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Soviet dissidents who challenged the Kremlin
00:51:42
Benjamin Nathans discusses how dissidents within the Soviet Union mounted a sustained campaign of 'civil obedience' after Stalin's death, compelling the Kremlin to live up to its own laws
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Benjamin Nathans
Foreign.
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Danny Byrd
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine in the years following Stalin's death in 1953, a new phenomenon emerged within the Soviet Union. So called dissidents. Preferring to think of themselves as rights defenders, these individuals advocated a form of civil disobedience, a demand that the state abide by its own constitution and the basic rights and freedoms that it promised on paper. Historian Benjamin Nathans explores this extraordinary movement in his book to the Success of Our Hopeless Cause, and Danny Byrd spoke to him to find out more. Benjamin's book is nominated for this year's Kundal History Prize. If you want to find out more about the prize and the other nominated books, then head to kundalprize.com what first.
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Interviewer (Danny Byrd)
Drew you to the world of the dissident movement within the Soviet Union?
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Benjamin Nathans
The question that really animated me was how do people who live in authoritarian or non democratic societies construe their options for political engagement? What's the repertoire that's available to them? Or what new forms do they invent to to adapt to their surroundings? And for me, because of my training, the Soviet Union was always going to be the sort of central case study in that inquiry. But I recognized at the time that it was kind of a general question that could apply to many places in many different time periods. I mean Russia today, China today, Iran today, North Korea today. So the book really tries to be a complete history from beginning to end of the Soviet dissident movement and especially those who were interested in civil rights and human rights. So the period covered is really from the early 1960s to the early 1980s, just up to the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
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Interviewer (Danny Byrd)
Now your book's title to the Success of Our Hopeless Cause is a curious one. What was the inspiration behind that?
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Benjamin Nathans
That title was a gift to me from the dissident movement. That was one of their favorite toasts that they would make over kitchen tables in their apartments in Moscow and Kyiv and Leningrad, now St. Petersburg and quite a few other cities. And for me it perfectly encapsulates the sort of emotional coloration of the movement and specifically the way it managed to combine in one movement and in many cases in one person, in each individual person's mind and heart, this really enigmatic blend of boldness and despair to the success of a movement that is acknowledged as being essentially hopeless. And to keep both of those moods and ideas in the same mind at the same time is an amazing thing to accomplish.
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Interviewer (Danny Byrd)
And that begs the question, what exactly was their aim? Did they have a coherent joined up strategy?
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Benjamin Nathans
They did. And especially the people that I focus on, who are the so called rights defenders in Russian. The word is, they didn't particularly like the word dissident and we can talk about that later if you want. They really liked the term rights defender. And that was the essence of their strategy, which was to defend and make real the rights that were already enshrined in the Soviet constitution and the Soviet code of criminal procedure. So in a nutshell, their goal was to turn the Soviet Union into a rule of law state, a law abiding country in which the existing one, rules and laws would be honored not just on paper but in practice. And to do that they tried to spread or heighten legal consciousness among the Soviet population.
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Interviewer (Danny Byrd)
I wonder if we could focus a little bit on the context of your book in terms of the period of time that you dwell on, because you talk a lot about this carnivorous period before, which is obviously very much associated with the totalitarian regime of Stalin and, and what followed him, which was obviously Khrushchev's fall and everything that came with that. Could you paint a picture of the sort of Soviet Union that we're dealing with at this time?
