On Soviet dissidents.
by Gary Saul Morson – Winter 2024/25 – Claremont Review of Books
On August 20, 1968, the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies invaded Czechoslovakia to crush its “socialism with a human face.” The Soviet government declared that its own citizens unanimously supported the move. As poet Natalya Gorbanevskaya observed, “to cleanse [their] conscience” and “atone for…the historical guilt of [their] people,” dissenters from this official proclamation felt obliged to voice their opposition. “If even one person doesn’t approve of the ‘fraternal assistance’ [of the USSR],” she continued, “then the approval stops being unanimous.”
Five days later, eight dissidents gathered on Red Square to unfold homemade banners supporting the Czechs. Imitating activists in the American civil rights movement, they intended to stage a “sit-down demonstration” but almost immediately were attacked by disguised KGB agents shouting, “They’re all Yids!” and “Beat the anti-Soviets!” Within minutes three cars pulled up. Forced inside, the dissidents were hauled off to the police station.
Shortly before the invasion, author Anatoly Marchenko, who guessed from Soviet news reports what would happen, circulated an open letter addressed to editors of Soviet, Czech, and Western newspapers. The impending Soviet intervention, he maintained, was not about “protecting socialism.” It was designed primarily to prevent Soviet “workers, peasants and intelligentsia” from imitating their Czech counterparts and demanding “freedom of speech in practice and not only on paper.” Marchenko was arrested, ostensibly on another charge. The eight Red Square protestors were well aware they faced the same response.
In his splendid new study of Soviet dissidents, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, University of Pennsylvania historian Benjamin Nathans asks why they organized this and similar protests. They had no illusions about changing Soviet policy or public opinion. And the risks they faced were enormous. To be sure, conditions had improved markedly since the Stalin era—“people no longer returned from interrogations with their fingernails gone,” Nathans observes—but they were still horrific.
Constructing a Castle
The memoirs of Marchenko, Vladimir Bukovsky, Natan Sharansky, and Andrei Amalrik—all literary classics—mention, among other punishments, perpetually inadequate food. Prison hunger was no longer acutely agonizing, Bukovsky explains in To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter (1978), but “rather a prolonged process of chronic undernourishment.” After a while, every position was painful because “your bones were sticking out.” But “the most unpleasant thing of all,” Bukovsky observes, “was the sensation of having lost your personality. It was as if your soul, with all its intricacies, convolutions, hidden nooks and crannies, had been pressed into a giant flatiron, so that it was now as smooth and flat as a starched dickey.”
It was still worse if they put you in “the box,” a sort of prison within the prison. There, writes Bukovsky, “you get no paper, no pencil, and no books. They don’t take you out for exercise or to the bathhouse; you get fed only every other day.” It is almost completely dark, it is always cold, and at night you wake up every 15 minutes to warm yourself by running around. The hole in the ground serving as a toilet stinks to high heaven, and the walls are covered with gobs of bloody saliva left by tuberculosis sufferers. With nothing to do in the dark blankness, “gradually you lose all sense of reality…and the more time passes the more you turn into some sort of inanimate object…. Your body is no longer you, your thoughts are no longer yours; they come and go of their own accord.” You think: perhaps death is not just nothingness but something far worse, “an agonizing repetition, an unbearable sameness.” How can one stay sane in such conditions?
Bukovsky managed to do so by using his imagination. “I set myself the task of constructing a castle in every detail…. I carefully cut each individual stone,” planned the tapestries in all detail, invited guests, and browsed through old books. “I even knew what was inside those books. I could even read them.” The castle preserved Bukovsky’s sanity because “it saved me from apathy, from indifference to living,” and from the emptiness that annihilates the self.
If the authorities want you to die, there are countless painful ways they can kill you, as Alexei Navalny’s death in February 2024 demonstrates. Under Vladimir Putin, Russia is gradually returning to the repression of the late Soviet era, and so one can add Navalny’s posthumous Patriot: A Memoir to the list of classics above. Is there another culture where prison memoirs are a major literary genre?
