Disturbers of the Peace

Jeffrey C. Isaac sees modern American parallels in Benjamin Nathan's book about Soviet dissidents.

By Jeffrey C. IsaacApril 4, 2025

• History

• Politics

Our experience shows that the activities of the “dissidents,” which was initially limited to anti-Soviet propaganda, subsequently, in a number of cases, assumed such dangerous forms as terrorist actions, organized underground with the purpose of overthrowing the Soviet regime, establishing ties with foreign special services engaged in espionage, and others.
—Yuri Andropov, chairman of the KGB, memorandum to the Politburo, December 29, 1975

[W]e pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections […] They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream. […] The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.
—Donald Trump, Veterans Day speech, November 11, 2023

AUTHORITARIAN LEADERS FEAR, and despise, their critics. This has long been true. But modern authoritarian leaders fear and despise their critics while also claiming to represent the will or at least the interests of the people at-large. This makes their critics especially disturbing to them, but it also affords them a unique power—the ability not simply to isolate but also to demonize the critics as “enemies of the people.” In doing so, they intensify the support of their most ardent followers while simultaneously justifying their moves to silence dissent. Persecuting dissenters can be very good politics for autocrats.

For this reason, Benjamin Nathans’s To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (2024) is a book about a past time that is very much a book for our time. Long ago and far away, the Soviet dissidents mattered, both in the Soviet Union, where they challenged the communist regime’s monopoly on truth, and in the West, where their exploits and their persecution became a cause célèbre. I remember campus debates, back in the 1970s, about the iconic writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, and Roy Medvedev. As a young political scientist teaching Soviet politics in the early 1980s, I was often gifted copies of A Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR—the English language offshoot of the dissident Chronicle of Current Events, which painstakingly documented human rights abuses in the Soviet Union.

For a time, the Soviet dissidents were major players in the ideological debates about human rights that defined the era and that remain relevant to our own. But history has not been kind to them. As Nathans outlines: “All but crushed by the KGB […] in the early 1980s, Soviet dissidents surprised the world a second time during the heady days of the Mikhail Gorbachev era.” And yet, as Nathans continues, within a few short years, they were once again reduced to marginality, and ever since, history “has swallowed their names.”

Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources—including over 150 memoirs, numerous diaries, samizdat publications, and long-vaulted KGB files—Nathans, in around 800 pages, traces the diverse movement from its earliest stirrings in the late 1950s to its eventual suffocation in the early 1980s. The book makes clear from the start that it has a broad public-intellectual purpose: “My aim in this book is to retrieve those names—not to pluck them from history, but to give them a history they deserve. Rather than measure their significance solely by what they contributed to the unraveling of the Soviet order,” Nathans argues, “I want to suggest that the story of Soviet dissent illuminates a deeper and more universal struggle between hopelessness and perseverance in the contemporary world.” The “many lives” of the book’s title can be taken both as a reference to the biographies of the diverse individuals whose stories Nathans recounts and as a reference to the incarnations of the movement itself as it pioneered tactics of resistance to a post-Stalinist regime.

The book’s five parts trace the movement’s evolution in detail. Part I explores the movement’s fitful origins in the pioneering efforts of dissident mathematician Alexander Volpin to promote a strategy of “civil obedience,” centered on obsessively documenting the ways that Soviet repression violated the letter of Soviet law. Diffuse and legalistic, the movement’s efforts to document rights abuses, monitor trials and publish trial transcripts, and organize petitions and “transparency” protests sought to reproach the regime rather than oppose it (a strategy that would have been suicidal). In Part II, Nathans describes the ongoing cycle of repression and protest as a “chain reaction” that continually raised the stakes of dissent. He charts the serious debates among activists about the virtues of spontaneity versus organization and both the advantages and limits of expanding the circle beyond small groups of confidants.

The movement’s apotheosis is described in chapter 22, which focuses on the Helsinki Final Act of August 1975. Signed by the leaders of the Soviet Union, the United States, Canada, and every European country but Albania, the act recognized the “sovereignty” of every European state, thereby legitimizing the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. But it also committed each state to respecting a “basket” of human rights that included freedom of speech, assembly, exchange of information, and emigration. In a way, this buoyed the dissident cause, fueling the formation of the Moscow Helsinki Group and subsequent satellite groups throughout the Soviet Union.

The Soviet regime treated the Helsinki Accords no differently from how it had treated the human rights provisions of its own Constitution. It had no intention of permitting freedom of expression and a liberal public sphere to emerge. And so, the Final Act also represented the beginning of the end of the movement itself, as the regime unleashed a torrent of repression, arresting scores of activists. The fate of the Final Act was symbolized by the banishment of Sakharov and his wife, fellow dissident Yelena Bonner, to Gorky, a town 250 miles east of Moscow, where they were detained under constant surveillance. This presaged the end of the dissident movement.

