Dissenters in the old Soviet Union were first given the label “dissidents” by sympathetic Western journalists. With the KGB only too happy to use the term, “sensing an opportunity to stigmatize nonconformists by branding them with a foreign word,” as historian Benjamin Nathans puts it, the nonconformists or “other-thinkers” themselves disliked the term. But like it or not, they became what they were labeled. As with the memoirs of these reluctantly “dissident” Soviets that Nathans analyses, the term crossed the more-porous-than-its-reputation Iron Curtain and “acquired unanticipated meanings in new settings.”
The dissidents were “a loose conglomeration of Soviet citizens,” writes Nathans, “who had initially coalesced around the 1966 trial of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, seeking to defend civil rights inscribed in the Soviet constitution and to foster greater openness in Soviet society.” Most were members of the intelligentsia, the Russian term for intellectuals, and they were always few in number. Some paid dearly for their dissent by losing their jobs, being sent to prison labor camps, being confined in psychiatric institutions, and/or forced into exile. Physicist Andrei Sakharov and writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, both recognized with Nobel Prizes, were two of the most renowned.
“The history of memoirs by Soviet dissidents is particularly striking [because] until the USSR’s collapse, such works could only be published outside the country in which their narrative takes place,” writes Nathans.
“Translated and brought into wide circulation by publishing houses outside the USSR,” he writes, and “in many cases appearing exclusively or initially in Western languages, the dissident memoir became a transnational platform for the presentation of an alternative Soviet self on a global scale.”
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Nathans’s database of book-length dissident memoirs “contains 144 titles published over the course of more than half a century in a dozen countries,” with more coming as he wrote. He cites seven individuals who produced multiple memoirs. “It would be difficult, I think, to find another social movement in which such a high percentage of leading participants produced autobiographies.”
That was actually very Russian of them. There was a tradition going back to the 1830s of dissenters writing autobiographically as a sign of “self-cultivation” and a “developed personality.”
The dissident movement itself was, in that pre-internet age, entirely paper-based: samizdat (self-publishing) meant that individuals produced and reproduced (mostly via typewriters and carbon paper) documents and distributed them by hand. Tamizdat was the term for literature published abroad, which may have originated as samizdat smuggled out of the USSR, which was then smuggled back into the USSR in a more formalized publication format. Another way these dissenting voices reached into in the USSR was via what the Soviets called the “Voices”—short-wave radio stations like the BBC, Voice of America, Radio Liberty, Deutsche Welle—one of the West’s best strategies during the Cold War.
All these memoirists, however, “faced a dual estrangement: from the author’s native land and from a Western readership eager to extract familiar Cold War lessons from the unfamiliar landscape of post-totalitarian socialism,” Nathans explains.
Vladimir Bukovsky’s Letters of a Russian Traveler, for instance, was put out by his American publisher as To Choose Freedom. Bukovsky himself noted how he found it very awkward to be turned into a hero and “dragged from city to city like a miracle-working icon.” Leonid Pliushch’s History’s Carnival had an “excessively honest sentence” about his youthful anti-Jewish view excised by his London publisher. Also not fitting the West’s preconceptions was the fact that most Soviet dissidents didn’t reject socialism.
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“Dissidents gave society an example of non-violent resistance to evil,” wrote physician Leonard Ternovskii, but they were otherwise just “ordinary people.”
Nathans’s Pulitzer-prize winning history of the Soviet dissident moment, To The Success of our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, was published last year. The book is named after a sardonic toast popular among the dissidents, and it comes with an epigraph from F. Scott Fitzgerald:
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
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