Why would anyone, let alone a whole movement, risk such punishment? When Navalny returned to Russia in 2021, a puzzled Western reporter asked Sharansky: didn’t Navalny know he would be arrested and probably killed? For Sharansky, this question betrayed the Western assumption that the point of life is individual well-being. He described his retort as “pretty rude”: “You’re the one who does not understand something. If you think the goal is survival—then you are right. But his true concern is the fate of his people—and he is telling them: ‘I am not afraid, and you should not be either.’”
Navalny cherished the hope that his movement could return Russia to freedom and democracy, but, as Nathans explains, his dissident predecessors were much less optimistic—thus their wry toast, “to the success of our hopeless cause.” What mattered most to them was regaining personal integrity. They disdained the cost/benefit approach that would have left them grumbling accomplices of the regime.
In their final speeches to the court, the Red Square defendants described their protest as an assertion of personal dignity. One explained: “All my conscious life I have wanted to be a citizen, that is, a person who proudly and calmly speaks his mind. For ten minutes I was a citizen.” Another stated that “five minutes of freedom” outweighed years in prison. Larisa Bogoraz, who had already played a prominent role in the dissident movement, asserted: “To keep silent meant to lie. I do not consider my way of acting the only correctdecision, but for me it was the only possible decision.”
Public and Private
As Nathans observes, what mattered most to Bogoraz and the others was “transparency…the absolute alignment of public face and private self.” Memoir after memoir describes Soviet life as a form of theatre, where people concealed their beliefs—even from themselves, if possible—and voiced the party line in chorus with everyone else. Memoirs also recount how, at some point, self-deception became clear.
For Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, clarity came when he recognized that the Communist beliefs he professed were not really his own but had been “planted from outside.” Historian Wolfgang Leonhard describes in his autobiography, Child of the Revolution(1957), how, as a young German refugee growing up in the USSR, he was delighted to be admitted to the Communist youth organization even though his teachers, friends, and even his mother had recently been arrested. “Somehow I dissociated these things, and even my personal impressions and experiences, from my fundamental political conviction. It was almost as if there were two separate levels—one of everyday experiences, which I found myself criticizing; the other of the great Party line which at this time, despite my hesitations, I still regarded as correct, from the standpoint of general principle.” The moment when Sharansky realized that his escape from Soviet reality into chess, science, and careerism had deprived him of self-respect came when the most eminent Soviet scientist, Andrei Sakharov, gave up his immense privileges to demand freedom.
Sakharov’s example inspired many. “Weighed down by our common sins, and the sins of each of us as individuals,” Solzhenitsyn observed, Sakharov had “left behind the abundant material comforts with which he was provided…and stepped out in front of the jaws of almighty violence.” When Sharansky followed Sakharov’s example, he felt liberated. In his account Never Alone (2020), Sharansky describes his time behind bars as “living free in prison.”
In her memoir of the Stalin era, Hope Against Hope (1970), Nadezhda Mandelstam explained that “the fundamental rule of the times was to ignore the facts of life…to see only the positive side of things.” That rule applied to Sovietized Eastern Europe as well. “After long acquaintance with his role,” explained Czesław Miłosz in The Captive Mind(1953), “a man grows into it so closely that he can no longer differentiate his true self from the self he simulates, so that even the most intimate of individuals speak to each other in Party slogans…. Acting on a comparable scale has not occurred often in the history of the human race.”
Once aware of his role-playing, a person might want to discover who he really is. We expect actors to study their roles, but in Communist countries people had to study themselves. Bukovsky describes how his mother, before she encountered Byzantine Soviet justice, “had cultivated in herself a safe submissiveness. And a habit of not even admitting to herself her true attitude to the world about her…. You get sucked into this kind of life so gradually that you can no longer make out which of the thoughts in your head are reserved for public consumption and which for private.”
