Book Talk: "To The Success Of Our Hopeless Cause" By Benjamin Nathans | Hoover Institution

The Hoover History Lab and Hoover Institution Library & Archives held a special hybrid event with Benjamin Nathans, introduced by Stephen Kotkin, as he launched his latest book To The Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement.

Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was unexpectedly confronted by a dissident movement that captured the world’s imagination. Demanding that the Kremlin obey its own laws, an improbable band of Soviet citizens held unauthorized public gatherings, petitioned in support of arrested intellectuals, and circulated banned samizdat texts. Soviet authorities arrested dissidents, subjected them to bogus trials and vicious press campaigns, sentenced them to psychiatric hospitals and labor camps, sent them into exile—and transformed them into martyred heroes. Against all odds, the dissident movement undermined the Soviet system and unexpectedly hastened its collapse. Taking its title from a toast made at dissident gatherings, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause (Princeton, 2024) is a definitive history of a remarkable group of people who helped change the twentieth century.

Learn more about the book.

This hybrid talk with Benjamin Nathans, with an introduction by Stephen Kotkin, took place in the Shultz Auditorium at the Hoover Institution on the Stanford University campus at 4:30 pm PT.

​About the Speakers

Benjamin Nathans Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term Associate Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania

Stephen Kotkin Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution; Birkelund Professor in History and International Affairs emeritus at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
[MUSIC]

>> Anatol Shmelev (00:04):
Welcome, everyone to this afternoon's event,
the book launch for Ben Nathans Landmarkhistory of the Dissident Movement,
largely based on the collections heldby the Hoover Institution archives.
My name is Anatol Shmelev.
I am the curator for Russian andEurasian collections.
And our archives is fortunate enoughto hold the papers of many of

(00:25):
the brave people you willhear about in a few minutes,
including Alexander Ginzburg,Andrei Sinyavsky, Yuri Yara Magaev,
Pavel Litvinov, Alexander Esenin-Volpin,Irina Grivnina,
Elena Sudakova, and Vladimir Bukovsky,one of our chief collections.
In fact,
the image that you see on the screen hereis from the papers of Vladimir Bukovsky.

(00:48):
On the left is Bukovsky himself,behind the flowers.
On the right is Boris Nemtsov,
one of the leaders of the oppositionto Putin who was assassinated in 2015.
And in the middle is Vladimir Kara-Murza,who was recently exchanged for
a number of soviet spies, much likeBukowsky himself was exchanged for

(01:09):
chilean communist leaderLuis Corvalán in 1976.
So I don't want to say thathistory repeats itself, but
there are certainly things tothink about in terms of analogies.
Thank you very much.
With that,I turn the floor over to Stephen Kotkin.

>> Stephen Kotkin (01:23):
Thank you, Anatol.
It's safe to say that wewouldn't be here today without
people such as Anatole andothers in the audience today.
The Hoover library and archives royaltythat collected these materials,
cataloged them, preserved them,
made them available to readerslike myself and Professor Nathans.

(01:48):
Doctor Eric Waken,the director of the library and
archives, couldn't be here today.
Unfortunately, something came upunexpected at the last minute.
But he conveys his bestwishes to everybody and
we all benefit from hisamazing leadership.
There's no need to introduce Ben Nathans.

(02:10):
He is a colossal figurein the field of Russian
soviet history,University of Pennsylvania.
He's got another oneof those named chairs.
You can read it on the screen.
His book, which you'll hear about now,

(02:32):
is instantly one ofthe greatest books ever
produced by the collectionthat we have here,
will stand the test of time.
It's an inspiration to us all, includingthe people who are here this week for
the library and Archives workshop run byProfessor Neymark and Professor Gregory.

(02:57):
I see them in the audience.
It's just a long and spectacular piece of
work about themes that unfortunately,
as Anatole Shmilioff referenced,seem not to have gone away.
I first met Ben onMartin Luther King Way in Berkeley,

(03:22):
California, when I wasa PhD student at Berkeley.
And Ben was newly admittedto the PhD program, but,
like many people of his caliber,were admitted to several programs.
And so Berkeley was trying to recruit him,and for some reason, they thought

(03:43):
a meeting with me would enhance ourchances to recruit him at Berkeley.
Despite that, he did choose Berkeley.
In the end, it was a superior program,so I had nothing to do with that.
I think this is the first time thatwe've had an event here at Stanford
with three members ofthe Berkeley PhD program on the dais.

(04:04):
Anatole himself,who arrived the same year as Ben and
I, finished not long after the two ofthem joined the program at Berkeley.
So we also have a number of Stanfordfaculty here who have their
PhDs from other institutions,including from Stanford.

(04:25):
So no prejudice there,even though Cal is amazing PhD program.
Let me just say one more thing about Benbesides the fact that I've known him for
100 years,since he joined the Berkeley program.
He's a fastidious scholar, and I use bothof those terms extremely empirically.

(04:50):
He's a scholar scholar.
He wants to know everythingthat he can find about
the subject that he's dealing with.
He doesn't latch on to onepiece in a eureka moment.
He wants the next piece, andthe next piece, and the piece after that,
including the material that maybe isorthogonal to the views that he's

(05:14):
bringing to reading the material.
I've watched him wrestle with the mostcomplicated issues imaginable and
always avoid the easy answer,the first impression,
go deeper, find more,get the full picture, get it in the round,
and be fair andjudicious in elucidating that.

(05:37):
This is especially important for
dealing with something as potentiallypolarizing as the amazing figures,
the many lives of the dissidentmovement in the soviet case.
They fought among themselves,as you'll hear, and of course,
their reception, or lack of reception,by others, not just by the regime,

(06:00):
but in some of the cases,by the exile communities that they.
So it is a fraught subjectthat requires a person of his
disposition andfastidiousness to do right.
We're very happy that the library andarchive supports our ability to distribute
this amazing book to everyone inthe audience who's interested.

(06:22):
And as Anatol Shmilov mentioned,you should definitely pick up a copy.
No matter how goodthe presentation is gonna be, and
it's gonna be very good,the book is a necessary read.
Please join me in welcomingthe amazing Professor Ben Nathans.

>> Benjamin Nathans (06:41):
Thank you, Steve, I appreciate that introduction.
Can everybody in the back hear me okay.
All right, I do tend to wander when Italk, but I have a wireless mic on me and
if there is a problem hearing me away fromthe podium, please raise your hand or
otherwise signal to me thatthere's difficulty hearing me.
Everything that's been saidabout the centrality of

(07:05):
the Hoover collection forthis book is true.
I have spent several researchvisits at this archive,
as well as archives infive other countries,
Britain, Germany, Lithuania, Russia.

(07:26):
If I'm leaving any out, Israel.
And I'm not exaggerating whenI say the Hoover archive was
the best archive to work at.
Because of the incredible knowledge andhelpfulness of its staff,
the supremely efficient organization ofits collection, and the sheer depth and

(07:49):
quality of the materials thatwere required acquired here.
It is always a pleasure to come backhere to discover something new,
and I do want to mention by name three.
Three of the people who were particularlyhelpful to me when I did the research for
this book at the Hoover.
And they are, first andforemost, Anatol himself,

(08:10):
my classmate at Berkeley, whose knowledgeof the holdings is unparalleled.
Carol Ledenham, who is here with us,
who was my guide to the Samizdatcollection, among others.
And Laura Soroka, who I hope is here.
Yes.
Who took a special interest in thisproject for reasons of her own biography,

(08:32):
and who never lost faith inthe project coming to completion,
even when that took much longerthan either she or I expected.
I'm very glad to see you here today,and I thank you.
I also have to thank Steve Kotkin forbeing a supporter over

(08:53):
many decades of the various projectsthat I've been involved in.
I have always counted on him forunvarnished commentary and
critique, on drafts of work that Iwas writing at this or that stage.
And like many people, not only atHoover but around the world, I look to
the kind of history that he writes asan example of what history can do,

(09:18):
what it is capable of in terms ofenlightening us about the past and
helping us make sense of it.
So thank you to Steve forthe introduction, and
thank you to the Hoover archive andlibrary for bringing me here.
The plan is for me to speak forabout 35 to 40 minutes and
then to open the floor up to questions.

