Disturbers of the Peace

Soviet dissidents​ saw things differently from those around them and asserted their right to do so. This was a phenomenon of the post-Stalin period, and specifically of the second half of the 1960s and the 1970s: the aftermath of Khrushchev’s Thaw, which happens to be the period in which I first encountered the Soviet Union as a British exchange student in Moscow. Naturally their dissenting opinions tended to be unpopular with their fellow citizens. Equally naturally, given the Cold War, the opposite was true in the West, where they were greatly admired.

I had my own dissenting opinion about the dissidents back then: I thought they were an annoying distraction. This was in part a reaction to the uncritical publicity Soviet dissidents received in the Western press, where they were seen as heroes and moral exemplars, and more broadly to the Cold War, which generated both the publicity and the aura of sanctity. As a graduate student in Soviet history at St Antony’s, Oxford’s ‘spy college’, I saw some of the Western myth-making close up. But my attitude was also formed by personal experience. I was brought up in Australia, where my father – a bohemian intellectual who reflexively opposed the government on any issue of free speech – had invented the professional dissident role for himself. In his case that meant shunning paid employment in favour of unpaid freelance ‘civil liberties’ (what we would now call human rights) activity, much of it conducted in the pub. I therefore grew up with a strong feeling that dissidence, morally admirable though it might appear, was basically a lifestyle choice, fun for natural troublemakers but tough on their families. When I first went to Moscow, in 1966, it was with a firm determination to avoid the two categories of locals easiest for a foreigner to meet: dissidents on the one hand, KGB informers on the other.

Given these prejudices, it’s lucky that it was not I but the fair-minded Benjamin Nathans who set out to write the history of Soviet dissidents. He likes them, but stays this side of idolatry. Their appeal as oddballs with strong, if not always logical, convictions and an instinctive resistance to authority is clear from his account, but he also recognises that their moral stands were often impractical. For people who represented themselves as democrats, they had a striking lack of interest in or regard for the views of ordinary people, and their sometimes mischievous baiting of the powers that be could be seen as both elitist and childish. Nathans presents his gallery of dissidents as idiosyncratic characters with disparate views and concerns, often larger than life, with a self-confidence and contempt for conformity and its agents that might seem surprising in the context of the society they came from. His claims for their long-term historical significance are modest (even as he devotes almost eight hundred pages to their story). Since they despised politics, they never achieved or tried to achieve any kind of political organisation, so that even during Gorbachev’s perestroika, under a leader who – unlike any of his predecessors – actually shared some of their ideas, they played only a minor role. With the collapse of the Soviet Union (and, along with it, the Soviet intelligentsia, of which they were an offshoot), the dissidents disappeared from the historical scene. As of 2013, Nathans reports, fewer than one in five Russians polled by an independent agency recognised any of the dissidents’ names.

If a Western public had been polled, particularly those of a certain age, the results would surely have been different. Even if you leave out Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who might be called the greatest of all Soviet dissidents had he not disclaimed all connection with the movement, the names retain some of their resonance. Some of the dissidents were famous largely for being famous in contemporary Western media coverage. But the physicist Andrei Sakharov was a genuine high achiever in his field who had a well worked-out human rights message. General Petr Grigorenko was a professor at a military academy. Pavel Litvinov, grandson of Maxim, Stalin’s foreign minister, had a famous relative, as did Petr Yakir, son of the military commander Iona Yakir, and Alexander Esenin-Volpin, son of the poet Sergei Esenin, whose suicide was one of the Moscow sensations of the 1920s. Mathematicians, including Volpin and Natan Sharansky, a Jewish former chess prodigy who would later become an important figure in Israeli politics, were over-represented, as were physicists. Lev Kopelev, a Communist journalist, was unusual in that his troubles with the regime (for associating with party Oppositionists) went back to the 1920s. Andrei Amalrik and Vladimir Bukovsky were both expelled from Moscow State University, the former for challenging conventional wisdom in his history dissertation, the latter for criticising the Soviet youth organization, the Komsomol. Amalrik’s Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984? (1970) was a bestseller in the Anglophone world, and many other books by dissidents – Sakharov’s Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968); Kopelev’s Education of a True Believer (1978); Bukovsky’s To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissident (1978) – were translated, widely reviewed and popular with book clubs, making Soviet dissident writing a significant subgenre of non-fiction publishing in the US and UK throughout the 1970s.