But there is a breaking point. “Sooner or later the moment of illumination comes for almost every inhabitant of the Soviet Union,” Bukovsky notes. After all, evidence of falsity is constantly present, and even children detect it. Bukovsky retells the popular joke about a Soviet nursery school teacher who describes how badly American children live, whereas in the Soviet Union everybody is happy and well off, parents buy their children treats, and the children go to the movies every day. When one little girl bursts into tears, the teacher asks what is wrong. “I want to go to the Soviet Union,” the girl sobs.
One way people learn to act is by experiencing, time and again, the consequences of straying even a step from approved behavior. One might be caught, to use Andrei Sinyavsky’s phrase, “smiling counter-revolutionarily.” Or one might witness reprimands dealt to others. Finally, one pretends to resist by telling jokes.
My favorite passage in Bukovksky’s memoir describes an experiment he performed while on a geological expedition. “I caught three ants and put them in a mug…. I wanted to see to what degree ants were better than people.” Every time the ants tried to climb out, he shook them back to the bottom. After 180 attempts to escape, the ants gave up. Bukovsky left the mug in the grass for three days, but the ants remained. “Several times it drizzled, the sun set and rose, but they simply stayed there in the mug, twitching their whiskers—probably telling one another jokes.”
And so it is with Soviet people, Bukovsky concluded. They resign themselves to harmless, “quiet, antlike joys, to bask[ing] in the sun on warm spring days and hav[ing] a drink together.” At last
the things he [the Soviet person] has been holding back all day are bursting to comeout. Peering over his shoulder is that ever-present companion, the joke. And nibbling at a morsel of processed cheese, he says: “What’s the best way to have plenty of everything? Plug your refrigerator into the radio network—it will always be full.”
Because, whether he wishes it or not, inside himself Soviet man is engaged in a permanent dialogue with Soviet propaganda.
Jokes are not the only way people managed to reconcile “thinking one thing, saying another, and doing a third.” In addition, writes Bukovsky, “the ants need elaborate theories” to justify submitting to lies. Bukovsky lists many common excuses: what can I do alone?; no man can flay a stone; if I didn’t, someone else would; open protests play into the hands of the authorities; and many more. Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin called these excuses alibis for responsibility. None of them is entirely groundless—they wouldn’t work if they were—but they serve to justify a life of doublethink.
A Lip-Service State
By the 1960s, authorities no longer expected people to believe the propaganda, as they did under Stalin; lip-service was enough. “Mature socialism” was what Nathans aptly calls a “lip-service state.” Is it any wonder that Russian dissidents repeatedly cited Hans Christian Andersen’s story of the emperor’s new clothes?
Theatricality reigned everywhere. Economic data were fictitious. Even the government had no idea how big the economy was because, at every point along the chain of reporting, figures were inflated. It was all tufta (meaning, roughly, fraud). The same goods were routinely double counted. Tufta came in endless varieties, and no one wanted to detect it because everyone was engaged in it. Labor, as well as production, often existed only on paper: “they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.” It was the emperor’s new economy.
As Václav Havel pointed out, although it may have felt as if cheating undermined the system, in a lip-service state cheating was the system. The reason that each person accepts lies is that his neighbor does, and the reason his neighbor does is that he does. By speaking prescribed language, “each helps the other to be obedient…. They are both victims of the system and its instruments.” Acting as if they did not object, “individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.” Yes, the system pressures people to lie, Havel wrote, but the pressure only works because they are all too willing to live that way, a willingness marking their “own failure as individuals.” In each person, Havel continued, “[lives a longing] for moral integrity…and a sense of transcendence.” But there is also “in everyone…some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudo-life.” The new Soviet man had a tufta soul. The jokes were on him.
It is this tissue of excuses against which the Red Square protestors rebelled. They refused all alibis. Regardless of how ineffective their protests might be, they wanted to escape “pseudo-life.”
