rights dissidents in who the most attention of the Western and Western he not the of the movement on the of the human rights movement. It was the movement that political and to be against the the broader human rights movement could not the movement had a of most the of of of Soviet to and other Western at a time when the broader human rights movement, which so for democratic had few if any to

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