The dissidents are sometimes seen as heirs to the radical tradition of the pre-revolutionary Russian intelligentsia. Nathans questions this, noting that, unlike their 19th-century predecessors, they had no interest in ‘going to the people’, either to enlighten them or to rally their support for a political cause. (This applies particularly to the early Moscow dissidents meeting round kitchen tables – Lyudmila Alexeyeva, Volpin, Yuli Daniel and his then wife Larisa Bogoraz and the like. The nationalist non-Russians who joined the movement later, including Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians, were more interested and successful in reaching a wider domestic public.) Under the old Russian empire, the radicals and revolutionaries who challenged the autocratic regime usually did so under the banner of socialism, but they won the applause of European liberals even so. Soviet dissidents, similarly, were often seen as ‘anti-Soviet’ opponents of the regime, not least by the KGB, which was endlessly exasperated by their ability to garner sympathetic attention in the West. Yet Nathans argues strongly for the dissidents’ essential Sovietness. The first generation to be born and educated in Soviet times, they accepted (though without any keen interest) the basic ‘socialist’ institutions of Soviet society: national health, free education, emancipation of women, nationalised industry. They did not aim to overthrow the Soviet regime, and (at least initially) rejected the ‘anti-Soviet’ label. What tended to arouse their indignation were blatant violations or hypocritical invocations of the Soviet ideology they had been taught to respect. For many, personal exposure to injustice played a role. Some, like Yakir, were the children of privileged parents whose security suddenly evaporated when their fathers were arrested in the Great Purges. Others, like Litvinov, came from Jewish families whose long-standing Soviet commitments and established status within the Soviet intelligentsia were shockingly called into question by the antisemitic campaign of Stalin’s last years.

The dissidents’ questioning of established Soviet truths itself had Soviet roots. Many had come of age in the period after Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ of 1956, when citizen critiques of Soviet society and the Stalinist legacy were not just permitted but almost required. A whole cohort of young people experienced the allure of passionate ‘truth-telling’ in groups of the like-minded. The regime’s priorities shifted after Brezhnev took office in 1964, with social and political critique no longer encouraged (though not definitively discouraged). But not everybody was ready to join the chorus of conformists. Much of the Soviet intelligentsia was appalled by the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and some signed public letters condemning it. When this had adverse consequences at work for individual ‘signers’, most drew in their horns. But for others, it was the first step along the not yet defined path of dissidence.

In Nathans’s account, personal relations mattered almost as much to the early dissidents as the right to criticise. The original dissident ‘around the kitchen table’ gatherings were outgrowths of the informal small-group socialising that flourished among young people during the Thaw period, with a high value placed on sincerity and loyalty to one’s friends. The Thaw, a novella from 1954 by Ilya Ehrenburg, a popular and well-connected writer and former war correspondent, gave the period its defining metaphor; it was about relationships that a few years earlier had been frozen but could now, with the coming of spring, become closer and more meaningful. This embrace of personal authenticity – an interestingly parallel development to the American ‘Sixties’ – was central to the approach of Nathans’s most sympathetic dissident figures, Alexeyeva and her circle in Moscow.

While the dissidents can be seen as heirs to the tradition of the Thaw, they weren’t the only claimants to that title, or even the most prominent in the Soviet Union. In the late 1950s and 1960s, most members of the intelligentsia read reform-oriented journals such as Novy Mir, which lobbied political leaders for support in its constant struggle with the state censors to get works like Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich into print. Novy Mir’s editors described themselves as Marxist-Leninists, committed to a better version of Soviet socialism. They kept their distance from the West, and strongly repudiated any suggestion that their efforts were in any sense ‘anti-Soviet’. The paper had a huge following, with copies passed from hand to hand, and particularly ‘daring’ articles and stories (often about the Gulag, collectivisation or some other aspect of the Stalinist legacy) endlessly discussed around those kitchen tables.

