'To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement' by Benjamin Nathans

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To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans

In the Soviet Union, death or imprisonment were the penalties for openly opposing Lenin. Under his successor, Stalin, even casual friends or distant relatives of suspected opponents were swept away in a relentless campaign of terror. With Stalin’s death in 1953, the surviving leaders of his regime, frightened by his excesses, launched a cautious policy of freeing political prisoners and diminishing the fear factor. 

Historian Benjamin Nathans examines the resulting “loosening of inhibitions” in To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause. His title comes from the toast raised by dissidents at their gatherings and exemplifies their mingled sense of hope and hopelessness. Few imagined or even desired the end of the Soviet Union. Their motivations were often to shame the Soviet regime into obeying its own constitution, which like constitutions everywhere include rote phrases about freedom and protection from arbitrary prosecution. The earliest wave of dissidents was the first generation educated according to Leninist dogma and many found it hard, at least at first, to think beyond the categories they were taught.  

Other dissidents tapped instead into Russia’s rich tradition of anarchism. For them, “it was not just a matter of rejecting the oppressive and structure of the Communist Party; it was about rejecting hierarchy and structure as such in favor of what activists of our own time call horizontality,” Nathan writes. Regardless of their ideology, in a nation where overt protest was punishable under an array of statutes with sentences that included confinement to prisons or mental hospitals (especially for noteworthy dissidents), dissent often took the form of illegal, self-published writings, samizdat, usually produced by typewriter and carbon paper and circulated clandestinely. 

The KGB was especially alarmed when the contents of samizdat made their way westward for broadcast to the Soviet Bloc by U.S. and other foreign radio stations, causing dissenting views to spread more widely. The global acclaim for leading dissidents such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov tarnished the Soviet image as the vanguard of human progress. Even Communists in western nations began to harbor doubts about the Kremlin’s version of reality. 

In the end, the dissidents did not cause the Soviet Union to unravel or the Bolsheviks to fall, but their intellectual agitation encouraged reformers within the Communist Party, notably Mikhail Gorbachev, to think differently than their predecessors. Nathan conducted exhaustive research in KGB archives and the diaries of dissidents. However, there were many dissident movements, including those driven by religion or nationalism. To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause focuses mainly on Russian secularists and his magisterial volume will have to be accompanied by works from other authors chronicling opposition within a state as vast and diverse as the Soviet Union. 

Get To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause at Amazon here.

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