Abstract
When the Soviet Union collapsed people said the dissident would die.
Imprisoned journalist and public figure Vladimir Kara-Murza during a court session this July in Moscow
In 1987, as glasnost ushered in a new era for writers, artists and intellectuals in the Soviet Union, Scammel’s successor George Theiner, himself a Czech dissident, wrote of his hopes for the new age of freedom for the USSR. “While we still devote a good many pages to the fate of Soviet writers and other intellectuals, this is largely due to the consequences of glasnost, which has cleared the way for a much franker discussion and for criticism of Soviet conditions of a kind that was unthinkable only a short time ago,” he said. Tragically, he never lived to see his hopes come to pass, dying just a year later, before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In February 1990, Vaclav Havel, who had been transformed from political prisoner to president of Czechoslovakia, wrote for Index: “It looks as if we’ve come to the end of a period which, for the sake of argument and brevity, might be described as ‘classic dissidence’, even though it is an ugly and imprecise label.” These were heady times in Eastern Europe and those who wrote for Index can be forgiven for thinking a better world was possible. After the collapse of communism, the countries of the former Soviet bloc were swept along in a market-driven wave of democratic optimism. Before the outbreak of conflict in the Balkans, German reunification and EU expansion suggested a new dawn really had arrived.
Writing in the same February 1990 edition, poet and Index founder Stephen Spender remembered a conversation with his friend, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, from the previous year when both men turned 80. “The one thing I wished to live to see was the collapse of the dictatorships in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. He agreed but said alas this would not happen in our lifetimes.” Spender’s next paragraph is haunting in the context of Russia today. “Well, now it has happened, and the results are completely bewildering. We can certainly hope that in that part of the world… we shall have far less need to be concerned with prisoners of conscience.”
He can be forgiven for not predicting that three decades later, dissidents would still face persecution in Russia. He could not have foreseen the fates of Alexey Navalny and Vladimir Kara-Murza, let alone those of Anna Politkovskaya and Alexander Litvinenko. In its way, the emergence of Vladimir Putin has been every bit as bewildering as the fall of communism.
It is easy to understand Havel’s desire to announce the demise of what he described as “classic dissidence” in 1990, when he was entering the presidential castle in Prague as the head of the newly independent and democratic Czech state. But this was not the first time Index had been used to write the obituary of the dissident.
At the end of the 1970s an intense row broke out in the pages of this magazine between two very distinct tendencies in the Soviet opposition movement. On one side stood a new breed of Soviet human rights activist, keen to expose the abuses of the Soviet regime and take up the causes of individual dissidents. Best known among them was Anatoly Shcharansky, who (as Natan Sharansky) went on to become a prominent Israeli politician. On the other side stood the socialist dissident historian Roy Medvedev and his twin brother Zhores, a prominent scientist. The Medvedev brothers were among the most famous Soviet opposition figures in the West, only really rivalled at the time by the novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
In September 1978, Roy Medvedev published an open letter criticising fellow dissident Alexander Ginzburg after he was arrested and put on trial for anti-Soviet activities. Ginzburg managed the Russian Social Fund, which helped political prisoners and their families. Medvedev felt Ginzburg had been careless in the way he compiled card indexes of thousands of names and addresses of dissidents and their supporters. These could then be used to target those identified by the authorities.
Writing in Index in February 1979, Medvedev grandly announced that “by the second half of the sixties… the dissident movement was already beginning to decline, and this trend has continued into the seventies.”
Medvedev was a fierce critic of the abuses of the Communist regime, but he did not support the human rights approach to opposition activity, which he saw as a distraction from the wider struggle for Soviet reform and the improvement of the living conditions for millions of ordinary Soviet citizens. He even likened this approach to The People’s Will, the revolutionary terrorists of the Tsarist era. “Just as the members of Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will) in their day were drawn into terror, into acts of vengeance for vengeance’s sake, so many dissidents have gradually reduced the human rights struggle to a struggle, however noble, for the release of their friends, for the right to go abroad, for the easing of labour camp regimes and so forth.”
A man stops in front of a film poster in Moscow, April 1976
Medvedev’s letter sparked a furious response. Elena Bonner, the wife of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov, likened Medvedev’s criticisms to those made by the KGB in the Russian media. In a full-throated response to Medvedev in the March 1979 edition of Index, the Ukrainian novelist Georgi Vladimov argued that dissidents were right to be open and candid in their activities in contrast to the secretive methods of the regime. In a direct challenge to Medvedev’s characterisation of the human rights movement, Vladimov wrote: “An underground terrorist group is at work, the only difference being that it is not hounded by this government - it is the government”.
Barbara Martin, author of Roy and Zhores Medvedev: Loyal Dissent in the Soviet Union, which was published this July, told Index that Medvedev’s position was informed by the research he had done into the history of communism. This brought him into contact with revolutionaries from the Tsarist era.
“Medvedev had interacted a lot with old Bolsheviks, and they had taught him the rules of conspiracy, which is this whole heritage of the revolutionary who had to hide from the Tsarist regime. And Medvedev is someone who was extremely skilled with these things. That’s also one of the keys to his survival. He used these techniques a lot and, for him, it was really a shame that Ginzburg had so little of these skills.
“Basically, the human rights movement had the opposite position: for them the keyword was glasnost, openness. They wanted to make everything public. And this implied that they could be arrested much more easily.”
Martin said the Medvedev-Vladimov debate has interesting contemporary echoes. Navalny faced similar criticism of negligence in 2021 when emails of supporters who had signed up to protests found their way online. “This is very much the same kind of thing that Medvedev was accusing Ginzburg of. These letters raised a huge reaction from the dissident movement. They were saying ‘you cannot accuse a man who’s in prison’ and Vladimov was also defending this position of openness saying ‘this is the way we do it in this movement and we don’t want this heritage of conspiracy’.”
The tension between conspiracy and openness remains at the heart of the debate over dissident tactics. Other features of the debate from the 1970s are also familiar, such as whether it is best to choose exile or to raise the alarm from within, a tactic which has become an increasingly dangerous pursuit in Putin’s Russia.
In April 1979 Alexander Ginzburg was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and expelled to the USA as part of a prisoner exchange. It is instructive to compare the subsequent careers of the two writers who crossed swords in Index over his arrest. Vladimov, who headed the Moscow branch of Amnesty International at the time of the controversy, continued to write novels and plays that were deeply critical of the Soviet military and the KGB. In 1983 he emigrated to West Germany. His novel about Kyiv during World War II, the General and His Army, won the Russian Booker Prize in 1994. Vladimov’s Russian citizenship was restored in 2000 and when he died in 2003 his Guardian obituary read: “His life was one of constant vicissitudes, but his authority and fortitude remained firm to the end.”
Medvedev remained in the Soviet Union, where he continued to argue for reform from within. In 1989 he rejoined the Communist Party and was elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies. After the fall of the regime, he helped found the new Socialist Workers’ Party. Still writing at the age of 97, Medvedev is now a cheerleading biographer of Putin. The book that brought him fame as a dissident in 1972 was called Let History Judge, which examined the legacy of Stalin. Now history will judge him.
Dissident brothers Roy Medvedev (L) and Zhores Medvedev