Dissidents who declared themselves apolitical, had no clear programme and consorted with Westerners were a big problem for Novy Mir – not just as competitors for moral authority within the intelligentsia but because their promiscuous westernising and (in Novy Mir’s view) irresponsibility tainted the reputation of all advocates of reform in the Soviet Union. I spent a fair amount of time among the Novy Mir crowd while I was an exchange student, so I returned to England even more sceptical about the dissidents than I had been when I left. I didn’t know Maya Zlobina, a freelancer associated with Novy Mir, and learned of her pseudonymous roman-à-clef, Sacred Paths to Wilful Freedom, circulated in samizdat in the early 1970s, only by reading the account in Nathans’s book – but I certainly recognised the combination of admiration, pity and, above all, irritation that her female protagonist felt about her impractical layabout dissident husband. Zlobina’s all too accurate reportage was harshly criticised by Larisa Bogoraz and other dissidents, but everybody knew that engagement in dissent tended to disrupt the lives of bystanders as well as protagonists. As the ex-wife of one dissident put it, they were ‘disturbers of the peace’.

But becoming a dissident wasn’t always just a lifestyle choice. The intellectual history of the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s was dotted with cases of people who started off trying to address a particular ‘delicate’ Soviet issue, sometimes by writing about it in Novy Mir, and were then so frustrated and harassed by Soviet officialdom, not to mention colleagues in the Writers’ Union, that they ended up defying the de facto Soviet prohibition on publishing work abroad outside official channels. This is what happened to the historian Roy Medvedev (whose Leninist critique of Stalinism, Let History Judge, came out in English in 1971) and his twin brother, Zhores Medvedev, a biologist who tried to expose the persecution of Soviet geneticists under Trofim Lysenko, a powerful figure in the Soviet Academy of Sciences and proponent of pseudo-scientific Lamarckism. Solzhenitsyn, who began as a Novy Mir author before repudiating its editors’ Sovietness to embrace Russianness and religion, followed a similar path in the early stages of his writing career. So did the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, who in a notorious public trial in 1966 were convicted of breaking Soviet law (Article 70 of the Soviet Criminal Code on ‘propaganda and agitation intended to assist the international bourgeoisie’) by publishing their work abroad.

The Sinyavsky-Daniel trial aroused great indignation and alarm among the Soviet intelligentsia, and Article 70 was surely one of a number of Stalin-era provisions that reform-minded Soviet lawyers would have liked to change. But dissidents took a different approach, in the form of Volpin’s eccentric insistence that in their treatment of Sinyavsky and Daniel the authorities were in fact failing to follow the letter of Soviet law, or even betraying the constitution. Volpin’s attack didn’t lead to any noticeable improvement in Soviet legal practice, but it did bring him into repeated confrontation with the state: he was one of the first dissidents to be sent for psychiatric treatment, essentially as punishment for wrong thinking – though, to be sure, there were those in Moscow who thought him a suitable case for treatment regardless of politics.

The fuzzy boundary between thinking differently and psychiatric disturbance is, of course, a familiar problem for dissidents everywhere. I have my own childhood memories from the Cold War 1950s: a friend of my father’s once tried to walk across the waters of Port Phillip Bay to reach visiting Soviet ships. Volpin’s legalistic approach, which Nathans finds odd, is quite familiar to me. Demonstrating that bureaucrats and politicians are not following their own rules is part of the universal repertoire of dissident one-upmanship. There was nothing my father enjoyed more than hoisting the Australian government by its own petard by arguing that on some free-speech issue it was breaking the law – even though, like Volpin, he was not a lawyer and had no particular admiration for his country’s legal system.

Challenges​ to authority like Volpin’s quickly attracted the attention of the KGB. The dissidents and the KGB devoted an excessive amount of attention to each other, persisting in their game of wits. The KGB of the post-Stalin era was no longer in the business of wholesale arrests, let alone basically random ones like those of the Great Terror of the 1930s. It did arrest individual dissidents, but only when there was a reason, as with Volpin’s accusation that the authorities were ignoring their own laws or Sinyavsky’s publication of work abroad. Under the leadership of a future general secretary of the Party, Yuri Andropov, the KGB was into prophylaxis, which meant calling in people who looked as if they might be going off the rails and giving them a talking to. That didn’t usually work with the dissidents, some of whom clearly enjoyed (as my father would have done) the cut and thrust of such interchanges and worked out elaborate ways of making fools of their KGB interlocutors.