(09:39):
And I very much welcome questions andcomments on my remarks and
anything having to do withthe topic of dissidents.
If you believe the slogan that is theguiding light of the Hoover institution,
and I'll remind you,that is ideas advancing freedom.
Then it seems to me you cannot but

(10:00):
be interested in the story ofdissidents in the Soviet Union.
Because these were peoplewho were struggling for
various forms of freedom,inner, outer, social, spiritual.
In what I think could be describedas one of the least hospitable
environments for that pursuit.

(10:21):
So if you follow the Hoover's guidingmission of using ideas to advance freedom,
I think this story willbe of interest to you.
In some ways,
the history of the soviet dissidentmovement never should have started.
The movement never should have existedin the context of that society.
A society emerging from several decadesof totalitarian rule under Stalin,

(10:46):
which, of course,Steve Cochin is the preeminent analyst of.
And it was the decision by Stalin'ssuccessors to remove the use of political
terror, which is to say,the random application of state sponsored
violence in order to instill fearin the maximum number of people.

(11:07):
That's the essence of terrorism,is its randomness.
Nobody can feel completelysafe from the state.
It was the removal of that technique fromthe repertoire of governing practices
by Stalin's successors that opened upthe space that made the movement possible.
And in the story that I have triedto tell in this book, it all begins

(11:31):
with an eccentric mathematicianin Moscow named Alexander Volpin.
Who was not just a mathematician,
but a student of mathematical logic,which is to say,
someone who was interested in the natureof truth statements in mathematics.

(11:51):
This interest in mathematical theory ormetamathematics led him in
the pursuit of a perfect language ofcommunication between human beings.
A language that wouldreplicate the precision and
accuracy of mathematicalstatements themselves.
He never did find orinvent that ideal language.

(12:13):
But along the way, for reasonshaving to do with his own biography,
his having been arrested forwriting satirical poetry in the 1940s,
for reasons of his own biography and hisown interactions with the soviet regime,
he happened upon a language that atleast approximated what he thought
would be a language of ideal clarity andprecision.

(12:37):
And that was the soviet constitution.
It may surprise you, but the sovietconstitution passed on December 5, 1936,
practically at the height of the terror,or on the eve of the terror under Stalin,
actually contained what sounded likesome rather robust protections of civil

(12:57):
liberties, freedom of speech,freedom of the press, freedom of assembly.
And when Vulpin stumbled on this text,which virtually nobody took seriously,
because it seemed to be no more thana piece of paper, he had a kind of
eureka moment where he realized,if we could make this language real,

(13:18):
if we could take the theory embeddedin Stalin's constitution and
actually exert some kind of pressureon the soviet government to live up
to its own laws by making those laws andtheir violations transparent,
publicizing them, that might be a way ofchanging the behavior of the soviet state.

(13:40):
Neither Volpin nor
his many disciples in the movementever used the word containment.
But I came to the conclusionthat what they were up to,
this soon to be born dissident movement,
was an extended campaign toexercise containment of the soviet
state by using its own lawsas their form of leverage.

(14:04):
And it was, in essence,a domestic counterpart to the kind of
containment that George Kennan wasurging the United States to practice
vis a vis the Soviet Union after1945 from outside the country.
So Volpin, ever the mathematicianis developing these theories
of leveraging soviet law,of taking the seemingly irreproachable

(14:29):
doctrine of insisting thatthe state observe its own laws.
Of using that and waiting foran occasion to put that into practice.
And he found that occasionin the fall of 1965,
when two Soviet writers, Yuli Daniel and
Andrei Sanyavsky were arrestedafter a nearly ten year campaign.

(14:54):
Having been unmasked as the realwriters behind a series of
works published abroad under pseudonyms.
The gold mine,the thing that every historian dreams of,
that I found here at the Hoover,was the KGB dossier of Andrei Sanyavsky.
Which documented the KGB's owndecade long detective hunt for

(15:18):
who this guy, writing under the pseudonymof Abram Terz, actually was.
Turns out he was a ratherprominent literary critic,
gainfully employed atthe Gorky Institute of World Literature.
So the arrests happenedin September of 1965.
Those of you who know a littlebit about soviet history

(15:39):
will realize that thisis just about a year,
just shy of a year after Khrushchevhas been deposed from office.
And everybody in the Soviet Union,and for that matter around the world,
is wondering what's gonna happen next.
Is there going to be a slideback into Stalinism?
Who are Khrushchev'ssuccessors going to be.

(15:59):
Be, and what are they gonna do tothis country that has just begun to
emerge from the Stalinist freeze?
Volpin takes this as his moment anddecides that he's gonna
organize a public demonstration,not in defense of the writers.
He's not interested inreading what they wrote.

(16:21):
He's not interested in takingthe measure of its anti-Soviet content,
which is the alleged crime forwhich they're arrested, but
rather to organize a public meeting whichwill insist on something very simple.
That the Soviet judiciary honor its ownjudicial code and all of the regulations
embedded in the constitution,and that means an open trial.

(16:45):
He decides to call thismeeting the glasnost meeting,
literally the transparency orpublicity meeting.
And glasnost, which you all know is oneof the slogans from the Gorbachev era,
becomes the firstwatchword of the movement.
The idea is, the only way toprevent a retrogression back into

(17:06):
Stalinism after Khrushchev isto have maximum publicity for
everything that the Sovietgovernment does, including when it
arrests two writers on allegationsof anti-Soviet activity.
He holds the glasnost meeting,the transparency meeting,
on the anniversary of the ratification ofStalin's constitution, December 5th, 1965.

(17:33):
There are multiple eyewitnessaccounts of this meeting.
It lasted all of about 20 minutes.
Some people say therewere 50 people there.
Others say there were 200.
Part of the source of the confusion isthat it was very difficult to distinguish
between participants and their friends whowanted to watch but not get too close and
possibly get arrested.

(17:56):
Only a handful of participantswere arrested at the trial.
The KGB, having done a goodjob of advanced intelligence,
knew all about it long before it was held.
And they were ready to pounce,to seize the various banners, and
to break things up, really, withina quarter hour of when it had started.

(18:17):
But Volpin learneda valuable lesson there, and
that was that there were people out there,people he did not know personally,
who he could marshal to support this kindof protest, a protest that was trying,
as hard as it could to operate strictlywithin the bounds of soviet law,

(18:38):
that announced itself assimply acting on the free
speech protections containedin the soviet constitution.
Those of you who have enoughmileage on your odometer or
have read the history of the civilrights movement in the United States,
know that the watchword of that movement,the key technique, was civil disobedience.

(19:03):
This was the technique that waspracticed in the Jim Crow south.
And the logic was very simple.
You deliberately violate Jim Crow law,whether it's in Memphis or
in Nashville or in any of the othermajor cities, across the south.
You deliberately violate Jim Crow law inorder to call attention to its injustice,

(19:28):
but ultimately to bring in the federalgovernment to trump that law and
to revoke local laws that would befound inconsistent with the american
constitution by the federal government.
That's the logic of civil disobedience.
And by the way, it's a logic thatgoes back to Henry David Thoreau,
who thought he shouldn't have to pay taxesto the us government that was waging

(19:50):
the mexican american war.
It goes back to Leo Tolstoy in Russia.
It goes back to Mahatma Gandhi in India,Rosa Parks.
This was a longstanding tradition.
I took this little detour by way ofhighlighting the contrasting logic of this
emerging dissident movementin the Soviet Union.

