Russia’s Noble Failures

In 1964, Malcolm X said that he and other African Americans “didn’t land on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock landed on us.” Historian Ben Nathans’ award-winning book To the Success of our Hopeless Cause charts how the Russian equivalent of Plymouth Rock has landed on those brave souls who challenged the Russian government to abide by domestic and international law. The people Nathans follows from the mid-1950s until the rise of Gorbachev were an admirable group, as fearless as they were brilliant, but the limited result of their efforts is there for all to see. Unlike these activists, the contemporary reader knows what lies ahead: glasnost, the end of Party dominance and the USSR itself, the disruptive 1990s, and, beginning in the early 2000s, the establishment of another repressive regime. The late 1980s saw one of the dissident movement’s offshoots, the Memorial Society, arise and do the painstaking work of remembrance that earned it a Nobel Prize, only to officially “disappear” a quarter-century later, much like the victims whose memory it seeks to preserve.

As the subtitle promises, this book covers “the many lives of the Soviet dissident movement” and what Nathans calls the “dissident repertoire,” from petitions and public protests to samizdat chronicles that recorded official lawlessness for the nation and the world to see. The work was concentrated in Moscow, but there was no central leadership and many different approaches. What began among groups of trusted friends grew into what Vladimir Bukovsky referred to as “an amazing conductorless orchestra”.

Nathans spends less time than other historians on the “usual suspects,” focusing his formidable research skills on such lesser-known figures as high school teacher and literary critic Anatoly Yakobson, who evoked Herzen as a guide to self-liberation, and Alexander Volpin, son of the poet Yesenin, who practiced “civil obedience” by acting as if the constitution and law codes were transparent documents that bound both government and citizen. After agreeing in 1972 to emigrate, thus avoiding a fourth psychiatric incarceration, Volpin’s ironic farewell offering to Russians was a booklet about how to conduct oneself during interrogations, the mark of a combatant who knows that the battle is far from over, not an optimist.

Unlike other works on Soviet-era dissent, including the numerous memoirs of its participants, Nathans is deliberately undramatic, providing detailed descriptions of people whose encounters with Soviet authority led them to public action, knowing that they could be fired, sent to a mental hospital, prison, labor camp, or, at best, given a one-way ticket to leave the country. Raisa Orlova wrote that during the mid-1960s it felt as if telegrams were constantly arriving with the cryptic message: “Start worrying – details to follow.” The book depicts what became a predictable chain of events: arrests, followed by letters of protest and demonstrations by supporters. Witnesses to political trials produced transcripts that were smuggled abroad, then broadcast back to the USSR by the Voice of America and other stations, thus breaking “the Kremlin’s monopoly on information.” The original arrestee’s supporters were targeted, and the cycle began again. One bright spot was that, unlike the Stalin era (or Putin’s Russia), the heroes of Nathans’ book generally had to do something concrete to get arrested, and they had a good chance of surviving the experience.

The book raises questions about the West’s periodic embrace of a single figure or literary work as being “the voice” of Soviet dissent, a colorful personality more likely to attract international interest than a hard-working committee. Nathans has said more recently (TLS, March 6, 2026) that he was wary of focusing “attention on single individuals at the expense of collective and impersonal forces.” One result of the admiring Western “glance,” according to satirist Alexander Zinoviev, was that “many more dissidents arrived in the West than left the Soviet Union.” Nathans makes the point that the best-known figures, like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, maintained their distance from group efforts, in contrast to more modest dissidents, who even allowed their names to be added to petitions they had not seen. Those of us who followed news from Moscow during those decades will benefit from Nathans’ brilliantly synthesizing volume, while younger readers would do well to also read what figures like Sinyavsky, Amalrik, and Bukovsky had to say for themselves.

Providing material for Western-funded Russian-language broadcasts into the USSR was the only scalable activity open to Soviet-era “other-thinkers,” given that copying material by hand or typewriter was labor-intensive and fraught with danger. After the Kremlin signed the Helsinki Accords in 1975, including a pledge to honor freedom of speech, assembly, and emigration, groups quickly formed to hold the Soviet Union to these commitments. Older readers will recall how the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group operated like a well-run sports team, as the next man (or woman) “up” seamlessly replaced someone taken out of action. However, by the early 1980s, arrests and deportations had diminished the ranks, and organized dissent did not so much usher in the Gorbachev era, as fade along with the age of Brezhnev.

Towards the end of his study, Nathans asks what dissidents in the sixties and seventies imagined the ‘success’ of their ‘hopeless cause’ might look like, but he finds no answer that goes beyond ending violations of established law. The individuals and groups he examines were certainly not prepared to set up a new governing structure. Vasily Kelsiev, a colleague of Alexander Herzen, assured tsarist authorities in the late 1860s that the émigré publicist formed no conspiracies or secret societies, and was simply “not interested in governing.” Herzen’s Soviet descendants successfully focused international attention on the lawlessness under which they lived, and the information they circulated at home and abroad met Solzhenitsyn’s challenge to “live not by lies.” Their initiatives, however, never led to the hoped-for “chain reaction” in the general population.

It is impossible to finish this book without thinking about the state of affairs in 2026. The current regime sees Russian history as a chain that links Ivan the Terrible, Nicholas I, and Stalin to Vladimir Putin, and the invasions of 1612, 1812, and 1941 to the conflict with Ukraine. This latest reformulation leaves no narrative space for such figures as Radishchev, the Decembrists, Herzen, pre-revolutionary liberals, Soviet-era dissidents, or the likes of Anna Politkovskaya, Sergei Magnitsky, Boris Nemtsov, or Alexei Navalny. In the last paragraph of his book, Nathans offers his work as the kind of “usable past” that Russians will need to study if the current “feral state” is to be transformed into a politically pluralistic, rule-based society. In the meantime, there will continue to be toasts to an honorable and hopeless cause.