In the Shadow of Stalin

Ed Pulford reviews Ben Nathans’s “To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement” and Perry Link and Wu Dazhi’s “I Have No Enemies: The Life and Legacy of Liu Xiaobo.”

By Ed PulfordAugust 3, 2025

• History

• Politics

IN 1953, Stalin died. He had been feared, loved, and reviled by different sections of society, and particularly scorned by intellectuals such as poet Osip Mandelstam, who dubbed him the “Kremlin highlander” in a bitterly satirical composition; his death led to the release of over one million prisoners across the USSR. Stalin’s reign—and for over two long decades, it had many of the monarchical trappings this term implies—was shot through with impulsive violence, meted out with an arbitrariness that belied its regimented imperial aesthetics. As Soviet citizens emerged traumatized from this personalistic vortex, there were some, like Alexander Volpin—an eccentric mathematician and founder manqué of the Soviet dissident movement—who simply hoped that the state could start to operate according to its own laws.

A decade later and 6,000 kilometers from the Kremlin, a young Chinese boy marauded up and down a street named Stalin Avenue. “De-Stalinization” under Nikita Khrushchev had done away with many such names within the USSR’s borders. But in the People’s Republic of China, including Liu Xiaobo’s Soviet-influenced rust-belt hometown of Changchun, invocations of the man lingered longer. When causing mischief with his childhood friends, Liu had little concern for rules. But in time, he too would come to insist that the Chinese government adhere more closely to the legal codes and commitment to “the people” it purported to advocate.

With or without Stalin’s name, the ponderous yet brutally capricious Communist Party order created in his image persisted for decades in both enormous countries. Those known variously in each place as “dissidents”—an ambivalent term, which not all have worn comfortably—crafted different responses to this 1930s Soviet system that was ported into China during the 1950s. And while Stalinism per se is not the main focus of either work, its haunting effects are an important undercurrent in two excellent recent books that, despite running to 816 and 568 pages in length respectively, give their complex subject matter remarkably deft and readable treatment: 2025 Pulitzer Prize winner Benjamin Nathans’s To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (2024) and Perry Link and Wu Dazhi’s I Have No Enemies: The Life and Legacy of Liu Xiaobo (2023). Focused on the vivid cast of characters who sought alternative ways of living in the 1960s–1990s Soviet Union and the single extraordinary figure of Chinese activist and intellectual Liu Xiaobo (1955–2017), each offers a trove of insights into the spirit and character of “dissident” lives under state socialism.

Connections between the books go beyond Stalin’s spectral imprint. It is difficult to fight a ghost, and so both Soviet and Chinese dissidents have looked to allies and exemplars for moral and practical succor. A singular strength of Nathans’s book is his close attention to internal social dynamics—the “inner drama” of dissident existence—from solidarities, friendships, and love affairs to internecine conflicts and betrayals. Liu’s prolific relationships of amity, intellectual camaraderie, and rivalry also make Link and Wu’s book a richer portrait of a movement and a moment than many single-person biographical works.

But even as compatriots have bonded in apartment kitchens where, out of eye- and earshot, the ironic toasts evoked in Nathans’s title have been uttered (Soviet actors habitually added the addresses of these apartments to their open letters), activists in both countries have also been aware of broader Eurasian resonances. Liu—in step with the time-delayed quality of the PRC revolution when seen from the USSR—consciously worked in the wake of Soviet and Eastern European dissident traditions. The echo between Charter 08, the document for which (despite his only partial role in its creation) he received his final, fatal prison sentence, and Czech dissident Václav Havel’s Charter 77 bespeaks a deeper kinship. An avid reader of Havel, Liu saw in him—as well as the likes of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Polish Solidarity leaders Lech Wałęsa and Adam Michnik—exemplars for the kind of truth-telling by which an individual could refuse the Leninist Party-state demand to behave as a screw in a machine.