(20:11):
Their watchword was civil obedience.
We will model legal behavior protectedby our own constitution in an effort to
set an example to the Soviet governmentin the hopes that it might do the same.
So the glasnost meeting lastsall of 15 to 20 minutes.
Members are dispersed.
Banners are seized and torn up.

(20:33):
The trial of the two writersproceeds in February of 1966.
They are found guilty,as everybody knows they would be.
They are sentenced to five andseven years, respectively, in the camps.
But here again, Volpin has a novel idea.
Since the courtroom was not trulyopen to members of the public,
he decided to recruit the wifeof one of the defendants.

(20:57):
This is Larisa Bogoraz, the wife of YuliDaniel, who was a professional linguist by
training, and among other things,was an excellent taker of shorthand notes.
As a relative of a defendant, she had theright to be present in the courtroom, and
she created a verbatimtranscript of the proceeding.
And that transcript was typed and retyped,

(21:18):
circulated in the technique known assamizdat, literally self publishing.
So that if the Soviet government wasn'tgonna open up the proceedings of this
trial to the Soviet population,
the dissidents would takethings into their own hands.
It was basically a way ofweaponizing publicity, and
without anyone planning the next steps.

(21:42):
The meeting of transparency,the trial, the circulation,
the clandestine circulation ofthe transcript, the protests against
the sentences meted out to the twodefendants, the arrest of the people
who had compiled the transcript,their trials, those protests.
It all mushroomed into whatI call a chain reaction,

(22:05):
a kind of spontaneous metastasizingof dissident activity, whether
it's engaging in public protests orproducing and reproducing samizdat texts.
Or writing open letters to the governmentdemanding open trials of those
who've been arrested,trying to defend the original two writers,

(22:26):
all of this snowballs out of controlin a process of chain reaction.
That is the spontaneous mechanismthat multiplies the movement.
It multiplies it from a dozenactivists surrounding Vulpin in 1965,
three years later, to roughly 1000.

(22:47):
And when I say 1000, I mean 1000 peoplewho were willing to put their names and
in some cases their address and telephonenumbers in a brazen display of self
publicity, again enacting the idea thatthey're not doing anything illegal,
therefore they have nothing to hide.
A thousand people put their names and
coordinates onto these open lettersthat were sent to the Soviet government.

(23:13):
That, in a way,
is the maximum extent that the dissidentmovement ever reached numerically.
And I want to just highlight foryour reflection that
1000 people in a country thathad roughly a population
of 280 million is a tiny,tiny drop in the ocean.

(23:35):
And the number of active dissidents,
people who would put their names onpetitions, never got much more than 1000.
But I need to qualify that.
The first qualification isthat those thousand came
from all over the Soviet Union,which, as you know, was then, as
Russia is today by far the largest countryon the planet with eleven time zones.

(23:57):
This was not just Moscow intellectual.
These were people from cities across thelength and breadth of the Soviet Union.
And I know this because the KGBdid my research for me.
They investigated who these people were,where they came from,
who was reading Samistat,where they were getting it.
The second thing to emphasize isthat the figure of a thousand,

(24:21):
this drop in the ocean, is in some waysan illusion, because those are only.
That's the inner circle of the movement,
of what was becomingthe movement via chain reaction.
Another concentric circle aroundthem would be composed of the people
who were either producing orreceiving or passing on samizdat texts.

(24:45):
And if you've never seen a samizdat text,I urge
you to look at some of the examples theyhave right here in the Hoover archive.
They are not visually impressive, right?
They're not beautiful coversdesigned by graphic artists.
They are hand typed on greasy,torn onion skin paper,
originally a sheaf of them withcarbon copy paper in between

(25:08):
that someone would poundcopies of like a chain letter.
You get one copy, you're expected tomake ten or twelve yourself to pass on
around the platen of a typewriter, if anyof you remember what a typewriter is.
One former typist of samizdatdescribed the feeling of typing ten

(25:29):
copies from one as you emerge withthe shoulders of a lumberjack.
Because you're pounding on the keysto make sure they go through all of
those levels of onion skin paper andcarbon paper in between.
If we take the number of people whoare producing and consuming samizdat,
then we're talking about tens ofthousands, again, across the length and

(25:51):
breadth of the Soviet Union,according to the KGB's own research.
Because this whole drama was unfoldingduring the Cold War, there was a third
concentric circle in who was participatingin some shape or form in this movement.
Whenever a samizdat text was produced,

(26:11):
there was a reasonable chancethat it would be smuggled abroad.
There were western correspondents whocould do this, who had embassy privileges.
There were the embassy staff themselvesof the various western countries.
There were tourists, maybe some of you,
who visited the Soviet Union inthe 1960s and 70s and early 80s.
And a significant proportion,

(26:32):
a selection of samizdat madeits way out of the country.
And a portion of that made its way toshortwave radio broadcasting services,
mostly sponsored by the CIA and MI6 and
other intelligence servicesof western countries.
You know their names.
The BBC World Service,including its Russian broadcasting arm.

(26:55):
The Voice of America, Radio Liberty,Radio Free Europe, the Deutsche Welle.
All of these had the capacityto broadcast what we would now
call audiobooks,audio versions of samizdat texts back
to the original audiencesin the original language.
And if we take the number ofpeople who were listening to those

(27:18):
broadcasts to the bestthat we can estimate them,
then we're talking millions,possibly 10 million Soviet citizens.
A lot of Soviet retirees especially lovedto listen to the BBC in the evening.
And we have massive amounts of anecdotalevidence showing that this was the case.

(27:38):
So, yes, it was a tiny movement.
And part of my burden in thisbook was to explain how so
few people could have such an outsizedimpact on the climate of opinion
in their own country andarguably in the dynamics of the cold War,
since they eventually interferedin the Soviet Union's

(28:00):
relationship with the United States andother western powers.
So, as I said, the chain reaction phaseof this story reaches its peak in
1968 when you get 1000 peoplesigning open letters and petitions.
The goal of the movement was to make theSoviet Union more of a law abiding state.

(28:24):
And unfortunately, what I discoveredis that it did not have that impact.
It failed to make the soviet governmentmore law abiding because the lesson
that the KGB drew from the variousarrests and crushing of the protests
was that the court system was notworking in the government's favor.

(28:44):
True, they always got a guilty verdict.
They were always able tosentence people accused of
anti soviet activities to longsentences in the camps or in prison.
But the political dividends of thesetrials were decidedly on the side of
the dissidents themselves.
It was bad publicity forthe soviet government.

(29:04):
And sorather than becoming more law abiding,
they chose increasingly extrajudicialtechniques to go after dissidents.
And by that I mean holding what theycalled prophylactic conversations,
to warn, translate, threaten peoplebefore they could be arrested,
to tell them,if you continue to do what you're doing,

(29:26):
you will lose your job, your childrenwill never get into a university.
Any number of punishments.
Other extrajudicial punishments includedexiling people without a trial to
the interior of the country or tellingthem that they might want to think about
emigrating, because the alternative tothat would be surely a prison sentence.