If the dissidents’ criticisms at first lacked focus, beyond insistence on the right to be critical, the KGB soon unwittingly provided it by subjecting dissidents to arrests, trials, labour camp sentences and forced emigration (this was not a revival of mass terror, but targeted and small-scale). These acts of persecution naturally became the dissidents’ chief topic in discussions with one another and with foreign correspondents. When the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel went wrong from the KGB standpoint, with the accused making good use of their right to speak and the prosecutors fumbling, dissidents circulated a transcript on the basis of notes surreptitiously made in court. The production of texts documenting the repression became a major dissident activity, notably in the Chronicle of Current Events, a multi-authored collective project that required hours of information-gathering, sorting and typing (with carbon copies) and was distributed primarily to Western media rather than Soviet readers. Over time, dissidence inevitably embraced its performative aspect, creating ‘elaborate moral spectacles that ended in labour camps’, as Nathans puts it. I remember the strangeness, in 1970s Moscow, of seeing a small group of dissidents standing outside the Lenin Library holding up posters written only in English, for the benefit of foreign TV cameras. Whatever the initial stimulus of protest, it was the reaction it provoked from Soviet authorities and the coverage in foreign media – all duly reported in samizdat – that was ultimately the point.

For the dissidents, the foreign connection was crucial. The West, not the Soviet public, became their audience – a conscious tactic on the part of some, for others just the way things turned out. Western correspondents in the Soviet Union – bored, hemmed in by annoying restrictions on their newsgathering and generally unsympathetic to the place (it was the Cold War, after all) – were eager to make contact with dissidents, and the dissidents (in contrast to the reformers in Novy Mir) generally welcomed such contact. The term ‘dissident’ itself was foreign, used by Western correspondents to describe what they saw as an emergent political opposition to the Soviet regime, before being absorbed into Russian as dissidenty. The dissidents themselves preferred to be called independent, non-mainstream thinkers (inakomysliashchie).

In Soviet terms, consorting with foreigners still carried the suspicion of treason. This was not an absolute. Part of the ethos of the Thaw had been to reach across closed borders. We foreign exchange students, admitted thanks to intergovernmental agreements made in the Khrushchev years, lived with Soviet students in university dormitories and were more or less free to mingle with the population. But that was a unique privilege. Diplomats and journalists were housed in special apartment blocks for foreigners, under the eye of regime-appointed handlers, and shopped at special stores. Journalists’ encounters with dissidents thus had an element of secrecy that added to the excitement.

The official Soviet press, which occasionally ran exposés on such contacts, portrayed the Westerners as acting for foreign intelligence agencies and the dissidents as being bribed with Johnnie Walker whisky and Marlboro cigarettes. But that was a caricature, unfair to both sides. Real friendships developed between individual foreign correspondents and dissidents, partly thanks to the social isolation both groups suffered in Moscow. The Washington Post’s correspondent Peter Osnos would break ranks in 1977 and criticise the Western press for its uncritical support of the dissidents and inflation of their significance. But the courting of Western support never became a seriously divisive issue among the dissidents themselves, despite the fact that it compromised them in the eyes of many Soviet citizens. As soon as publicising their mistreatment by the Soviet regime became the dissidents’ main business, the contact with Western correspondents was essential.

Through the correspondents – and, later, through NGOs like Amnesty International that took up the dissident cause – the dissidents acquired something like a megaphone in the West. The correspondents (and sometimes other foreigners in Moscow) smuggled manuscripts through customs in their luggage or sent them out via foreign embassies, whose personnel – like the CIA and MI6 – were sympathetic to the cause. Once in the West, as well as being translated and published for local audiences, the dissidents’ protests were disseminated back to the Soviet Union in Russian and other languages by foreign radio stations. To great Soviet annoyance, Radio Liberty, Voice of America and the BBC World Service – referred to collectively as ‘the Voices’ – beamed propaganda as well as news, jazz and Western pop songs straight into Soviet apartments via shortwave radio. Many citizens who would not have described themselves as dissidents quietly became regular late-night listeners.