To them, it was a matter of being truly human by reclaiming one’s own individual soul. As Vladimir Zelensky explained, “[B]ehind any public protest is an individual’s attempt to break through his own social adaptation, through his own doublethink, and find himself…. When young people enter into hopeless political conspiracies for which they are subsequently sentenced to ten or fifteen years, they do this because they want to possess their own identities among the surrounding masks.” The regime routinely “unmasked” secret enemies, but these dissidents unmasked themselves in order to regain their lichnost’ (personhood) or what Lidiya Ginzburg called their “human visage.”
“If a majority of citizens in our country would recognize that the individual human self, and first of all their own self, represents an independent value, and not just a means for fulfilling this or that distant, vague task,” wrote Pavel Litvinov to Stephen Spender in 1968, “this would make it possible to create a healthier society, without the horrors, violence, and bloodletting…beginning in 1917. Such an appreciation of the human self does not exclude, of course, various metaphysical ideals—on the contrary, it makes them even more significant.”
Should one sign a petition demanding the right to attend the (supposedly open) trial of a dissident? It took enormous courage to do so. “Whoever wants to struggle against arbitrariness,” declared the dissident General Petro Grigorenko, “must destroy in himself the fear of arbitrariness. He must take up his cross and climb Golgotha.” Although signing entailed great risk, it marked, according to Andrei Amalrik, a significant “step toward internal liberation…. This or that particular signature might have no significance whatsoever for the country’s political situation, but for the signer himself, it could become a kind of catharsis, a rupture with the system of doublethink in which the ‘Soviet person’ had been raised since childhood.”
Like Free People
Bolsheviks failed to create a new type of human being, but the dissidents, as Nathans describes them, may have succeeded. They displayed “a personality of a new type.” “Each person takes responsibility for his own decision as dictated by conscience,” Viktor Krasin explained. Only in this way, Bukovsky argued, could a person escape the collective, reject conformism, and “act alone…. With his back to the wall, the individual understands…he cannot sacrifice a part of himself…he comes to prefer physical death to spiritual death.” It is by not caring about effectiveness that he becomes effective, through the power of personal example:
“Why me, of all people?”—each member of a crowd asks himself. “I cannot accomplish anything by myself.”
And all are lost.
“If not me, then who?”—the individual with his back to the wall asks himself.
And he saves everyone.
As they created a distinct type of personality, these dissidents also arrived at a corresponding method of protest. Rather than demand an end to Communism, they called for “transparency,” for the regime to observe its own constitution and law code. As Confucius prescribed “the rectification of names,” these dissidents wanted words to correspond to reality.
“They did something simple to the point of genius,” explained Amalrik. “In an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.” Nathans credits this strategy to Alexander Esenin-Volpin, who had been influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein and analytic philosophy’s concern with the precise meaning of words. When Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were tried for publishing their “slanderous” fiction abroad, dissidents insisted that the proceedings be open, as the constitution required. Gathering in Pushkin Square on December 5, 1965—Soviet Constitution Day—poet Joseph Brodsky, bard Bulat Okudzhava, samizdat compiler Aleksandr Ginzburg, Volpin, and others unfurled a homemade banner reading “Respect the Constitution of the USSR!”
The writer Varlam Shalamov observed that this was the first unsanctioned demonstration since 1927. Sinyavsky and Daniel, he added, were the first Soviet defendants in a major political trial to plead not guilty. They acted, in other words, as if the trial were a real one.
At Bukovsky’s trial his lawyer, Dina Kaminskaya, did something unheard of: she acknowledged that her client had done everything he was accused of but argued that none of it was illegal. Bukovsky mastered the criminal code and repeatedly cited it to interrogators and prison officials.
Before long, Soviet authorities came to regard these trials—descriptions of which were broadcast by Western media to Russian citizens—as counterproductive. So, they often avoided judicial proceedings by declaring defendants insane and incarcerating them in psychiatric hospitals. Leonid Brezhnev seems to have really believed that anyone unhappy in the worker’s paradise must be mad. Psychiatrists duly dreamed up the diagnosis of “sluggish schizophrenia,” a disease without symptoms. “The absence of symptoms of an illness cannot prove the absence of the illness itself,” one prominent psychiatrist declared. It was the emperor’s new illness.