(29:49):
And the third and most extreme, the thingthat created the most concern inside and
outside the country was ratherthan arresting someone,
rather than subjecting them to a trial,even by Soviet standards.
They could be held indefinitelyin a psychiatric institution.
And in the worst cases, be treatedinvoluntarily with antipsychotic drugs,

(30:13):
which essentially disabled their abilityto think, live alone, read or write.
The west was often accused of engagingin psychological warfare against
the Soviet Union,which meant a propaganda war.
And of course, that was a hugeaspect of american policy towards
the soviet bloc forthe entire duration of the Cold War.

(30:35):
But the Soviet Union also engaged inits version of psychological warfare.
Only the goal there was not to change howpeople think by exposing them to ideas and
texts, but to stop them from thinkingby placing them in psychiatric
institutions and disabling theirminds with very powerful drugs.

(30:55):
So the dissident movementfaced a crisis moment.
And part of the reason why I gavethe book the subtitle that I
did the many lives ofthe soviet dissident movement,
is that the movement almost died severaltimes and had to reinvent itself.
It was on the way to becoming a socialmovement in the classic sense of the word,

(31:17):
of mobilizing significant numbersof people with public activities.
But the KGB crackdown after 1968essentially asphyxiated that goal.
It made it impossible to expand that innercircle beyond about 1000 people, many of
whom were connected to each other by tiesof very intimate friendship and trust.

(31:40):
And those of you who knew or know,Russians and Russia know that adult
friendships are an extremely importantpart of people's lives than is now.
But you couldn't infinitely expandthe circle of adult friendships.
And the KGB was able tointimidate enough people through.
Prophylactic conversations or

(32:01):
threats of psychiatric imprisonmentto put an end to that phase.
After a near death experience forthe movement in 1968,
it had to reinvent itself.
Or, as I try to argue in the book,it had to reformat itself.
And in this long process of searching fora form through which to work,

(32:25):
a form through which toorganize the movement happened
upon models outsidethe Soviet Union that it found
completely magneticthe solution to its problems.
And that was the model of the NGO,the nongovernmental organization.
And the preeminent NGO that inspireddissidents to reinvent themselves as

(32:49):
something other than a socialmovement was Amnesty International.
I won't go into all the details of amnesty's story.
You may know it was founded in 1961, insome ways at the height of the Cold War,
and was determined not to be sucked intothe vortex of this or that side, east or

(33:11):
west of that war, but rather to be abovethat conflict and to invoke a way of
thinking, namely human rights norms,that was allegedly above that conflict,
that was universal and therefore,by definition, international.
And the soviet dissidents fastenedon to that language of human rights.

(33:32):
They had begun essentially as a civilrights movement, a counterpart, in a way,
to our own.
They wanted to make real the civilliberties that were enshrined in
the Soviet constitution.
None of their responses, I'm sorry,none of their petitions to
the Soviet government ever receiveda single answer in writing.
The only answer to those demonstrations,public letters, petitions, etc.,

(33:55):
was arrest and imprisonment,a nonverbal answer, in other words.
With the failure of the chain reaction andthe reinvention of the movement as an NGO,
they took the logic of invokinglaw to contain the behavior of
the Soviet state to a different level,to an international level.

(34:18):
And he began invoking human rights normsthat the Soviet Union had signed as
part of international agreements andtrying to use those as a form of leverage.
And this is where they treadon the most dangerous ground.
Because the soviet government guardedforeign policy as a kind of royal

(34:38):
privilege, no one but the Kremlinwas supposed to have any say in
the Soviet Union's relationshipwith the outside world.
And yet the dissidents were ableto command the attention of
the west in a way thatnobody could have foreseen.
It's impossible to overstate thesignificance of the western journalists.

(35:00):
People like today's Evan Gershkovich, whowere stationed in Moscow and who became
the publicity lifeline of the movementto their increasingly western audience.
Many Westerners, I think,made a perceptual mistake of seeing
dissidents as little liberalswho just had the misfortune

(35:23):
of being born on the wrongside of the Iron Curtain.
They did something thatAmericans are often prone to do,
which is to project their own beliefs and
commitments onto people who they thinkare representing those same values abroad.
As one dissident once said,
there's a big difference betweena westerner and a westernizer.

(35:47):
There are plenty of westernizersamong Soviet dissidents, but
that doesn't make them little westernliberals who are fighting our battle on
the other side of the Iron Curtain.
So the movement reinvented itself,
reformatted itself as an NGo.
Now an NGO is like an oxymoronin the Soviet system.

(36:08):
There aren't supposed to benongovernmental organizations, and
the Soviet state ruthlessly guardedits monopoly on the public sphere and
public discourse aboutanything remotely political.
And, of course, in the Soviet Union,everything was potentially political.
Nonetheless, by 1973,a dozen dissidents had managed

(36:30):
to found a Moscow chapterof Amnesty International,
the first chapter of that movement inthe socialist world, in the Second World.
The drama of that founding I don't havetime to go into now, but it's one of
the most interesting things that Idiscovered working in amnesty's archive,

(36:51):
because it was an enormously controversialthing inside amnesty itself.
They were used to going to bat for,or, as they put it,
adopting prisoners of consciencein countries all over the world.
But they never dreamed that some of those
prisoners of conscience might wantto become their collaborators and

(37:12):
might even want to join theirorganization with their own chapter.
So part of what I tried toexplore in this book is
how did human rightswork outside the West?
I tried to get away from our habitof seeing them as a western export

(37:32):
product and look at the way peoplein non-democratic settings,
in authoritarian settings,mobilize that language, and to what end.
It was as much a learning experience foramnesty as it was for the dissidents.
In a way, stepping into the internationalarena by exporting damning

(37:56):
information about Soviet violationsof international human rights norms.
They're not just violating their ownnorms, but now international norms,
was the fatal move ofthe dissident movement.
Because the KGB, after more orless tolerating or
at least allowing dissidents to live,

(38:16):
even as they were punishing andexiling many of them,
once they crossed over into coldwar politics, the end was near.
And by 1980 1982,
pretty much all ofthe movement had been crushed.
The Helsinki watch groups, designed topublicize soviet violations of the latest

(38:39):
in a series of international human rightsaccords, namely the Helsinki Accords.
Of 1975 were all crushed.
I would estimate that of that originalinner circle of 1000 people who openly
signed petitions, roughly half, about 500,had been forced out of the country.
And simply removed from the arena wheretheir activism was most meaningful.

(39:04):
It was a precursor I think to the parallelstrategy that the Putin government has
used in the last few years to let many,
many more people leave the countryas a kind of safety valve.
Just let them go and getthe troublemakers out of Russia itself.
In general, many of the techniquesthat I looked at in terms of the KGB

(39:25):
repertoire of dealing with dissidentshave sadly come back into use.
Including the use of involuntaryincarceration in psychiatric institutions,
which is, once again,being practiced in Russia.
Let me wrap up by returning tothe analogy to the american civil
rights movement since it's somethingthat we know from our own history,

(39:50):
our own curriculum, our own experience andthe legacy of it is still alive today.
So I mentioned the contrastbetween the logic of.
Of civil disobedience, on the one hand,and the logic of civil obedience.
And I mentioned that civil rightsactivists in the United States were
trying to get the federal law tosupersede and trump, and in some cases,

(40:14):
dismantle local discriminatory Jim Crowlegislation, especially in the south.
There's something particular tothe American system that made that
technique work, and that somethingis the principle of judicial review.
This country is almost unique in the worldin empowering judges to overrule

(40:35):
legislation that they findcontradictory to the constitution.
There is no judicial review in the Sovietsystem or in the Russian system today.
We are the outlier in that respect,not the Soviet Union.
But that mechanism ofenforcement where a higher

(40:55):
level law can trump a lowerlevel law did not exist.
And essentially,there was an escape hatch for
the Soviet government where it couldrewrite its own laws in order to
allow it to continue its ownpersecution of people who spoke freely.
The same thing happened onthe international level.