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Benjamin Nathans
Yes, and I'm glad you raised that issue because the two halves of Soviet history, the half up to Stalin's death and the half after Stalin's death, are dramatically different. As you mentioned, the so called carnivorous era of Russian history, or Soviet history, is the one with the most spectacular drama and the most spectacular mass violence. The revolution, the civil war, the famines, the forced collectivization, the application of state sponsored terror against millions of Soviet citizens, the construction of the Gulag. I mean, history doesn't get more dramatic than the first act of the Soviet era, the act from 1917 to 1953, and many treatments of the second act of Soviet history, the one after Stalin, really don't find much of interest until we get to the sort of prehistory of the collapse. And of course the collapse of the Soviet Union, while it's not particularly violent, is extremely dramatic and caught everyone off guard, and I do mean pretty much everyone. So what I have tried to show is that there is a really compelling drama and human story unfolding in the second half of Soviet history. But it's not a violent one. It's a very moving one to me. And that is the spectacle of a society attempting to extricate itself precisely from this totalitarian legacy. It starts with Stalin's successors, in particular Nikita Khrushchev, who have recognized something that anybody could have seen and people saw at the time, which was that the pattern of using state sponsored violence was devastating the Communist Party itself. One of the most dangerous things you could be in the Stalin period was a high ranking Communist official. Those are the people he went after in many cases as potential or imagined or hallucinated rivals or threats to his own power. And honestly, the most dangerous thing you could be was a member of the security apparatus, that is the apparatus that was carrying out these campaigns of mass arrest and mass executions. So initially, if only as an act of self preservation, Khrushchev wanted to put an end to that kind of violence. But the impact was to basically remove that technique of governance from the repertoire of the Communist Party and to embark on this really world changing experiment. Can you run the Soviet system without the use of mass terror? That was the, the wager that Khrushchev embarked on in 1956, and that was a game changer for the dissident movement that would emerge about a decade later.
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Interviewer (Danny Byrd)
The book also traces dissidents reliance on older current from before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Liberal, Orthodox and even Tolstoyan. Were they consciously drawing on those traditions or did the parallels emerge later on?
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Benjamin Nathans
They were absolutely drawing on those traditions, intentionally and consciously. As a matter of fact, they were emphatic about understanding themselves as the heirs of the 19th century Radical or progressive Russian intelligentsia. And it's no surprise that they chose that particular pedigree. That after all, is the glory of Russian history, the literature and the moral testimony that the 19th century intelligentsia produced is possibly the greatest thing that Russia has contributed to world civilization. People in Russia today certainly still feel that way, as does the state. I mean, you may remember at the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, the closing ceremony featured an elaborate Russian parade in which they were carrying enormous pictures of their great writers, you know, of Pushkin and of Gogol and of Lermotov and Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and on and on and on. I mean, that tradition is the noblest patrimony that one can claim. However, in my book, I try to argue that while it's significant that they tried to inscribe themselves in that particular lineage, in fact, we won't really understand Soviet dissidents if we just see them as the descendants of the 19th century intelligentsia. They were Soviet people, they were made by the Soviet system, they were formed by it intellectually, culturally, and I try to understand them as Soviet people formed by and responding to their own time and place.
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Interviewer (Danny Byrd)
Could you describe the practical ways that dissidents organized themselves, both through things like samizdat, underground networks or human rights campaigns, and how these evolved over time?
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Benjamin Nathans
Yes, that in some ways is the chief through line of the book, is the repertoire of resistance that developed and changed and had to be reformatted over time. I want to emphasize at the outset that we're talking about a very, very small number of, in relation to the total Soviet population. You know, at its height, maybe 1,000 or 2,000 core activists in a population of roughly 250 million. Now, the number of sympathizers was far greater, and we can talk about that later. But your question is really about the techniques of dissent. The thing that's really crucial to understand about this movement is that precisely because it's ultimate goal was the rule of law, they themselves operated strictly within the rule of the Soviet legal system. In contrast to the technique of civil disobedience, which was pioneered by Henry David Thoreau in my country, in the United States and in Russia by Lev Tolstoy, the great writer, and eventually was embraced by Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi and other 20th century figures, the Soviet dissident movement was really about civil obedience, about forms of protest and activism that were explicitly protected by the Soviet Constitution. As paradoxical as it may sound, the Soviet constitution, ratified in 1936, very near the height of Stalin's terror, actually had some pretty robust civil liberties. Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press. It's true that they were all bracketed by the conditioning factor that those things all had to be performed in the interests of the working class and building socialism. But nonetheless, the language actually provided some traction, and it was, in a way, the genius of the Soviet dissonant movement and particularly its Sort of intellectual godfather, this mathematician, Alexander Volpin, to use the language of civil rights from the Soviet Constitution as a form of leverage, as a way of saying we are going to perform certain kinds of protest that are strictly legal. And we want, by doing that, to set an example for how the state should also honor the limits placed on it by the Soviet constitution. So one way to think of their strategy is as a form of containment of state power, of placing limits on what the state can do to its own population. This is not the Cold War containment that was articulated by the American diplomat scholar George Kennan. You know, the strategy of containing Soviet expansionism. It's a form of containment exercised domestically using the legal system, the Soviet legal system, rather than the American military and other international strategies. Samizdat is a Russian neologism, which is a fancy word for new word, an invented word that came into being in the mid-1950s. And it's a play on words. So there is an element of humor. It's essentially a mimicry of the names of typical state owned publishing houses. And all of the publishing houses in the Soviet Union were state owned. And it's also an abbreviation. So if the official name of a publishing house was, say, which means literally state publisher, that would be abbreviated as gos isdat sam. ISDAT is a play on that form, but it means I published it myself. Sam means self, and isdat is either the verb to publish or an abbreviation of publisher. And what it refers to is the practice of disseminating texts not by passing them through the gauntlet of the censorship and editorial interventions and then the physical publication of a book itself, rather doing an end run around that process and simply creating texts by using typewriters, very thin onion skin paper and carbon paper. And you would alternate onion skin and carbon paper. Some people could do up to 10 levels. And they would wind that raft of sheets around the platen of a typewriter and you would pound the keys as hard as you could as you either created or copied a text that had been given to you or more likely, lent to you for 24 hours, so that one copy became 10. And then when those were disseminated, kind of like a chain letter, the 10 would become 100. And before you know it, thousands and even tens of thousands of people would have samizdat in their hands. When you pick up a piece of samizdat, and I own several examples of it, and there are many others that are in museums and archives and other manuscript collections, it looks very unimpressive. It's Usually ragged pieces of paper. There are traces of human sweat and typewriter ink on them. It lacks any element of elegance. However, those very qualities that make it look rather rough and literally rough edged are also a sign that there are only X number of links between you and the creator of that text, who may have been Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who may have been Andrei Sakharov. So it's this sense of belonging to the world's most transgressive book club ever. There's a sense of danger in these texts which gives them, quite apart from their content, a real excitement. Samizdat is the root word of a family of words, and you mentioned one of the other ones, tamizdat. Again, there's a joke built into this. Tam is the Russian word for there or over there. And that refers to what happened when a work of samizdat was smuggled by a journalist like you, or a diplomat or a tourist, or anybody who managed to get a manuscript out of the Soviet Union. And it would make its way to, just to choose an example, the BBC. And the BBC might have interest in publishing that as a text. Whoever published it, if it was published over there, which usually meant in the west, it could then be smuggled back into the Soviet Union now as a book. And it would be a very small format book in most cases, to make the smuggling job easier, if it was a really interesting text that lent itself to what we would now call audiobook format, the BBC, having come into the possession of such a text, would then broadcast it on its world Service. And as you know, the BBC had a Russian language service, still does, to reach listeners in the Soviet Union or today's Russia. And a very substantial number of samistat texts became what we now call audiobooks, and were transmitted now not to thousands or tens of thousands, but to millions of listeners on the other side of the Iron Curtain. So this was the most fantastic communications network you can imagine. Dissidents could communicate with their neighbors via the BBC on a mass scale. That's a remarkable fact of the Cold War.
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Interviewer (Danny Byrd)
And I believe you also reference in the book how the dissidents looked to some of the international agreements and treaties which had come in the wake of the Second World War.
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Benjamin Nathans
Yes, I mean, initially, this really begins as a civil rights movement, and I would say the first civil rights movement within the socialist world. But it gradually morphs into a human rights movement when the desired traction that the dissidents hoped they could gain vis a vis their own government, placing limits on what it could do according to Soviet law failed to work. It failed absolutely to work. Hundreds and hundreds of petitions and open letters and protests failed to elicit a single response, a single written response from the Soviet government. The Communist Party simply did not want to enter into dialogue with these people. And so the only response that the dissidents received was took the form of arrests, harassments, firing from one's job, graduate students kicked out of their universities, and various other extrajudicial forms of punishment. These were relatively mild compared to what the Stalinist government had done to people. But they did have a significant impact on the movement. They intimidated a lot of people, these various threats. And that's when gradually and without a lot of conscious deliberation, the language of the movement gradually shifted from Soviet civil rights to international human rights. And that ended up being a very consequential shift because it all of a sudden made the dissidents a player in the Cold War because now they were bringing attention to the world about Soviet violations of international accords, especially the civil rights accord pacts that had been signed under the sponsorship of the United Nations. And so that injected the human rights issue into Cold War tensions, which was a very powerful but also a very dangerous move on their part.