The point was not to change minds but to disable them. If protests affirmed the soul, drugs administered by psychiatrists threatened to destroy it. Nathans mentions one sufferer who, over a period of months, was treated with insulin injections to cure his belief in God.
Not Staring at the Table
Conscious of continuing the dissident tradition, Navalny read Sharansky’s memoir Fear No Evil (1988). The two heroes exchanged letters. And yet, Navalny’s Patriot does not sound like Sharansky’s, Bukovsky’s, or any other memoir from the late Soviet period. Although Navalny was imprisoned, almost lost his sight to a disinfectant thrown in his face, saw his brother put in solitary confinement, and was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok, he never presents himself as a victim. Quite the contrary, he regards his life as a fortunate one. “I know one thing for sure,” he writes. “I’m among the happiest 1 percent of people on the planet—those who absolutely adore their work. I enjoy every single second of it.”
Whether he was broadcasting pictures of palaces owned by corrupt officials making a modest salary, having his headquarters raided and his equipment seized, or facing trumped-up charges entailing years in prison, Navalny treats it all as one fascinating adventure. If there is one phrase he repeats, it is “It was great fun!” It is amazing to read accounts of such persecution written with a sense of humor, as if it was all part of an absurdist comedy rather than reality. The documentary film Navalny (2022), which exposed just how he was poisoned, is hilarious, and Navalny clearly enjoyed every minute of it. I have read many memoirs about Soviet abuses under Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, but I have never encountered one like this.
When Navalny attracted gigantic crowds during his campaign for mayor of Moscow in 2013, he was hauled off to prison. Thrown into a cold cell and eaten alive by mosquitoes, he decided to keep a diary “and immediately wrote my first entry. About mosquitoes. I have to tell you that I never slept better than I did that night.”
To disqualify Navalny from running for president, authorities charged him with defrauding a French company, even though the company testified that it had lost no money. (Such a thing could not happen in America!) “Once again I had been arrested, as now happened after every demonstration,” he explains, “but I was delighted.” When Putin’s United Russia Party sent hecklers to his rallies, Navalny invited them on stage to debate (“I love debating”).
Why wasn’t Navalny afraid? After all, in 2006 journalist Anna Politkovskaya had been murdered in the elevator of her apartment building, and nine years later opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was gunned down near the Kremlin. Navalny could expect thugs to beat him or throw acid in his face. Poisoning did not stop him. Aware of the danger, he returned to Russia in 2021, where he was swiftly detained. He died enduring appalling conditions in a labor camp three years later.
What was he thinking? “I have always tried to ignore the idea that I could be attacked, arrested, or even killed,” he explains. “It’s not that I’m trying not to think about it, closing my eyes and pretending the danger does not exist. But one day I simply made the decision not to be afraid.” Given his values, he decided there was nothing else to do. Yes, there is danger, “but I love what I do and think that I should keep doing it. I’m not crazy, nor am I irresponsible or fearless. It’s simply that deep down I know I have to do this, that this is my life’s work.”
Patriot includes the text of Navalny’s remarkable final statement at his trial for defrauding the French company. Since, as everyone knew, the verdict had been predetermined, the judge and prosecutors were acting dishonestly. “Do you realize,” Navalny asked them, “that you are all constantly looking down at the table? You have nothing to say.” They resembled all those Russians who know they are behaving falsely but keep “looking down at the table.” However guilty they may have felt, they did not change because “the human consciousness compensates for the feeling of guilt; if it didn’t, people would constantly be throwing themselves onto dry land like dolphins.”
Navalny’s anti-corruption campaign, he continued, aimed at moving people to face what they were doing—in Solzhenitsyn’s famous phrase, to “live not by lies.” “We are fighting for the hearts and minds of those who simply stare at the table and shrug their shoulders,” Navalny writes. “People who, when all they need to do is not do something vile, they go ahead and do it anyway.”