Thus the dissidents, despite being indifferent about reaching a Soviet popular audience, ended up doing so anyway, thanks to their Western friends. It was a Cold War bonanza for the West, including Western intelligence agencies, and a constant worry for the KGB, which for years couldn’t find a way to break the cycle. Arresting dissidents and sending them to the Gulag only provided grist to the mill of ‘anti-Soviet’ publicity in the West and on the Voices. The expedient they finally hit on, forcing individual dissidents to emigrate and cancelling their citizenship, had obvious disadvantages in reputational and propaganda terms. Dissidents living abroad were not forgotten by Western media, and their ‘anti-Soviet’ works added to the materials available for broadcast back to the Soviet Union.

The dissidents’ emergence was also a bonanza for Russian émigré anti-Soviet organisations like the People’s Labour Union (NTS), a conspiratorial organisation dedicated to the overthrow of the Soviet Union, which had a history of collaboration with the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s, and after the war with the CIA. As well as occasionally, with CIA help, dropping agents into the Soviet Union to sow subversion, NTS produced Russian-language journals for circulation in the diaspora as well as smuggling into the Soviet Union: Posev and Grani, both based in West Germany, published dissident texts with or without the authors’ permission. While NTS claimed the dissidents as kindred spirits, the dissidents themselves were often wary of it – though by no means as wary as Novy Mir, which suffered the same embarrassing embrace. If NTS’s ‘conspiratorial methods and advocacy of armed insurrection, not to mention its language, made it an anathema in dissident circles’, as Nathans reports, that probably applied mainly to the early Moscow and Leningrad dissident circles. For dissidents forced to live abroad, émigré journals including those of NTS were a valuable outlet for Russian-language publication.

‘To the success of our hopeless cause’ was a standard toast around dissident kitchen tables, Nathans says, though it was never clear exactly what the cause was, and the dissident physicist Yuri Orlov refused to drink to it, on the grounds that if he thought the cause was hopeless, he would have found other ways to spend his time. But it was also apparently a favourite toast of NTS’s Secret Sector in the 1950s, and in this context the nature of the ‘hopeless cause’ was unambiguous: the overthrow of the Soviet Union. In Nathans’s view, this was absolutely not the dissidents’ cause. Certainly it doesn’t fit the original Moscow dissidents, sitting around kitchen tables with their friends, but eventually Cold War logic pushed the dissidents towards the Western ‘anti-Soviet’ side. In Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?, Amalrik wrote that he hoped ‘to be rewarded a hundred-fold [for his demonstration of the futility of all things Soviet] by becoming a witness to that state’s end’.

Did​ the Soviet dissidents have an impact on history? Nathans wants to dissociate himself from the simplistic argument that they caused the collapse of the Soviet Union, and this perhaps leads him to be too modest in assessing their historical importance. Against my will – since I was always sceptical about their significance – I now, in retrospect, see several areas where they had an effect. The first was the erosion of Soviet legitimacy among the intelligentsia, to which samizdat and the Voices (including their dissident content) made a major contribution. When I was an exchange student in the late 1960s, the dissidents were seen as a marginal group, with most people (i.e. most members of the intelligentsia that a foreigner might meet) still subscribing to the Thaw’s premise that socialism was fine in principle: it was just the practice that needed improvement. But that changed. Hopes of in-system reform declined (Novy Mir was defanged in 1970) and consciousness that people lived better in the West increased. People saw that they wanted more: consumer goods for the broad public, cultural liberalisation for the intelligentsia. The dissident critiques that came in via foreign radio and samizdat had by now stopped sounding outrageous, particularly to the young. But the perspectives of the middle-aged were adjusting as well. They were aware that, to their children, uncoerced expressions of ‘Soviet patriotism’ had become social solecisms. While they might still profess to prefer the BBC World Service to Radio Liberty, on aesthetic or intellectual grounds, it was now more heterodox in intelligentsia circles to call oneself a ‘Marxist-Leninist’ than to be an avowed listener to the Voices.