(41:18):
So by the time the dissidentmovement reinvents itself as an NGO,
trying to mimic the mechanisms ofAmnesty International, trying to leverage
international human rights law againstSoviet law and Soviet practices.
Once again, there's no organization,there's no enforcement
mechanism that can force a country,let alone a superpower,

(41:41):
to actually abide by international law,including human rights law.
So it was a logic withoutan enforcement mechanism.
And I think it's fair to say thatthe Putin government has been extremely
sophisticated in its manipulationof that absence of enforcement.
It has been able to use Russianlaw today to sanction and

(42:06):
essentially legalize the kinds ofsuppression that are going on,
despite the fact that, in theory,they violate today's Russian constitution.
As an exercise for my students,I sometimes ask them to think,
when was the greater rupture?
After Stalin died orafter the Soviet Union collapsed?

(42:29):
We're used to thinking of the collapse,what happened in 1991,
as the earthquake of Russia'slate 20th century history.
But I'm seeing more andmore continuities and
parallels between today's post-SovietRussia, and the late Soviet

(42:50):
period than I am between the lateSoviet period and the Stalinist era.
And I'm anticipating someobjections to that hypothesis.
But I think it's a useful device forthinking about where the deepest forms
of change have actually occurred and whatkind of regime we're looking at today.
So let me just close again bythanking my sponsors here at

(43:13):
the Hoover institution,not just for today's talk, but
for the several fruitful archivalvisits that I spent here.
The first and most exciting of them wasthe one sponsored by Paul Gregory and
Norman Naimark at the summerresearch workshop.
That's where I stumbled on the Sinyavskypapers that kind of opened

(43:36):
the door to what the KGB was doing.
The KGB is and always will be the singlerichest source of information about
the dissident movement, that and their ownmemoirs, of which there are well over 150.
I'd be happy to take questions fromanybody in the audience and also from you.
Thank you.

(43:56):
>> [APPLAUSE]>> Stephen Kotkin: Well, there you saw
both the storytelling skills andthe analytical skills as promised.
Before we go to the livestudio audience as well as our
members on Zoom,let me press you on some of your themes.
You made the important point that weshouldn't impose our own way of thinking

(44:22):
or our own understanding of human rightson places that developed human rights.
You also use the term dissidentmovement quite frequently.
So one might say that there'sa bunch of nationalists,
Ukrainian nationalists,Georgian nationalists,

(44:43):
very significant population,potentially larger than what
you're calling the dissident movement orthe human rights framing.
And that they are at least as big a story,
maybe a bigger story in terms ofopposition to the Soviet regime.
Again, they're not liberal.

(45:04):
Many of them are illiberal.
How do we deal with those peoplevis-a-vis the ones that you
spotlighted in your talk here?
You could also turn on the religious side,right?
If you were an evangelical Christianity,for example, you're not,
but if you were an evangelical Christian,

(45:26):
you might tell a different storyabout freedom in the Soviet Union,
lack of freedom, which in their case isfreedom to practice a certain religion.
And maybe they're less concerned withthe nature of the regime per se and
more concerned with theirsalvation of vis-a-vis God.

(45:46):
So on the one side, the nationalists,self-styled nationalists,
that's not a label I'm applying myself to.
On the other side, the evangelicalChristians, but others, right,
the practicing Muslims, and we couldgo on in that category, you know well,
and you yourself have written aboutthe Jewish community previously.

(46:11):
So in some ways, there are multiplestrands here in addition to what
you're calling the movement orthe human rights framing of this.
So explain to us a littlebit how that fits in or
doesn't fit into the largerstory you're trying to tell.
Sure, I don't wanna be obsessed with terminology, but

(46:32):
I do think I owe it to youto point out that none of
the dissidents likedbeing called dissidents.
It didn't like that term.
It didn't like it semanticallybecause it implied people.
The word itself means those who sit apart.
And they didn't sit apart,

(46:52):
they were some of the most civicallyengaged citizens of the Soviet Union.
They also didn't like that it wasa foreign term imported into Russia,
dissident.
And the regime weaponized thatforeign word to stigmatize
those to whom it was applied.
So when someone made the mistake in Moscowonce of referring to Andrei Sakharov as

(47:15):
dissident, his wife Yelena Bonnerpopped up and said,
my husband is not a dissident,he's a physicist.
And when Alexander Solzhenitsynwas sitting in Vermont in exile,
having been expelled fromthe Soviet Union in 1974,
by the 1980s, he wrote a privateletter to President Ronald Reagan

(47:37):
in which he insisted that he wasneither a dissident nor an emigre.
He was a Russian writer.
And you'll notice that in both of thoseexamples, the two individuals choose
to be identified by their work,by their profession.
I tried to recreate the lives ofdissidents in their Fullness as people

(47:59):
who had careers and families and ambitionsbefore they got the label of dissident,
which was first put on them bywestern journalists trying in
the best of faith to cover thisemerging movement, and then,
as I said, weaponized by the sovietstate to stigmatize them.

(48:21):
There are many definitions ofwho comes under that rubric,
whether they liked it or nothing.
And I chose not to includethe nationalists and
religious minorities,including evangelical Christians and
other christian minorities,because they, without exception,
were not interested inreforming the soviet state.

(48:45):
I wanted to use the term inan analytically rigorous way and therefore
apply it to the people who actuallywanted to change the soviet state.
And I put it that way quite deliberately.
None of the dissidents aimedat toppling the Soviet regime.
Like most soviet people, and like mostpeople in the world, they couldn't imagine

(49:08):
that the soviet regime couldcollapse in their lifetimes or
could be brought down in their lifetimes.
There are a handful of examples ofextraordinarily prescient people who
had a sense that the regimewas enormously brittle and
could collapse underthe right circumstances.
But the overwhelming majority had no suchimagination and no such aspirations.

(49:33):
So I decided to focus on thosewho were oriented towards
the strategy of getting the Sovietstate to abide by its own laws.
And the more I read inthe primary sources,
including the ones herein the Hoover archive,
the more that felt consistentwith the practice of the people.
At the time, most nationalists didnot want to be known as dissidents

(49:57):
because that implied that they weretrying to reform the soviet system.
And if you were a Lithuanian nationalist,circa 1975,
the last thing you wanted was toget mixed up in Soviet politics.
You were looking foran exit ramp for Lithuania.
The same thing forthe jewish national movement,

(50:17):
which was dead set on not gettingmixed up in soviet politics and
instead focusing like a laseron emigration as the one and
only solution to the jewishpredicament in the Soviet Union.
So I think the distinction doescarry weight analytically.
And I would even go so far as to saythat in terms of the consequences,

(50:41):
and you're absolutely right,that on the level of sheer numbers.
Nationalists andevangelical Christians and other religious
minorities were way larger thanthe dissidents by many, many factors.
Especially in a place like Ukraine,which has a population of 40,

(51:01):
50 million at the time.
Nonetheless, since I do believethat small groups of people
make history very oftenwherever they're positioned.
The people that I'm referring toas dissidents and who were known
as dissidents at the time, the socalled rights defenders, Prava Zesniki.

(51:22):
They did more to discreditthe Soviet Union as a system.
They did more to expose this regimeas fundamentally archaic precisely
because it failed over andover again to observe its own laws,
the laws that it had drafted andratified and sanctified.

(51:43):
More damage was done reputationallyto the soviet government by this
tiny cohort of dissidents than byall the national movements and
religious movements combined.
It's true that when the Soviet Unionbroke up, the fault lines turned out
to be largely national, orat least republican, putatively national.

