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

Benjamin Nathans traces the Soviet dissident movement from the years after Stalin's death, when the regime's methods of suppressing opposition shifted away from mass execution toward subtler tools, psychiatric confinement, internal exile, harassment and shorter prison terms, into the movement's fullest flowering in the 1960s and 1970s. At the center of Nathans's account sits Alexander Volpin, the son of the poet Sergei Esenin, who pioneered a strategy of legalism: rather than confronting the Soviet state on ideological grounds it could simply crush, Volpin and those who followed his example demanded that the government abide by its own published constitution and laws, a tactic that forced Soviet authorities into the awkward position of violating rules they claimed to uphold.

Nathans follows that strategy through the movement's best known figures, the poet Joseph Brodsky, tried and exiled for social parasitism in a case that became an early rallying point, the novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and the human rights campaigner Sergei Kovalev, showing how a loose network of writers, scientists and ordinary citizens built a movement out of samizdat publishing, underground bulletins and the deliberate, patient use of Soviet law against the state that wrote it.

Nathans closes by contrasting that era with the Russia of Vladimir Putin, arguing that the legal terrain dissidents once exploited, however dangerous, has narrowed into what he calls a feral state, where opponents now face assassination rather than the comparatively survivable legal battles Volpin's generation waged. It suits a reader interested in how dissent actually functions under authoritarian rule, told through the specific tactics a movement invented rather than through a general history of Soviet repression.