First published 2024
Starting in the 1960s, an unlikely collection of Soviet citizens began demanding their government follow its own laws. Nobel laureates Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn joined with lesser known activists to hold forbidden gatherings, petition for imprisoned intellectuals, and distribute underground samizdat literature. Soviet authorities responded with arrests, show trials, psychiatric imprisonment, and labor camp sentences, inadvertently creating martyred heroes. Benjamin Nathans traces how these dissidents developed a strategy of using Soviet legal frameworks against the state itself. Drawing from diaries, personal correspondence, interviews, and KGB files, he reveals how ordinary people chose to act as free citizens within an unfree system. The movement ultimately weakened Soviet power and accelerated the USSR's collapse. This history demonstrates how the dissident legacy continues influencing resistance in Putin's Russia and offers lessons for other struggles between despair and persistence worldwide.
Genres: biography, history, 20th-century, political-science, activism, soviet-union
Vibes: empowering, inspiring, meticulously-researched, sobering, thought-provoking
Tropes: legal-defiance, ordinary-people-extraordinary-courage, resistance-against-oppression
Setting: Soviet Union, Russia, USSR
Period: 1960s, 20th century, Cold War era
816 pages · Paperback · Princeton University Press
Content warnings: torture