One of the book’s most chilling chapters focuses on “the Fifth Directorate,” a “counter-intelligence” unit of the KGB—established in 1967 by future general secretary Yuri Andropov—whose purpose was to surveil, monitor, interrogate, intimidate, and “neutralize” the dissident movement. Over time, this effort was extremely successful in exhausting and frustrating the dissidents, sowing dissension among them, and eventually getting many of their leaders to either forcibly or voluntarily leave the country.

At the same time, the movement was small and socially marginal, which increased its vulnerability. As Nathans observes: “Nowhere, in fact, did human rights activism take the form of a broad social movement.” While the activists had some allies and supporters, most of them wary and silent, their repression, reinforced by extensive control of media, took place “against the backdrop of the 250 million Soviet citizens whose sympathies were uncertain but who appeared either indifferent or hostile to the dissident cause.” For most Soviet citizens, for whom the terror of the Stalin years was still vivid, the dissenters were “disturbers of the peace” who challenged their submissiveness to authority at a time when normality was their supreme value. Was the dissident cause, then, in the end a hopeless one?

The movement itself was surely overpowered and defeated by the Soviet regime. And when the regime fell a decade later, the dissidents played no significant role. At the same time, there can be no doubt that the dissident campaigns, protests, testimonies, and samizdat literature played an important role in eroding communist legitimacy in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe. As Nathans points out, groups like Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77 employed similar tactics of civil obedience, often with somewhat greater success than their Soviet counterparts. And when communism did fall in the Soviet Union, dissident ideas and practices resurfaced, if only briefly, before they were stamped out with the rise of Vladimir Putin, the former KGB head who has in many ways succeeded in completing the anti-liberal project that his predecessor Andropov first initiated decades earlier.

Back then, the mantra was “The Party and the People are one.” Today, it is “Together we are strong.” The point is the same: for Putin, opponents of the regime are fifth columnists, and “the Russian people […] will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors, and simply spit them out like a gnat that accidentally flew into their mouths, spit them out on the pavement.” The vision is also the same: the promotion of Russian domination, by force when necessary, throughout the area once known as the Soviet Union. There is no other way to understand Putin’s brutal war on Ukraine, which, he insists, is a part of Russia and essential to the restoration of Russia’s Eurasian greatness.

Putin is Andropov’s heir. But there is one enormous difference separating them: Putin has the support of the Trump-controlled United States government and provides a nationalist authoritarianism model for Donald Trump and the MAGA movement more generally.

That a second Trump administration would attack United States constitutional democracy has long been understood, and indeed MAGA ideologues at the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute, and elsewhere made these plans clear. We are now seeing the results: Trump and his henchmen are issuing an onslaught of executive orders challenging long-standing institutional norms and civil rights protections, purging the federal workforce and placing cronies at the head of federal agencies, using the Department of Justice to intimidate political opponents and threaten investigations and prosecutions, attacking academic freedom and seeking to turn the institutions of public education into transmission belts of MAGA ideology, attacking the press, and using the military to support a massive effort to detain and deport millions of undocumented immigrants.

The speed at which this has happened has been remarkable. As political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way argue in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs, we are now well along “the path to American authoritarianism.”

Back in 2023, Trump promised to “root out” and destroy “the enemy from within.” And that is exactly what he is trying to do. When he gave that speech—one of many sounding the theme of vengeance and destruction of liberalism—a Washington Post headline articulated what many commentators were saying, that he was “echoing dictators Hitler [and] Mussolini.” But he was also echoing the Soviet “post-totalitarian” autocrats, like Leonid Brezhnev and Andropov, who are the role models of Putin’s Russia and also the subjects of Nathans’s book.

Nathans closes his book with the hope that the history he has recounted might offer a “usable past” for Russians working to “find their way to political pluralism and the rule of law.” One can only hope. All the same, the story of the Soviet dissidents is a story from which we all stand to learn as we face a new wave of authoritarianism. Litigation and legal mobilization; active promotion of a robust “public sphere” beneath and outside official communication circuits; networks of friendship and solidarity furnishing support in the face of insecurity, confusion, and despair; determined efforts to reach across frontiers in defense of civil liberties and human rights—these things will be especially important in the weeks and months ahead.

Will they succeed in holding the line against the new authoritarianism and perhaps helping to fuel a real political alternative to it? As Václav Havel once famously said, “even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.” Havel, like his Soviet dissident counterparts, furnishes us with powerful words and an inspiring example. At the same time, only we can save ourselves.