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Benjamin Nathans
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Benjamin Nathans
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Interviewer (Danny Byrd)
Now, you've mentioned that the dissidents had quite a minor role within the general Soviet population, and that they had some appeal, but very little appeal compared to things such as the civil rights movement that was happening in the United States at the same time. And I was just curious to know a little bit about how did the Kremlin respond to the dissidents? What tactics did it deploy to contain, control them?
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Benjamin Nathans
Well, the operative unit of the Soviet state that did the responding and did the strategizing about how to deal with this movement was less the Kremlin than the kgb. They worked closely together. But certainly during the period when Leonid Brezhnev was the leader of the Soviet Union and the head of the Communist Party, he consistently preferred for the kgb, whose leader, Yuri Andropov, eventually became a Politburo member. He really preferred for Andropov and the KGB to handle this problem. He did not particularly to deal with it. So the KGB initially was really kind of flummoxed by the dissident movement. It had lots and lots of experience, decades of experience, dealing with other kinds of problems, dealing with nationalists, dealing with fascists, dealing with monarchists, dealing with Christian believers, In other words, dealing with all kinds of people who rejected the fundamental tenets of the Soviet system, including those who wanted to overthrow and destroy the Soviet state. The KGB knew how to handle these people, sometimes violently. What it had no experience with were people whose public slogan was defend the Soviet Constitution. So this was a really weird problem. These people appeared to be highly patriotic and pro Soviet. And they certainly described themselves as pro Soviet. And whenever a Western commentator would refer to them as anti communist or anti Soviet, they were adamant about rejecting that definition. As a matter of fact, they didn't even think of themselves as politically engaged people, as strange as that sounds. They really thought they were just defending the existing Soviet legal system. So it took a while for the KGB to get its bearings and drop off. Was a very smart guy, a very forward looking thinker, and he created a new division within the kgb, the so called Fifth Directorate, to deal specifically with this problem. And part of the reinvention of Soviet power after Stalin's death that we were discussing before involved at least an attempt by the security apparatus to operate within the boundary of the law, which was not a hallmark of the security services under Stalin. They were notorious for their lawlessness. But Khrushchev and the KGB leadership itself wanted to operate within the law. And so initially the KGB strategy was arrest dissidents, put them on trial, have a real trial with real evidence, convict them, that was a given, and punish them with imprisonment or internal exile or a sentence at a hard labor camp. And that, in fact, is what they did. And in every case, or nearly every case, 99% of the cases, they got their guilty verdicts. In fact, they got their guilty verdicts before the trial was held, because the KGB would call the judge and say, okay, you're going to give so and so five years, and so and so will get seven. And that's in fact what happened. But there was at least the attempt to have something like a legal process before the punishments were enacted. The problem was that even though the verdict was always guilty, the public relations fallout of these trials was always bad for the KGB and for the Soviet state. They always made the dissidents look like martyrs. They made them famous. They arrested people who nobody had heard of, and then turned them into front page news in the west and also in the samizdat underground print world. So that strategy wasn't working very well. And that's when the KGB retreated from using the law and courts and started all kinds of extrajudicial punishment, the most notorious of which was simply placing troublemakers in psychiatric institutions indefinitely and completely outside the reach of the law. But there were many other techniques. Getting people fired, making sure their kids would never get into a university, cutting their salary in half. All of these were extrajudicial techniques that the KGB used on a massive scale, hundreds of thousands of people.
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Interviewer (Danny Byrd)
You show also how the dissident movement courted Western attention and support. How did this international spotlight shape both the possibilities and dangers of dissent within the USSR during this time?