(52:06):
But I think it's a terriblemistake to think that it was
nationalism that destroyed the empire.
Nationalism replaced the organizingprinciple of the empire,
a principle that it had itselfenshrined by creating ethnic republics.
But that was not the forcethat blew things apart.

(52:27):
The dissident movement alsodidn't blow things apart.
I don't want to exaggerate my claims for
the relationship of the movementto the collapse of communism.
Gorbachev destroyed the Soviet Union,again, without any intention of doing so.
But some of Gorbachev's ideas,including, as you may recall,
his watchword of glasnost or transparency,his watchword of democratization,

(52:52):
these were absorbed fromthe dissident lexicon.
And Gorbachev says as much in his memoirs.
He says the moral influence ofthe movement was far out of
proportion with its numerical size.
And that's about as close as you're goingto get a soviet official to admit that
ideas were coming infrom outside the party.

>> Stephen Kotkin (53:16):
Okay, Solzhenitsyn might disagree that the human rights
activists were more influential thanhe was in blackening the Soviet regime.
And Solzhenitsyn was a Christian,
one might actually sayilliberal Russian nationalist,

(53:37):
or at least Slavic,Eastern Slavic nationalist.
His impact,he doesn't fit the human rights advocacy.
He fits the overthrow position much more.
But anyway, it's important for us tounderstand the decision that you made.

(53:57):
Second point before we goto the studio audience,
I see Bert Patton outin our audience today.
Your analysis of continuities,Brezhnev and Putin,
as opposed to the breakwith Stalin's death.
The Okhranka archives,the archives of the tsarist secret police,

(54:19):
are also here at the Hoover Institution,which is why I mentioned Bert's name.
Bert eloquently describingthat collection for us.
And we see continuities withthe tsarist era in some ways.
I don't wanna saythe continuities are 100%.

(54:41):
Obviously tremendousdiscontinuities throughout history,
even between the Brezhnev andthe Putin regime you would acknowledge.
But you see ways in which people livingwith the injustices are trying to
figure out what their strategy is forbattling the injustices,
overthrow reform, work within the system,work outside the system.

(55:05):
And you also see the secretpolice as the main readers,
the main audience in some ways forthe tsarist era, resistance,
social justice,however you wanna describe them.
Again, the vocabulary is important,but I want to be neutral there.

(55:26):
And one can see with the KGB thatthey're like the tsarist secret
police in paying the closestattention to these people and
filtering those people down to us.
Now you're sophisticated in making sureyou don't adopt the KGB point of view or
anything, even as they're the filter fora lot of the information.

(55:50):
But I wonder if given that your earlierwork was also on the tsarist period,
I wonder if you'd make a comment to usabout About whether there's something
longer term here in the Russianexperience, like the intelligentsia term.
Again, I don't wanna call itdissident in the Czarist period.

(56:11):
I'm careful with the vocabulary.
But if you would weigh for us on that.

>> Benjamin Nathans (56:15):
It's a great question, and there's so
much to say about it because you'reasking a very long-range question
across->> Stephen Kotkin: But
you're the guy to ask that question.
Well, I will be for the next five minutes.
>> [LAUGH]>> Benjamin Nathans: So
historians who go off to work in archives,not so much this one,

(56:35):
which is in a very beautiful,pleasant setting.
But when you go halfway around the worldto more difficult settings and
you're spending nine,ten hours a day poring over documents,
some of which are utterly boring and havenothing of use for you, the thing that
lets you get through that experience iswhen you are surprised by what you find.

(57:01):
And any historian worth his or her saltloves to be surprised in the archives.
And the thing that surprised me most,it happened sometimes here,
but it especially happened inthe archives in Lithuania and in Russia,
is that the KGB in the period that Iworked on, in the post-Stalin era,

(57:25):
was not very interested in ideas,let alone ideas that advance freedom.
When they interrogated dissidents, andI read a lot of dissident interrogation
transcripts, they were notinterested in their childhoods.
They were not interested in whathad led them to the movement.
They were not interested inplumbing their spiritual depths.

(57:49):
They had seemingly abandoned all ofthe obsessions of the Stalin era KGB.
They just wanted damning information.
They wanted to know who yougot this Samizdat text from,
which Western journalistshave you been in touch with?
Did you ever go to the American embassy?
They wanted forensic evidence so
that they could widen the circle ofincrimination as much as they could.

(58:14):
And we have the world'sleading expert on the KGB here
in the front row, Amir Weiner.
This is a KGB that isbent on professionalism,
on not descending to the sort ofdungeon tactics of the Stalinist era.
They don't torture people.
They very rarely beatdissidents in prison.

(58:37):
They're not hell bent on extractingtheir deeper, innermost secrets.
They just wanna widen the circle ofthe investigation so that they can
be seen as competent as possible,and they become very good at that.
This is something that differentiatesthem from their predecessors,
both in the Stalin era and, I think,in the pre-revolutionary era.

(59:01):
In the pre-revolutionary era,the Eckankar was interested in ideas.
They wanted to know who was reading whatand which authors were influential and
who was influencing whomintellectually and spiritually.
How do we explain that rupture?
I think that after Stalin departsfrom the scene, the Soviet Union,

(59:22):
under Khrushchev and his successors,is trying to become a modern state.
They are trying to exit fromthe vortex of totalitarianism.
And let's remember, the most dangerousthing you could be in the 1930s,
you know this as well as anyone.
The most dangerous thing youcould be in the 1930s was

(59:43):
a high-ranking memberof the communist party.
And within that group, the zone ofmost heightened risk was to work for
the security services, the NKVD.
It's ironic, but that was the mostdangerous job of all, because a very high
proportion of those people weresucked into that vortex themselves.

(01:00:05):
So if only as a mechanism ofself-preservation, they wanted to put
an end to the auto-cannibalismthat was the Stalinist system.
And it has been suggestedby [INAUDIBLE] and others,
a German historian working in Berlin,that Khrushchev was engaged
in a kind of civilizing mission,trying to make the Soviet Union

(01:00:29):
a long-term project that couldsurvive its own violent instincts.
Or, as one of my dissidents put it,many of them were scientifically trained,
highly scientifically literate,as was the Soviet population as a whole.
The Soviet Union, after Stalin,
to borrow the language of thermodynamics,had achieved a steady state.

(01:00:52):
It had managed to channelthe revolutionary heat into something
that looked like it could last forever.
And that really is the way itseemed to most people at the time.
The Soviet Union was a forever country.
Not just the future,but a forever country.
So there are many more things that couldbe said about the continuities and
the discontinuities,

(01:01:13):
but those are the things that leapt outof to me in the process of my research.

>> Stephen Kotkin (01:01:17):
Well done.
Let's go to our audience now.
Wait for the microphone.
Who's got the courage toask the first question?
This is, after all, about courage.
Yes.>> Benjamin Nathans: We have
one in the front row.
Right here in the front, please, Sameer.
Please identify yourself, if possible.

>> Katherine Jolluck (01:01:33):
Hi, Katherine Jolluck from the history department.
I wanted to go back tothe beginning of the talk.
You locate the beginning of what became,in our language,
the dissident movement with Volpin.
Could you talk about what about him and
his thinking caused that turnfrom being a mathematician,

(01:01:55):
interested in kind of a theoreticalnotion of perfect language,
to then move into what isreally a political endeavor?
I just wonder if you could elaborateon that move into what he then pursued.