Like Lenin’s and Stalin’s legacies traveling from west to east, dissident influence was, in this regard, mainly a one-way street. Among the observers and informal notetakers at the 1966 Moscow trial of writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel—themselves exemplary in their novel efforts to plead not guilty to the state’s subversion charges—was samizdat author and Sinologist Boris Vakhtin. But Vakhtin stuck to ancient Chinese literature and history and, whether out of cultural chauvinism (not wholly absent from the elite Russians who peopled much of the dissident movement) or the out-of-sync nature of communist state-building projects, Soviet campaigners were unlikely to look to China for inspiration. Yet PRC socialism still offered a certain kind of foil for Soviet concerns, particularly during the Cultural Revolution, whose onset coincided with the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial. Writing of the Soviet suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring, exposer of Soviet forced labor camps Anatoly Marchenko sarcastically wondered whether Moscow would consider unleashing an anarchic force like the Maoist Red Guards in Czechoslovakia, an alternative to sending the rebels to Stalinist gulags in Kolyma or Norilsk. The Soviet authorities also found China to be a useful counterpoint. Following the December 1973 publication (abroad, naturally) of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, a 1974 KGB-backed smear campaign labeled him an “ally” of Mao Zedong, a figure officially seen as somewhere between revolutionary deviant and peasant rabble-rouser during the 1960s–1980s Sino-Soviet split.

If both Soviet dissidents and authorities therefore shared a sense of Maoist China as a protean well of socialist extremes, Liu experienced these firsthand. Entering adulthood in Mao’s final years, Liu spent much of the Cultural Revolution rusticated in Horqin Right Banner on the Inner Mongolian steppe, where his father Liu Ling was consigned to undertake agricultural work in 1969. The two socialist giants shared a proclivity for banishing troublemakers to distant corners of their expansive continental realms, a practice Nathans links to European empires’ use of internal exile, and which has its own longer history in China too. Since the USSR and PRC shared a long border, this at times produced a curious geographical propinquity between the expelled: while Liu’s brothers Xiaoguang and Xiaohui were separated from the rest of the family and sent to the ethnically Korean region of Yanbian abutting the Soviet Union, 1969 also saw physicist Pavel Litvinov punished for participating in a Prague Spring protest by being sent to Chita Oblast, many times closer to China than to Moscow. Despite the purported demise of the Stalinist gulags (en route to which Mandelstam had died outside Vladivostok in 1938, 58 kilometers from China), North Asia served as a kind of vast dumping ground. Socialist peripheries seemed fitting repositories for those who “thought” or “saw” things differently, ideas implied by the Russian and Chinese terms “inakomysliashchie” (инакомыслящие) and “yishizhe” (异视者), which, more often used by such figures themselves, carry less stigma than the English “dissident.”

Liu Ling was certainly not the contrarian his son would become, and Link and Wu narrate such generational frictions, as well as the young Liu Xiaobo’s exile experiences of first love and readings of Russian novels and Marx, with an intimacy mirroring Nathans’s attention to dissident sociality. Indeed, the presence of “life” and “lives” in the titles of both books captures their shared humanity and nuance, further exposing the pitfalls of using the catch-all term “dissident.” To suggest that anyone wishing to do things differently, from non-system authors to ethnic minority groups campaigning for historical justice, belongs to a single category risks consenting to the Communist Party order’s own binary worldview.

“Dissident” also has a particular history within both societies’ interactions with the Cold War “West,” from London, Paris, or Washington’s realpolitik efforts to destabilize geopolitical rivals to the campaigns of human rights organizations based in those cities. “The West” (as well as, in Liu’s case, Hong Kong and Taiwan) has played a multidimensional role in the dissident world, as a locus for publishing banned works, a satellite dish for bouncing signals back into one’s home environment (the Soviet authorities at times spent more money trying to block foreign radio signals than it did on its own broadcasting), and a perceived bulwark of genuinely desirable values and liberties. Journalists from Western Europe and North America have also been—whether serving consumer publics back home, the noble cause of democracy, or some combination—among the most committed purveyors of dissident news and, equally often, their friends, drinking buddies, or allies in Beijing and Moscow.