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Benjamin Nathans
It was really the failure of a civil rights strategy that pushed the movement to embrace a global audience. And now invoking human rights rather than Soviet civil rights. I would argue that that was over determined. I mean, they certainly tried everything. They could establish a dialogue with the Soviet state, but year in and year out, it just wasn't working. Add to that the fact that the most receptive audience for their ideas and their activism was precisely in the west, in Europe, in Great Britain, in the United States, where the dissidents became the darlings of really the entire political spectrum. Liberals loved them because they seemed to speak the language of liberalism, of rights and the rule of law. Conservatives loved them because conservatives hated the Soviet Union and its government. And the dissidents looked like fantastic weapons in the Cold War. Not the military or threatened Cold war, but the war of ideas, the battle of ideas, the struggle for hearts and minds. So they had the most receptive audience imaginable in the West. And when I Say audience, I mean both ordinary citizens who sympathized with the plights of dissidents who were being punished by their own government. I also mean NGOs, especially human rights NGOs. And preeminent among them was Amnesty International, with its headquarters in London. They established the closest and longest lasting ties with the dissident movement. And I did quite a bit of work in Amnesty's archive. And there were absolutely fascinating conversations both within Amnesty and between Amnesty and the dissidents about how this relationship might work. It was not an easy one, not a simple one, despite the ideological affinity. And eventually the Western audience included Western states. The United States Congress, for example, recognized that the dissidents and their message of human rights was just an outstanding source of leverage against the Soviets in the Cold War context. So the dissidents discovered a form of leverage that was more powerful than all of their domestic demonstrations put together. But it was also very dangerous because like most authoritarian governments, the Kremlin absolutely insisted on its monopoly over foreign policy. They did not want any compromise about who could influence the Soviet Union's relationship with the outside world and above all, its relationship with its preeminent antagonist, the United States. So once the dissidents entered that force field, they did gain a huge amount of leverage, but they exposed themselves to the wrath of the regime. And the death of the movement really comes in as a result of their becoming entangled in that Cold War antagonism. And that's when the KGB decided to crack down really quite harshly at the end of the 70s and early 80s, sending almost everybody into prison, exile, or a labor camp.
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Interviewer (Danny Byrd)
A key moment you highlight in your book was the 1968 Red Square protest. Could you tell me about that event and why so little is known about it?
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Benjamin Nathans
That event took place on August 25, 1968. It is considered certainly the most glorious 15 minutes in the history of the Soviet dissident movement. It made a huge impression on people around the world at the time, and it remains a point of memory and pride among opponents to the current regime in Russia. And there are many parallels between the events that instigated the protest in 1968 and the war in Ukraine that's going on right now. So in a nutshell, here's what happened. A reform movement was gathering steam in Czechoslovakia, which was a Soviet ally. This is known as the Prague Spring. It began early 1968, and it involved many of the same issues that Soviet dissidents had already been thinking about and becoming active in for three years. Civil liberties, civil rights, putting an end to censorship, creating real freedom of the press, and so on. So Soviet dissidents were watching the Prague Spring and gaining inspiration for it and hoping that something analogous might happen in Moscow. And people did start referring to a Moscow Spring. The Soviet Union, of course, the leadership, that is, was very nervous about this. And they were especially concerned because the reform wing of the Czechoslovak Communist Party was part of this reform movement. So it was not just a citizens movement. It was really the left edge of the party, or left and right don't really mean the same things in this setting, but the progressive edge of the party was participating in this. After a lot of back and forth and a lot of threats and a lot of negotiations, Brezhnev made the fateful decision to invade Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968. And this was a turning point, needless to say, in relations between the Soviet Union and its East European allies. But it was also a turning point for the dissident movement. And I describe how eight exceedingly brave individuals decided that they couldn't let this act go without some kind of public statement. And so they gathered in Red Square, the symbolic epicenter of the Soviet universe, the most politically resonant space inside the Soviet Union. And they gathered there and held up signs with a variety of slogans, the most famous of which is for your freedom and ours, which was borrowed from the 19th century movement of Polish liberals, Polish protesters against Russian imperial domination. The KGB knew about the protests in advance. Several of the protesters had never met before, which tells you a lot about how loose and almost anarchic this movement was. In addition to the fact that only eight showed up, they knew they would be arrested. There was no doubt about that. Many of them suspected that they might never see their friends and family again. There was no telling what the KGB would do to such a brazen act of protest, disproving the Soviet claim that the Soviet population unanimously supported this so called act of fraternal assistance to Czechoslovakia. And the protest on Red Square also entered into the bloodstream of this communications network that we were talking about earlier. Even though there was no photographic evidence of the protest, they botched their agreement with foreign journalists in Moscow, who were supposed to show up shortly before the protest began and document it with their cameras and with their live coverage as eyewitnesses. That didn't work because of some scheduling confusion. But what did happen was news of the protest reached the BBC, which beamed a Russian language broadcast about it four hours after the event itself. So roughly 4pm Moscow time, and the fact that the BBC was able to report this event in what we would now call real time was like an earthquake for Soviet listeners. One of them who listened to that broadcast later wrote in his diary, where is the Iron Curtain? How can we even talk of an Iron Curtain when we can get news from London about what's happening in our own backyard just hours within the event? So both the event itself and the media coverage of the event were staggeringly powerful for a Soviet audience. It's an extraordinary story. It's been commemorated many, many times. And the eight individuals who participated in that event that became practically part of their name, they were forever known as one of the brave protesters on August 25, 1968.