>> Benjamin Nathans (01:02:13):
Sure, I'm tempted to respond by saying no move was necessary,
because one of the glories of Russia'sintellectual tradition is a contempt for
disciplinary boundaries.
So, yes,he had a PhD in mathematical logic,
but like many Russian andSoviet intellectuals of his caliber,

(01:02:35):
he considered the entire domain of humanknowledge to be his field of inquiry.
That meant poetry, that meant economics,that meant the law, as well as
mathematical logic and everythingthat he actually specialized in.
So in his search for a perfect ideallanguage, he was reading Wittgenstein,

(01:02:56):
who had a similar ambition and who wastranslated into Russian in the 1950s.
He was reading Norbert Wiener of MIT,who is the godfather of cybernetics.
And as some of you may knowcybernetics was the dreamed of master
discipline through whichall arenas of knowledge,

(01:03:17):
from biology to linguistics to,you name it, astronomy, could all be
unified in a single quantifiedlanguage of feedback and response.
So Volpin, in a sense, was an extremecase of what I think is a general
phenomenon of cross-disciplinaryboldness and inquiry.

(01:03:40):
He simply took it in directionsthat others were not willing to go.
You asked why orhow did he become interested in making
a political case forthe use of an ideal language?
Here again, I have to bring to yourattention Attention, the way he and

(01:04:01):
other dissidents thought of themselves,which is absolutely apolitical.
It's strange because we see them asbeing these enormously courageous,
politically engaged soviet citizenstaking advantage of a crack in
the monolith to exercise somekind of agency in public life.

(01:04:22):
But by appealing to law and laterdomestic law, and later to international
human rights, they were absolutelyconvinced that they were above politics.
It's a mistake that activists inRussia today don't make anymore, and
it's one of the great differencesbetween them and the dissident movement.

(01:04:43):
Until they began to be poisoned andshot and imprisoned, they were running for
public office.
They were founding political parties.
They were not falling into what I thinkultimately was the trap that Soviet
dissidents set for themselves, althoughthey didn't have a lot of alternatives,
the trap of trying to remain outside orabove politics.

(01:05:03):
So it's difficult to answer tothe second part of your question,
because Volpin himself would havedenied that he was a political being.

>> Jacob Shumski (01:05:12):
Hi.
Jakob Shumski.
I'm visiting from the Universityof Vienna in Germany.
I'm a participant ofthe authoritarianism workshop.
I have two questions.
The first one would be whether youconsider socialist dictatorship,
communist dictatorship,a good environment for
this kind of dissidence,whether you could compare it to

(01:05:36):
other dictatorships,like right-wing kind of fascism.
What would be the difference?
And second one, I'm wondering,what is the, let's say,
presence of this dissidentheritage in today's Russia?
Is it at all a point of pride?
Do you know public figures who wouldconsider themselves former dissidents and

(01:05:59):
earn some kind ofa prestige from this brand?
Okay, thank you.

>> Benjamin Nathans (01:06:04):
Thank you.
In the epilogue of the book,
one of the things that I do is brieflycompare the soviet dissident movement
to other movements that I think can shedlight on what is particular about it.
So I compare it to the resistancemovement in Nazi Germany.
I compare it to the americancivil rights movement,

(01:06:25):
which I did a little bit here today.
I compare it to the dissident movementsof the eastern bloc countries, Poland,
Hungary, Czechoslovakia, et cetera.
And finally,I compare it to dissent in China.
One thing that leaps out fromthat set of brief comparisons
is the remarkable structuralsimilarity of dissident movements in

(01:06:49):
all of the Soviet-style countries.
And here, uncharacteristically, theRussians are ahead of the East Europeans.
It's the East Europeans who are takingtheir cues from the Russian,
the Soviet dissident movement.
And I mean this in every imaginable way.
So Havel's notion, Vaclav Havel ofCzechoslovakia, his notion of the parallel

(01:07:11):
polis and of living in truth owesan enormous intellectual debt, which he
fully acknowledged to Solzhenitsyn'sshort essay, Live Not by the Lie.
You can trace the lineages fromthe soviet movement to its east european
counterparts, but also structurally,they all adopted the technique of
demanding fealty to the law, demandingthat their own states live up to their own

(01:07:34):
legal statutes andeventually international legal statutes.
So the parallels thereare almost too obvious.
They just leap out.
I don't see those kinds ofparallels in the whole range
of other authoritarian regimes.
No member of the german resistance underHitler, whether a member of the general

(01:07:57):
staff that organized the famousassassination attempt on Hitler in July of
44, whether the underground CommunistParty, whether the the evangelical church,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others, noneof those people would have ever dreamed
of invoking nazi law to containthe behavior of the nazi state.
It simply did not exist as a technique.

(01:08:19):
So there it's the contraststhat really stand out and
that let us see what is distinctiveabout Soviet-style regimes and
the dissident movementsthat they engender.
One of the major themes of my book isthat orthodoxies produce their own
specific heresies.
I don't want to see the dissidents aslittle western liberals plopped down on

(01:08:43):
the wrong side of the Iron Curtain.
These are soviet people, and they formedtheir movement from soviet ingredients.
And that structure of a movementwas then exported after
the 1960s to the variousEast European countries.
Your second question was aboutthe legacy of the movement today.

(01:09:05):
If I had managed to finishthis book before 2022,
I would have had a verydifferent epilogue.
My goal would have been to tracethe kind of roller-coaster of reputation
of the movement in the yearsafter the Soviet collapse.

From the sense of euphoria (01:09:21):
we gave Gorbachev his agenda; we helped
bring down communism; we helpedbring down the Soviet empire,
isn't this a glorious finale to thisstory that unfolded during the cold War?

That quickly gave way to (01:09:38):
you dissidents are responsible for
Russia's freefall into poverty,disrespect, and dissolution.
So the same people werealternately praised and blamed,
depending on how youlooked at the outcome.
And that roller-coaster ride continuedin the early 2000s and afterward.

(01:10:00):
Once 2022 hit, once the methodicalcrushing of Memoriale and
the Andrei Sakharov center andthe Helsinki watch groups,
which were the institutional legacy ofthe dissident movement in the Putin era,
once all of those organizationshad been liquidated and
their members forced to flee the country,it was no longer very interesting

(01:10:22):
to me to trace the ups and downs,because the verdict has been rendered.
Russia, not just its government butits population,
has essentially turned away fromthe legacy of the movement.
And the ripples of protest afterthe crushing of Memoriale were,
to me, depressingly small and weak.

(01:10:44):
Yes, there were a fewpublic demonstrations, but
essentially the leading civil societyorganizations of Putin's Russia
were crushed with barely a murmur ofprotest by the population at large.
So it's a story,if we're taking Soviet public opinion,
Russian public opinion as a whole,

(01:11:05):
it's a story of a return to a senseof ghettoization and isolation.
And now the Andrei Sakharov centeroperates as best it can from its exile in
Berlin.
Oleg Orlov, who was one of the leaders ofMemoriale after the death of the founding
generation, was one of the prisonersfreed in the recent exchange.

(01:11:28):
He's also one of the prisonerswho never wanted to leave Russia,
who was never asked if hewanted to leave Russia.
And as Vladimir Karamurza pointedout in that phenomenal press
conference that he and Ilya Jasin andothers held in Berlin within
hours of their passage out of Russia,the Russian government
can't even do a prisoner exchangewithout violating its own laws.