This process of constant mediatized refraction has not escaped Soviet and PRC authorities’ attention. While dismissing public dissent as—in the favored terms of the Chinese Communist Party—the work of “hostile foreign forces,” both governments have sought to evade the Western gaze. Trials before exile have often been held far from the political centers where press corps are based: Sergei Kovalev, a biophysicist and contributor to the most enduring samizdat compendium, Chronicle of Current Events, attended court in Vilnius, Lithuania, while Tashkent, Uzbekistan, was the venue for a 1969 trial of Crimean Tatar rights activists. Liu was sentenced in Beijing before being exiled to Northeast China in 2009, but foreign reporters attempting to speak to him or his second wife, Liu Xia, nevertheless faced constant harassment. Liu’s imprisonment that year meant that, in a further sign of official fears of “Western” validation, he joined Wałęsa and Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov in the roster of Nobel Peace Prize winners prevented by their own governments from traveling to Norway to collect their awards.

Aside from the vividness of the worlds evoked in these two books, the “life” of the titles also evokes the importance to many protagonists of living as fully realized human beings. Faced with hopelessness and unfreedom, dissidents have had the audacity—in the words of activist-historian Andrei Amalrik—to “conduct themselves like free people,” or, as Havel put it when commenting on the repression of Solzhenitsyn, to “live in truth.” For Liu, this meant using writing to make a powerful claim of sovereignty over the self and, as his thought matured and he abandoned some of his early “swagger,” behaving with conscience and dignity despite the insuperable pressure the system imposed. Against the grain of official efforts to inculcate “people-ness” (renminxing), a Soviet idea (narodnost) connoting undifferentiated membership of “the people,” which Liu learned about from 1950s Russian novels at university, dissidents have sought a more individualized human truth. In response, their governments have attempted to frame them as isolated ingrates, spurned by the bulk of their more respectable fellow citizens.

Contending with such Party-state tactics, the search for truth has not all been idealistic flights of fancy. Hard-nosed claims to “law” and “rights,” especially those notionally guaranteed by the USSR and PRC constitutions, have lain at the heart of what Nathans calls the “dissident repertoire.” Soviet pravozashchitniki, or “rights defenders”—another important alternative to the term “dissident”—might have come first, but their Chinese weiquan (维权) counterparts, with whom Liu was involved, had many more actual lawyers among their numbers. Science and mathematics backgrounds were nevertheless well suited to the task of holding the state to its own standards. Volpin’s quest for accurate correspondence between official language and social reality was rooted in a powerful linguistic formalism, and explication of this is one of many moments when Nathans’s own exceptional prose comes into its own. Yet in convoluted bureaucratic systems that—as Nathans notes—“took the written word seriously,” dissidents have also expressed their own reverence for text in a high literary sensibility: much of Liu’s most accomplished writing drew on the Zhuangzi, a classical work of Chinese philosophy, and his own efforts to eke truth out of linguistic expression was also a fight to reconcile centuries of humanistic literature with the state’s own deadening logocentrism.

This dissident facility with confronting the state in its own terms reflects their status as products of the system they oppose. Like the native “Soviet people” who populate Nathans’s narrative, Liu’s 1950s birth meant he grew up entirely in a PRC context, which gave him the oppressed’s distinctively intimate knowledge of the oppressor. For all his repudiation of Chinese socialism and love of Western liberal democracy (sometimes to the point of overlooking inconvenient shortcomings), Liu did not deny the importance of training his mind to memorize tracts of Marx to aid in his later extraordinary accomplishments. In the USSR too, the “sacred canon” of Marxism-Leninism was central to the socialization of young oppositionists: the fact that, in either country, one could get into trouble for applying the wrong kind of Marxist ideas to “real existing” socialism perfectly captured the stultifying irony of states who insisted that the revolutionary romanticism they celebrated was solely a thing of the past.