- [33:43]
Interviewer (Danny Byrd)
Looking beyond 1968, can you tell me a little bit about what happened to the dissidents in the decade that followed?
- [33:51]
Benjamin Nathans
Yes. As a result of the extrajudicial harassment and worse of people who had signed those petitions and those open letters begging with the Soviet government or demanding that the Soviet government honor its own constitution, that campaign of intimidation was rather effective. And the movement's ability to gather, say, 100 or 200 signatures on an open protest letter with names and sometimes addresses and phone numbers, it diminished over time. And furthermore, the entire strategy of assembling those kinds of letters began to feel more and more pointless. They really didn't have results to show for all of those efforts and all of the risk that they had subjected themselves and their friends and their family members to. And after the demonstration in Red Square, there was another important tactical shift. Very briefly, inside the Soviet movement, there had been a kind of fault line between people who really liked the quasi anarchic flavor of the movement, where there were no leaders, there were no followers, there were no assigned roles, there were no formal membership, no formal division of labor. Everybody acted according to his or her own conscience. And if you felt that you could not live with yourself if you didn't come out and say something about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, then you showed up on Red Square on that Sunday in August. But it was considered bad form to pressure people to come to protests. Everybody should decide on their own. And that ethos of voluntarism and conscience driven activism was a powerful wing of the movement. There was another wing as well, and that consisted of people who said, well, conscience is nice and voluntarism is nice, but if we really want to accomplish something, we need a division of labor. We need to have roles, we need to have followers and leaders, we need to have a strategy worked out and specific tactics. And the argument between these Two wings which had really been hidden from historians view because obviously they wanted to keep it secret. They didn't want to reveal their own divisions. The argument, it never really got settled on an intellectual basis. Nobody really won the argument. What happens is that the leading, the most prominent voluntarists, the most prominent conscience driven people were the ones who went to that protest on Red Square in August of 1968. And they all got arrested and sentenced to five, six, seven years of internal exile. So they were removed from the argument. They didn't lose the argument, they were just taken away. And in the aftermath of that demonstration, the organization folks won the day. And they were true to their word. They started having won that argument de facto. They started founding organizations. Already in 1969 and 1970, the first dissident organizations start coming into view. One of them is called the Initiative Group for the Defense of Civil Rights in the Soviet Union. Another is called the Human Rights Committee, of which Andrei Sakharov is a member. And eventually Solzhenitsyn briefly becomes a member of that committee. And so the dissident movement enters a new phase of its history. It's no longer trying to collect as many signatures as possible as it can on protest letters because that technique just wasn't working. And instead it starts to organize itself into what we in the west would call NGOs, non governmental organizations. And Amnesty International becomes the most important, most inspiring model for many of those organizations. As a matter of fact, by 1973, Soviet dissidents found the Moscow branch of Amnesty International, the first branch of that organization behind the Iron Curtain, which is extremely controversial, not just inside the Soviet Union, but for Amnesty itself. It's. Amnesty is very comfortable with adopting Soviet prisoners of conscience. That's the language that Amnesty itself used. What it wasn't used to was having those guys be members of their organization. And there are a couple of chapters in the book where I describe the very uneasy, unfamiliar conversation between Amnesty's headquarters in London and the Soviet dissidents who essentially announce that they are now members of the organization. It's a fascinating story.