(01:11:53):
It continues to be a government thatsimply is incapable of law abiding
behavior with respect to.
To its own population, sothe legacy gets invoked by individuals.
Kara-Murza is a disciple ofVladimir Bukovsky, he says that openly.
You will occasionally hear the morehistorically literate members of

(01:12:15):
Pussy Riot citingthe Sinyavsky-Daniel trial.
We shouldn't be distracted by thesetoken invocations of the legacy.
For me, for my money, the mosttelling fact out there is a public
opinion poll conducted in Russiaback when you could do that in 2014

(01:12:37):
by the Levada Institute,in which it was discovered that fewer than
one in five Russians could namea single Soviet dissident by name.
That's an amazing fact.
The history of this movement deservesto be the patrimony of Russia, but
it doesn't feel that way now, and it'sgonna be a long time before it ever is.

>> Verna Yu (01:13:00):
Hi, thank you for a very fascinating talk.
My name is Bernou Yu, I teach modernChinese studies at the University
of Oxford, and I'm over here touse the Hoover archive as well.
I used to be a journalist and I coveredthe Chinese dissident movement for
20 years.

(01:13:21):
So a lot of what you saidreally resonated, and
I'd be really looking forwardto your chapter on China.
So, number one, I mean,what do you think was
comparable between the Sovietdissident movement and
the Chinese dissident movement andany differences or similarities?

(01:13:48):
Secondly, I think you would agreethat the Chinese dissident movement
has a very different outcome.
Would you say thatthe outcome of the Soviet
movement has a lot to dowith the top-down approach?
I mean,what was happening in the leadership?

(01:14:12):
Was it as much as what it's about in
the leadership asthe bottom up movement or
was it sort of an interactivekind of process?

>> Benjamin Nathans (01:14:29):
Yeah.

>> Verna Yu (01:14:30):
Thank you.

>> Benjamin Nathans (01:14:31):
Well, given what you've said about your work,
I hesitate to say anything aboutthe Chinese [LAUGH] dissident movement,
because I have a strong sensationthat you know a lot more than I do.
But in my comparison, in the epilogue,
a couple of things sortof jumped out at me.
One is the Soviet dissident movement wascomposed overwhelmingly of scientists,

(01:14:56):
or let me put it this way,of people in the STEM fields, physicists,
biologists, computer scientists,engineers.
There were a good numberof humanists as well.
What there wasn't was lawyers.
And that's a strange thing for
a movement whose central strategywas about leveraging the law.

(01:15:17):
And it was telling that there weren'ta lot of lawyers in the Soviet dissident
movement, because theirway of interacting with
Soviet law was in some ways quite amateur,quite literal minded.
I know this from the memoirs oflawyers who came to the aid of
dissidents put on trial andwho had to tell their defendants,

(01:15:38):
you don't know how the Sovietlegal system works.
For one thing, you can't havea law declared unconstitutional,
because no judge is empowered to do that.
Here's what's really distinctiveabout the Chinese case.
There are lots and lots of lawyers.
In fact, the dominant force inthe movement, from what I can understand,
are people with professional legaltraining and who really know the Chinese

(01:16:02):
legal system as professionals,not as jailhouse lawyers.
And that has, I think,shaped the way they deploy law
very differently from the Soviet case.
I really don't feel qualified tosay how different are relations
between Chinese dissidents and therulership as opposed to the Soviet case.

(01:16:27):
What's interesting about the Sovietcase is that even in instances where
we have a strong hunch that dissidentideas were being absorbed by osmosis,
if not by someone like Gorbachev, whodid read samistat texts, by the way, and
his wife, who was even better educated andbetter read than he was, Raisa Gorbacheva.

(01:16:49):
She read even more of the dissident texts.
They could get them when they wanted to.
But at lower levels,we know that people like Chernyaev and
Arbatov, these are sort of just belowthe public surface of the regime.
In the 1970s and 80s,
we know that they were quite well awareof what the dissidents were saying.

(01:17:10):
But in the Soviet system,there was an almost
impregnable taboo against acknowledging
the provenance of ideasfrom outside the party.
And Gorbachev says this in his memoirs,
the only meaningful reform thatcould ever have been enacted in

(01:17:32):
the Soviet system was from insidethe party, translation from him.
That's Gorbachev, someone who wasfundamentally sympathetic to a lot of what
the dissidents were about.
Transparency, the rule of law, not puttingpeople in prison for their beliefs.
Even he subscribed to the idea thatlike it or not, in that system,

(01:17:54):
significant reform can onlycome from the inner sanctum.
As a just lay observer ofthe chinese situation,
that seems to be very much the case there,too.
The party guards its monopoly ferociously.
And whatever it admits aboutthe sources of its thinking,

(01:18:14):
it cannot be seen as borrowing ideas,
much less getting advice frompeople outside the party.
It's an impossibility, orit's regarded as an impossibility,
as a life threatening gesture.

>> Stephen Kotkin (01:18:30):
We're now in injury time.
I'm gonna add a fewminutes to the game here.
We haven't given ourZoom audience a chance.
So let's go to the Zoom audience forthe final question.

>> Speaker 1 (01:18:47):
In an effort to compile a few different questions from online,
can you expand on howSoviet governments and
today's regime,as well as Western governments sort of
interact with Soviet dissidentsin both time periods?

>> Benjamin Nathans (01:19:05):
Yeah, the book is long, and I had to exclude certain
subtopics just for want of space andtime, and one of those was,
what did the United States government,especially the intelligence services,
know about the dissident movement,and how did they appraise it?
I did do some work in the Johnson Libraryand the Carter Library,

(01:19:27):
and the Nixon Library,didn't make it into the book.
Maybe it'll make it intoan article someday.
And essentially, what I foundwas a consistent conclusion that
the dissidents posed no significantthreat to the Soviet state.
And so while for purposes ofpsychological warfare, it made a lot of

(01:19:47):
sense to speak out about them, to protectthem when possible, and, in general,
to allow them to function as a thornin the side of the Soviet government.
I never found evidence that people inthe State Department, or the CIA, or
the National Security Councilreally thought that dissidents were

(01:20:07):
a significant threat tothe Soviet government.
So it was a very sober, I think,
assessment on the part ofthe American governing apparatus.
I obviously can't tell you whatpeople inside the CIA think today of
the remnants of dissent in today's Russia.
But I can't imagine that they have anykind of optimism about the capacity of

(01:20:32):
whoever's left after a million peoplehave fled that country, including some
of the best and brightest and mostinclined towards western style reforms.
I can't imagine anybody worth takingseriously in the US government thinks
that there's some kind of movement aboutto erupt that's gonna topple Putin.

(01:20:53):
And in general, if there's one thing I'velearned over the years as an historian
studying people who try to make sense oftheir own life and times, that's a lot of
what we do as an historian, is to try toget inside the minds of our protagonists.
The single greatest weakness that Ihave found in people over the time that
I've been studying them is the tendencyto believe what they wanna believe

(01:21:17):
rather than what's true.
It's known in shorthandas wishful thinking, but
it's an incredibly widespread[COUGH] phenomenon, and
I see it all the time in the wayRussia is covered by the media today.
This notion that Putin isthis evil dictator and
the Russian populationis cowed by his regime.

(01:21:38):
And if just a few things can be adjusted,the population will rise up.
That is just not the picture that I see.
As appealing as it is on a moral orpolitical level, I don't see that, and
that certainly was not the casein the late Soviet period.
And to its credit, the CIA understoodthat by the 1960s that there was

(01:22:01):
actually a tremendous amount of patriotismand loyalty to the Soviet government.
And I think we would do well to havethat same kind of sobriety in the way we
assess things today.
I wish it were different,but that's not what I see.

>> Stephen Kotkin (01:22:16):
Ladies and gentlemen, to the success of our hopeless cause,
Professor Benjamin Nathan.
>> [APPLAUSE]>> Stephen Kotkin: Let's give it up.
>> [APPLAUSE]
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