Non-Russian, nationalist forms of dissent play a secondary role in Nathans’s account, partly because the Moscow dissidents were ‘wary’ of them, seeing them as too political (in seeking to recruit and organise support) and too narrow in their concerns (Alexeyeva thought Ukrainian activists were interested in ‘the defence of only one right – the right of equality on the basis of nationality’, and then ‘only if Ukrainians were involved’). Yet national dissent grew in the 1970s, with nationalist Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Tatars, Jews and others protesting against historical and current mistreatment. Their protests, too, were played back and amplified by the Voices, and taken up forcefully by Western human rights groups including Amnesty International. This surely laid some sort of foundation for the nationalist upsurge of perestroika and the subsequent disintegration of the Soviet Union on national lines.

Finally, there is the question of the impact of Soviet dissidents on the Cold War. Nathans dismisses the triumphalist argument that the 1975 Helsinki Accords, and subsequent relentless campaigns by human rights organisations over their violation in the treatment of Soviet dissidents, brought about the Soviet Union’s collapse: after all, that didn’t happen for another fifteen years. But while it goes against the grain for me to concede a point to triumphalists, historical impacts don’t have to be immediate. The campaign obviously hurt not just the Soviet Union but also both Western and Soviet efforts to achieve détente and a (non-triumphalist) conclusion to the Cold War. In the US, Henry Kissinger and George Kennan complained bitterly of the constant impediment to arms control negotiations created by the international human rights movement’s support of Soviet dissidents, and the Soviet ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, agreed that the failure of détente ‘was due in no small measure to the toxic atmosphere generated by the cycle of Soviet rights-defenders producing evidence of the Kremlin’s non-compliance with the Final Act [of the Helsinki Accords], the American levering of that evidence, and the KGB’s brutal repression of those who delivered it’. No doubt this was largely an unintended consequence as far as human-rights activists were concerned. As for the dissidents themselves, determinedly apolitical (or just narrowly focused on their own affairs), they rarely expressed any opinion about détente, pro or con.

A special case of Cold War impact was the campaign for Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union, supported by international human rights advocates, energetically campaigned for by Jewish organisations worldwide, and a central issue in the superpowers’ tussle after the US Congress passed the Jackson-Vanik amendment of 1974 restricting trade with countries that denied free emigration. Soviet dissidents were naturally in favour of free emigration on principle, and in legalistic mode could argue that, while it wasn’t explicitly guaranteed by the Soviet constitution, it was also not forbidden, which amounted to implicit acceptance. But, in contrast to the international campaigners, they didn’t see it as a specifically Jewish issue, since, regardless of nationality, nobody was free to emigrate from the Soviet Union. The position stated by Valery Chalidze, a Moscow-born Georgian human rights activist deprived of Soviet citizenship in 1972, was that ‘not just Jews but every Soviet citizen … should have the right to leave the country.’ The situation was complicated, however, by the fact that a disproportionate number of the dissidents were Jewish, and many paid for their dissidence by being forced or encouraged by the KGB to emigrate, often to Israel. Jewish emigration wasn’t particularly a Soviet dissident issue; rather, by a train of historical circumstances, it became a common Soviet dissident fate.

Nathans concludes with the hope that, despite the black hole in Russian memory into which the dissidents have currently fallen, they may someday be rediscovered by Russian historians and myth-makers and made part of a ‘usable past’ for the nation. As he points out, this happened to wartime anti-Nazis in Germany in the 1970s after decades of German amnesia. I must have mellowed on the dissidents, because I now feel some sympathy with this hope. After all, I was pleased when, a decade or so after his death in 1965, my father was taken, in a small way, into the mythology of the Australian left. It’s brave of dissidents to take on the authorities and fight for principle, regardless of the inconvenience to those around them, and even if they get a kick out of it. On reflection, though, I don’t think this outcome is likely for Soviet dissidents, and that’s the final irony. The German anti-Nazis were German. The Soviet dissidents were, no doubt, Soviet, but that’s not an identity that exists anymore. In Russian historical memory, thanks to the involuntary mixing of the Soviet dissident issue with that of Jewish emigration, they ended up as Soviet Jews who emigrated, and there’s no usable past for Russians in that.