- [38:25]
Interviewer (Danny Byrd)
Moving on slightly to the 1980s and of course, Gorbachev's introduction of the concepts of glasnost and perestroika, openness and restructuring respectively, essentially making the very language of dissent official Soviet policy. I was just wondering, how did the dissidents themselves react to a figure within the Communist Party adopting their ideas? Essentially, yes.
- [38:49]
Benjamin Nathans
A good deal of Gorbachev's vocabulary, I think, can be traced back to the movement. Although he never described it that way. And while he was in office, it would have been political suicide to admit even an iota of influence by the dissidents. That was just unthinkable for a Soviet leader or any member of the political elite or the Communist Party. In his memoirs, after he stepped down from office and after the Soviet Union ceased to exist, he mentions Sakharov and his intellectual and spiritual influence on the country. But it's all very kind of high altitude vague. But it's clear that some of Gorbachev's vocabulary, especially the word glasnost, which means transparency or openness or publicity, was taken from the dissident's vocabulary. I should add, though, just so that we have a fully sober view of this issue, that much of Gorbachev's agenda had almost nothing to do with the dissident movement. The dissidents took almost no interest in economic reform. They didn't think the economy mattered. They were intellectuals, and they really thought mostly about civil liberties and culture and ideas. And for Gorbachev, the economy was central. It was absolutely central to his reform. So I don't want to overstate the influence of the dissidents. You asked about their reaction. Initially, dissidents reacted to Gorbachev's rise. And remember, this is Gorbachev becomes general secretary in 1985, March of 1985, and his reform agenda, known as perestroika, really kicks in early 1987. So initially, Soviet dissidents, whether they were still in the Soviet Union or watching things from abroad, like everybody else, they were skeptical. They assumed that this was a lot of hot air, that he could talk the talk, but nothing was really going to change because that was the story of the Soviet Union for so much of the post war era. Lots of talk of reform, some significant reform under Khrushchev, the elimination of terror as an instrument of governance. But a lot of other reforms went nowhere. Eventually, though, it became pretty clear that Gorbachev was not only serious, but quite radical. He was not only a man, as Margaret Thatcher put it, you could do business with, but somebody whose ability to think outside the box, outside the Soviet box was like no other Soviet leaders. And then they started realizing this guy actually wants to democratize the country. And I mean, I interviewed quite a few dissidents and I've tried to read as many of their memoirs as I could. I never heard anybody express resentment or envy or any notion along the lines of he stole our ideas and he didn't even give us credit. I never heard that or read that. What I did encounter was people saying how wonderful it was that someone inside the Kremlin was finally realizing the power of these ideas. The most important statement about the dissident response to Gorbachev was by a woman named Lyudmila Alexeeva, one of the crucial dissidents present, really, from the beginning to the end and even after the dissident movement was no longer a going concern. Alexeeva was one of the handful of dissidents who, having been exiled, returned to the Soviet Union and then Russia and actually tried to become, and did become politically engaged. She served on the Moscow Helsinki Committee. She eventually became part of the Russian government's own human rights mechanism. Didn't end up working out very well. She did try to work with Putin in his early years, but it quickly became apparent that their goals were not really commensurate. But her reaction in her memoirs was along the lines of, we didn't care that Gorbachev wasn't acknowledging our use of those terms. We were just thrilled that now someone inside the Kremlin was speaking that language.
- [42:49]
Interviewer (Danny Byrd)
I think it's very interesting because you raised the point, of course, that a lot of the dissidents had been born and raised within the Soviet Union themselves. They hadn't known anything before the revolution. And Gorbachev, of course, is the first Soviet leader born after the revolution. That's an interesting coincidence, I think, that this man ends up in that position.
- [43:08]
Benjamin Nathans
Yes. And it's, I think, very important when you try to understand Gorbachev, to realize that in some ways, like the dissidents, he was not just a Soviet person, but kind of a poster child for Soviet values. Gorbachev was a man of tremendous idealism, trying to operate in a sea of cynicism. He took Leninism and the ideals of socialism and socialist democracy more seriously than anybody else in the Politburo. And even though I wouldn't say the dissidents were particularly enamored of Lenin, most of those who actually read Lenin were kind of appalled by what they found. But in a more general sense, the high mindedness of the movement, the fidelity to Soviet principle in the form of the Soviet legal system, is in a way parallel to the idealism that Gorbachev brought to the Kremlin.
