Adrian Matus – historian of Central Europe and editor of the Review of Democracy – reviews Benjamin Nathans’ To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, Princeton University Press, 2024, 761p.
How did the dissident circles from the Soviet Union develop into a concrete movement that first aimed to set limits on the Soviet state and then to challenge it? This pungent question has stirred academic debates virtually from the moment dissident movements emerged, debates which increased exponentially after the fall of Soviet regimes. By now, the scholarly canon on Soviet-era dissent is vast and it stretches from analysing the role of dissident movements in shaping public discourse and public memory, as Barbara Martin’s 2021 book Dissident Histories in the Soviet Union does, to proposing new frameworks within the post-revisionist context to understand this phenomenon (such as Alexei Yurchak does in his 2006 work Everything Was Forever Until Was No More) or even more recent developments that focus on less visible cases, such as hippies, as with Juliane Fürst’s 2020 book Flowers through Concrete. Yet, some topics have remained unclarified up to this day.
Emerging in this context, Benjamin Nathans’ well-documented book To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause offers a fresh exploration of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union.
As a historian of Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union, modern European Jewish history and the history of human rights, Nathans uses his intimate familiarity with the broader historical context and relevant archives to create an account of the dissident movement in the USSR.
Throughout this work, the author draws our attention primarily to the legalist movement, whose example can reveal broader patterns about the connections between dissidents throughout late socialism.
Before focusing on the main claims, it is important to signal that the author’s conceptual framework nuances the political undertones of the problematic word dissident. As the introduction and first chapters argue, some of the intellectual groups preferred to be labelled as inakomysliashchie in Russian (literally: people who think differently) (p.13). Two problems arose with this term: first of all, inakomysliashchie was difficult to render in foreign languages. Moreover, it put a clear emphasis on the act of thinking. Other groups preferred the terms pravozashchitniki (right-defenders) or zakonniki (legalists) in Russian. As Nathans emphasizes though, inakomysliashchie “appealed to the vanities of the intelligentsia” (p.13). While in the introduction and the first chapter Nathans critiques in a relevant manner the label “dissident” that was used both by Soviet and West European media, his emphasis on concepts such as zakonniki and pravozashchitniki does not amount to an alternative conceptual framework and risks overlooking the everyday forms of opposition that do fit these concepts.
One of the author’s intriguing claims is that the mid-1950s was the moment when the Soviet Union started to fall apart. In the wake of the return of prisoners from the Gulag, intellectuals like Andrei Sinyavsky, Yuli Daniel or Alexander Esenin-Volpin understood that Soviet society was itself like a prison. As Nathans argues to support this claim, “The reappearance of millions of former Gulag inmates in Soviet society – what the cultural historian Alexander Etkind has called “the return of the repressed” – revealed a deeper truth […]: The prison is in us” (p.72). Following Khrushchev’s famed speech in 1956, the intellectuals chose to focus on individual self-transformation to escape oppression.
To support his claim about mid-1950s as the beginning of the fall of the Soviet Union, Nathans follows lesser-known stories of dissidents through a rigorous archival investigation.
His main narrative, however, revolves around one character, Alexander Esenin-Volpin (1924-2016), whose life and activities are thoroughly discussed. Dissident and political prisoner over the course of his life, Volpin was the son of Sergei Yesenin, the famous Russian poet, and had a strong interest in logic, mathematics and legal studies from an early age.
His case serves as a foundation to make the wider claim that the methods of negotiating power were more diverse and complex than those used by the best-researched parts of the frontal, oppositional movement.
In many cases, dissidents used legal means and thereby exposed just how Kafkaesque the Soviet Union’s juridical decisions were. Facing the legalist movement that was born in the context of the return of Gulag prisoners, the juridical system had to confront new challenges that it never managed to resolve, a dynamic which Nathans underlines.
Volpin’s background in logics and mathematics shaped his reflections on the state’s role and led him to the concept of “civil obedience”.
As opposed to Gandhi’s concept of “civil disobedience” that was later used by other dissidents, this concept emphasized that the Soviet government should be convinced to obey its own set of laws.
Fundamental to it was the idea that rights were embedded in the Soviet legal system, and one could challenge the state’s decisions only through a vast knowledge of its legal intricacies; it implied that by obeying legal rules, one could effectively demand accountability.
The book highlights that through his intellectual rigor, Volpin managed to challenge arbitrary state decisions. Volpin’s approach was not instilled by any form of revolutionary romanticism, instead he claimed to respect the “rule of law”. The question that still has no complete answer is to what extent this strategy was simply a matter of legal rigorousness and not a commitment to confront on the long-term a state that continuously reinterpreted or simply ignored its laws.
By meticulously documenting Volpin and the biographies of other dissidents via their letter exchanges and other archival materials, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause sheds new light onto the entanglements between various groups in consolidating a cohesive movement.
A particular focus is Hélène Peltier, who was the daughter of the French naval attaché in Moscow of the late 1940s. Benjamin Nathans uses her case to show how these intellectual networks started to reflect their relationship with the Soviet state from a different ideological fundament.