During the PRC’s 1989 spring of foment, a key turning point in his life as well as that of the PRC, Liu set himself apart from some Tiananmen student protesters by noting that their firebrand attitudes resulted from having been “raised on wolf’s milk.” But this only expressed the humane recognition of one person acculturated in a system to his fellows in the next generation. And Liu still embarked on a protracted hunger strike before the CCP, having run out of other ideas, sent the tanks in early June.

Communist Party authorities have found it intensely frustrating to be faced with figures so adept at navigating the byzantine intricacies they impose. As future Soviet leader Yuri Andropov recognized during his 1960s–1980s tenure as head of the KGB, governments that claim total oversight over social, political, and economic life cannot afford to remain neutral regarding activities that do not fit the state script, since this would imply tacit permission. Persisting with Stalinesque practices of arresting people who had broken no law seemed to him the only means to curtail the activities of dissidents who, if unpunished, would become untouchable celebrities in the eyes of the Soviet intelligentsia, youth, and foreign press. There was a perverse irony in the role that the Party-state itself played in producing what Liu referred to as “dissident heroes.” Liu’s controversial Monologue of a Doomsday Survivor, a memoir of his experiences around Tiananmen published in Taiwan in 1992, included extensive self-reflection on the failure of dissidents to perceive their symbiotic relationship with the system they opposed. This critique provoked the ire of many fellow prodemocracy activists: one’s unavoidable place in a Communist Party–fostered sociopolitical ecosystem could be painful to acknowledge.

The dissident struggle for truth represents something beyond the late-Soviet tendency theorized by anthropologist Alexei Yurchak for people to inhabit spaces “vne”—outside—system-imposed categories. What makes figures from Volpin to Liu remarkable is the energy and imagination of their efforts to avoid succumbing to statist inhumanity. Liu’s assertion “I Have No Enemies”—the title of his statement in his last trial—is a refusal of Maoism’s bifurcation of the world into “friends and enemies” of the revolution. The fact that, unlike many of his Soviet and PRC counterparts, Liu declined several opportunities to leave China altogether, and thus exile himself from the lives he understood best, reflected his active commitment to putting this principle into practice.

For all its heroic vigor, the project to live like free people is far from a victory march. Read together, these two books brilliantly convey the mundanity—sometimes enforced by state confinement—of dissident existence, and how the profane social world intersects with sacred visions for a better society. Without understanding dark Soviet intellectual humor or the periodic reemergences of the mischievous character Liu exhibited in the Stalin Avenue days, one cannot appreciate what sort of person would seek to resist the forced normality of state socialism. Like the act of dissent itself, comparing the USSR and PRC cases can feel like trying to hold on to a rocking ship, yawing to and fro asynchronously: against the ravages of 1930s–1940s Stalinism or 1950s–1970s Maoism, China’s 1980s and early 2000s shared some of the permissiveness of the Soviet 1960s or post-Soviet 1990s. Russia and China today—particularly since Liu’s death and that of Alexei Navalny, another refuser of exile—feel both eerily reminiscent of and far removed from the worlds these masterful books describe. The real existing “West” also seems less like somewhere potential oppositionists in these countries would look to for inspiration or support. But for anyone seeking exemplars today, Soviet and Chinese dissidents have left powerful domestic legacies over the past 70 years. Wu Dazhi—a pseudonymized friend of Liu—and Benjamin Nathans each conclude their studies on a note of reassurance. Despite grim prospects for political pluralism in Russia, the Soviet dissident record stands as important precedent. Liu Xiaobo should not, Wu writes, be seen as China’s last face of hope. Those emerging from new shadows in either country would also do well to cast their eyes across Eurasia at struggles waged in the other place.