- [44:04]
Interviewer (Danny Byrd)
You argue that Soviet dissent was less about grabbing political power and more about bearing moral witness. What did that mean in practice for the people involved? And how has that shaped Russia's political culture? Since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
- [44:17]
Benjamin Nathans
In 1991, Soviet dissidents never aspired to achieve power themselves. They never thought that the result of their movement would be to topple the Soviet government. And in fact, like many Soviet people born after 1917 who witnessed the epic scales of violence unleashed by that revolution and the decades that followed, they were allergic to revolutionary upheaval. The last thing they would have wanted for their country was a repetition of what the bolsheviks enacted in 1917. So they were peaceful, explicitly non violent, and emphatically law abiding protesters. You asked me early on in our conversation about the goals of the movement, and I should just say that they failed to achieve their own stated goals. They did not make the Soviet state more law abiding. If anything, the KGB's frustration with the outcome of trial after trial where they got the guilty verdicts. But they made the dissidents, the defendants, look like martyrs, and they made the Soviet government look like scoundrels. If anything, that pushed the KGB to be less law abiding than it already was. But like so many things in history, the unintended consequences of this movement were far more important and significant historically than the failure to achieve the intended consequences. And the unintended consequence of this movement involved showing the world and the Soviet people over and over again that this government, which constantly talked about itself, in fact, could not shut up about itself as the vanguard of human history, as the most progressive, scientifically advanced society the world had ever seen. That same government was revealed to be incapable or unwilling to obey its own laws over and over and over again. And the effect of that, if you will, unmasking of the essential lawlessness of the Soviet state was to deprive that state of much of its legitimacy. The legitimacy of the state was getting hollowed out by the way it behaved vis a vis the dissident movement. And that hollowness, that brittleness, is, I think, essential to understanding why the Soviet Union, a superpower, arms to the teeth, collapsed like a house of cards with almost not a single shot being fired. You could only understand the suddenness of the Soviet collapse if you realized that it was already hollow on the inside. And you could only understand why it became hollow if you include, among other factors, including a really poorly performing economy, if you include the effect of the dissident movement campaign, which inadvertently showed everybody that this, this government could not obey its own laws.
- [47:23]
Interviewer (Danny Byrd)
Finally, Ben, I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about how the dissident movement is remembered today in Russia and whether any of its traditions continue.
- [47:34]
Benjamin Nathans
You know, originally I wrote a totally different conclusion to this book. This was prior to the full scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. And my first version of the conclusion was going to be to sort of trace the afterlife of the dissident movement, its reputational ups and downs in post Soviet Russia. And then on the eve of that full scale invasion, Putin methodically eliminated the three most important institutional legacies. One of them the Memorial Society, which was the leading human rights NGO in post Soviet Russia. But another one was the Andrei Sakharov center in Moscow, which was an important civil society organization. And the third was the Moscow Helsinki Group, a direct continuation of an organization founded by dissidents in 1975. All three were liquidated. So the legacy of the movement in today's Russia, first of all, is weak. I cite a public opinion poll from, I believe it was 2006 or 7 that showed that only one in five Russian adults, adults in the Russian Federation, could name the name of a single dissident. One in five. And when I say a single dissident, I'm including people like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn. So there's a lot of just sheer forgetting and ignorance of the movement's legacy. There are people who regard the dissidents as heroes, as people who helped bring down Communist tyranny. But there are also many Russians who regard the Soviet dissidents as traitors to their country, as people who destroyed a mighty empire and deprived today's Russians of the kind of respect and, let's be frank, fear that they enjoyed on the international arena prior to the Soviet collapse. So the institutional legacy of the movement has been wiped out. I won't say permanently, because there are still people in today's Russian Federation who are preserving that legacy, especially the archives of those three institutions.
- [49:42]
Danny Byrd
That was Benjamin Nathan's speaking to Danny Bird. Benjamin is professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. His book on this subject is called to the Success of Our Hopeless the Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement. The book's nominated for this year's Kundal History Prize. And if you want to find out more about the prize and the other nominees, then go to kundalprize.com.
- [50:11]
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- [51:41]
Greg Jenner
Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of youf're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously. Each week I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past. In our all new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed, from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg brothers. Listen to youo're Dead to Me Now. Wherever you get your podcasts.