Throughout the available transcripts of Sinyavsky’s numerous interrogations, Peltier is barely visible. Yet, Nathans manages to reveal an alternative story: Peltier – or “Lenochka,” as Sinyavsky called her – played a formative role in the development of certain dissident groups. Sinyavsky and Peltier met at the Philological Faculty of Moscow State University in 1947 and shortly developed a friendship. In the course of the discussions that followed their initial meeting, they both found it necessary to reframe their prior political opinions. Sharp disagreements followed, with an unexpected twist: “Sinyavsky’s claim, more than three decades later, that after confessing to Peltier ‘it was emotionally impossible for me to return to the ranks of moral and political unity with Soviet society,’ can probably be set aside as hyperbole, or ironic play with a stock Soviet phrase, or perhaps as the compression into a single event of what was in fact a series of seismic tremors” (p.69). Sinyavsky’s doubt, initially sparked by the discussions with Peltier on Western art, French Revolution, was doubled by the official attacks on formalism and abstract art by Andrei Zhdanov’s doctrine- a topic discussed between the two. The last element of this “gradual seismic tremors” that marked the ideological shift of Sinyavsky was the arrest of his father in 1950 on charges of anti-Soviet activities.
Such interventions reveal that Nathans’ book aims to explain how intellectual networks formed and functioned. The trajectory of the dissident movement was closely tied to informal friendships and networks that could survive through time, but did not necessarily do so. “The dissident movement began as a collection of small face-to-face communities bound by strong ties of intimate friendship and trust. In certain ways it never lost those qualities. The movement itself had many lives, punctuated by several near deaths”, he writes (p.621).
Remarkably, the author avoids the pitfall of idealizing his protagonists, which cannot be said about all historians who have investigated dissidents. Instead of reading romanticized biographies, the reader will discover the multiple layers of systemic incongruences created by the Soviet legal framework.
Thus, to explain the dissident movement from the USSR, the author chooses to tackle two main points: the complex mechanisms of dissident network-building and the possibility of agency within the legal framework.
To The Success of Our Hopeless Cause maps the Soviet system’s paradoxes and contradictions: it was a system that created legal frameworks to punish and repress dissidents, but retained certain laws that dissidents could exploit to their advantage.
This tension is underlined when the author follows the history of political trials. During the late Stalinist period, only 20 percent of such trials were conducted in regular courts. However, after 1956, most of the trials were held in regular courts, as cases were supposed to be based on verifiable evidence. The concept of “glasnost” in fact began to be used in this context, before it acquired another meaning in the 1980s: “the transparency meeting was part of the process whereby social trust hesitantly emerged from the fearful shadows of Stalinism. Volpin had been searching for an ideal language that would allow him to trust his own thoughts and communicate without ambiguity. He and the other participants in the transparency meeting were attempting to enact among themselves the very thing they demanded of the Soviet state: openness.” (p.97). Through such examples, Nathans argues that dissidents cleverly exploited such tensions.
At the same time, Nathans does not hesitate to place the dissidents’ specific claims into a broader socio-political context: “Dissidents did not criticize the USSR’s elaborate system of social and economic rights, from free childcare, medical care, and education (up through the post-secondary level) to subsidized housing and vacation. In fact, most showed little to no interest in the economy or how economic structures might inflict legal arrangements, including civil and political rights” (p.362) To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause concludes that their movement achieved its aim by understanding the principles behind the rule of law and through solid and trustworthy face-to-face communities bound by intimate friendships. When the dissident movement met extra-judicial persecution, it reinvented itself “as a series of small NGO-like associations buttressed by samizdat networks of communication, all of which operated under a state of siege by the KGB’s Fifth Directorate” (p.620).
A less convincing aspect of the book concerns the representativity of this group.
The over-emphasis on the legalist movement within the dissident movement, doubled by the focus on the Russian intelligentsia, makes Nathans underplay more centripetal movements that could not build and maintain a solid and stable network.
His argument about the elitism of the legalists could also have been more fully developed.
Nathans does recognize that judgements of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union were far from unequivocal: “While the dissident message seems to have resonated with a significant portion of the urban intelligentsia, many sympathetic bystanders came to regard dissidents as troublemakers who disrupted not just the performance of the Soviet play but a whole array of everyday mechanisms, many extra-legal, for coping with the Soviet system” (p.621). While the answer to the question about the interplay between law, judges and dissidents is tackled through explaining judiciary shifts in the Soviet Union, broader questions such as the internal impact of the legalist movements does not receive an encompassing answer.
At the same time, by combining the richness of primary sources with a focus on the rule of law, Nathans nonetheless provides new insights into the legalist movement. The post-Stalinist regime’s retreat from the use of mass terror in the 1950s enabled the development of broader, more impersonal, interest-driven networks and more expansive participation. By using alternative primary sources and a fine-grained micro-historical approach, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause reveals the important role of figures such as Hélène Peltier in defining the conceptual tools used by the dissidents. Although Nathans could have done more to develop an alternative conceptual framework, his critique of the elitism of the legalist movement is notable and resonates with other important works such as Yurchak’s Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More. Scholars working on the Soviet dissident movements as well as researchers who want to explore the multiple understandings of the concept of “rule of law” will find useful his balanced reading of legal texts, court proceedings and correspondence, which provides a nuanced understanding of the dawns and (dis)continuities of the dissident movement.