When you come to think of it, Navalny added, “life’s too short to simply stare down at the table”:
I blinked and I’m almost forty years old…we all will blink again and we’ll be on our deathbeds, with our relatives all around us, and all they’ll be thinking about is, It’s about time they died and freed up this apartment. And at some point we’ll realize that nothing we did had any meaning at all, so why did we just stare at the table and say nothing? The only moments in our lives that count for anything are those when we do the right thing, when we don’t have to look down at the table but can raise our heads and look each other in the eye. Nothing else matters.
In his famous address at the 1978 Harvard commencement, Solzhenitsyn stressed the shallowness of Americans who imagine that life is all about personal happiness.
Russian dissidents represent a completely different view of life. “To write about freedom from the safety of the Western World requires little courage or commitment,” admitted Senator Thomas Dodd, a veteran of the Nuremberg trials. “But to write about freedom or to take a stand for freedom under the totalitarian Soviet regime requires the most sublime kind of courage and a degree of commitment exceeding the understanding of those who have been brought up to regard freedom as their birthright.”
If Solzhenitsyn and Havel prove correct that the Soviet past is our future, we must fervently hope that we too can produce a tradition of people with the courage not to stare at the table.
Gary Saul Morson is the Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University and author, most recently, of Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (Belknap Press).
Correspondence: Dissident Devotion
Gary Saul Morson’s sure-footed tour of Russian dissident literature (“Sublime Courage,” Winter 2024/25) is powerfully stirring. He’s right to nominate Patriot—the late Alexei Navalny’s memoir, recounting the deadly buffoonery he suffered at the hands of what passes for the law in Putin’s Russia—as a new classic of the genre. For American readers, accustomed to the melodramatic autobiographical trauma-mongering typical of celebrities like Meghan Markle, it’s bracing to find an author casually mentioning that, since writing the previous chapter, he has been thrown into the prison system where he will die. This is Russian understatement at its finest.
No review—indeed no book—can mention everything worth mentioning. But one major keystone of Navalny’s resilience that merits further attention is his Christian faith. “I’ve gotten quite into religion (ha ha!),” says the entry for May 2, 2021, a little less than three years before his death. The mordant humor and the tone of wry surprise are typical of Navalny—he found himself suddenly and almost unwillingly converted upon the birth of his daughter. “I am a big fan of science,” he writes, “but I decided at that moment that, on its own, evolution was not enough. There must be more. From a dyed-in-the-wool atheist, I gradually became a religious person.”
Arguably this shock of unexpected belief visited upon a hard-bitten cynic—this faith with a gimlet eye—is another hallmark of the prison memoir genre. Christianity has flourished in post-revolutionary Russia, as it has always done under the bitterest kinds of persecution. It is a faith mercifully free of any soapy illusions about what the human race is capable of. Like Dostoevsky in The House of the Dead, who came to see Christ in his unlovely fellow prisoners, like Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag, who learned that belief was the dividing line between the death and life of the soul, Navalny kept his psyche intact with the rituals of the liturgy.
He carried a laminated card in his pocket, inscribed with “A Prayer to the Archangel”—a tchotchke given to him by another unlikely saint. The receipt of it occasions another wonderful passage: “I felt like going over to the [security] camera, thrusting the icon in front of its lens, and yelling, See, you bastards, I am not alone! But that would not have been very Christian and would have disappointed the archangel in my pocket.”
“Your soul, which formerly was dry, now ripens from suffering,” wrote Solzhenitsyn of the marks dug into the soul by barbed wire. Of all the many themes in this profound literary tradition, the most moving is surely the recurring image of the dumbstruck Christian, his feet planted in the prison yard and his eyes raised to heaven as if to say—“Who, me?”
Anne Langley, Ithaca, NY
Gary Saul Morson replies:
I very much appreciate Anne Langley’s reply to my article. In the West the horrors of 20th-century totalitarianism often led to atheism: how could God have allowed this? But in Russia it has often led to the opposite conclusion: if human beings can do this, surely we must place our hopes not in human nature but in God.
Lord Buckbeak: "Will you come into my parlor?," said the Spider to the Fly. 