By David Kortava
It is widely held that the beginning of the end of Soviet totalitarianism arrived in the 1980s, when the general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev ushered in a period of democratic reform. Under his policies of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness), the state relaxed censorship laws, brought private enterprise further out of the shadows and stood back as one Soviet satellite after another — Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and others — slipped out of Moscow’s orbit. Hundreds of political prisoners returned home and hundreds of thousands, including members of my family, were exonerated for political offenses committed during the reign of Joseph Stalin.
But as the historian Benjamin Nathans makes plain in “To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause,” an exhaustive chronicle of the Soviet dissident movement (based on more than two decades of a research into a mountain of K.G.B. case files, unpublished diaries and private correspondence), the fire that would ultimately incinerate the U.S.S.R. was lit much earlier, in the ’50s, after the death of Stalin and the ascendance of Nikita Khrushchev.
The so-called Khrushchev Thaw, beginning with the new leader’s “secret speech” denouncing Stalin before the 1956 Congress of the Communist Party, put an end to four decades of state terror and mass incarceration in the gulag, the country’s extensive network of forced labor camps. Soviet authorities even cautiously allowed in a trickle of Western art, literature and cinema, contributing to what Nathans calls a general “loosening of inhibitions.” For millions of newly released Soviet citizens, it felt, in the Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s indelible phrase, like “the return of breathing.”
Although de-Stalinization did not proceed in a straight line, the erosion of participatory dictatorship created an opening for Soviet citizens to try out “new ways of living,” Nathans writes. The early Soviet style of control through the specter of mass murder had been put to rest. It was during this post-totalitarian “vegetarian epoch,” as the writer and educator Nadezhda Mandelstam once put it, that the Soviet dissident movement was born.