During Joseph Stalin’s final years in power, and continuing into Nikita Khrushchev’s Thaw, no worldview, no way of thinking, no set of texts contributed more to oppositional activity in the Soviet Union than those of Marxism-Leninism. Even as it continued to fortify the Communist Party’s monopoly on power, serving as a potent instrument of legitimation and social control, the USSR’s official ideology also inspired countless clandestine “unions,” “central committees,” and “parties” dedicated to revolutionary struggle against the “bureaucracy” or “new class” that had allegedly hijacked the Revolution.
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There was the Union of Struggle for the Revolutionary Cause, the Communist Party of Youth, the Union of Patriots, the Union of Communards, and dozens, possibly hundreds, of similar groups. With membership typically in the single digits, most of them were as ephemeral as they were exuberant. Even when they were conspiring in the same town or indeed in the same university, the secrecy of such groups often kept them unaware of each other’s existence—until they met behind prison bars. In most cases, historians discovered them only decades later, in the archives of the former Soviet Procuracy or the KGB.
It was not simply that they shunned the use of violence. They did not seek to capture the state; theirs was a mission of containment by law.
None of this is especially surprising. By the early post-World War II period, the demographic cohort most likely to rebel against authority—namely, youth—had been molded by Soviet institutions in which the revolutionary teachings of Marxism-Leninism had achieved the status of sacred canon. “For young people educated in Soviet schools,” Vyacheslav Igrunov recalled, “there was no way out other than to begin one’s political self-definition with Marxism.” The revolutionary romanticism nourished by the official Soviet curriculum could not always be contained within approved channels, especially once the Soviet project entered its middle age.
The dilemmas of post-revolutionary life—in particular, the gap between fulsome propaganda and flawed realities—were efficiently captured, as usual, in the popular genre known as the anekdot. A Moscow kindergarten teacher describes to her pupils how in the Soviet Union, children have the best toys, the sweetest candies, the nicest schools, and so on, when suddenly little Vova [Vladimir] bursts into tears. “Vovochka,” the surprised teacher asks, “what’s the matter?” To which Vova replies, between sniffles, “I want to live in the Soviet Union!”
If Vova went on to join an underground student group, he would upgrade his desire for the best toys into a yearning for a “return to Leninist principles,” or what one might call “doctrine-based reformism.” In November 1956, for example, Viktor Trofimov, Ivan Potapov, and other founders of the Union of Leninist Communists (all of them members of the Communist Party’s Youth League) distributed leaflets calling to “increase people’s involvement in politics and restore Leninist freedom.” “Where is the freedom that Lenin won for us?” they asked. “Let us destroy the chains of political bureaucratization under the banner of Leninism!” As Vladimir Bukovsky observed of those who gathered with him for poetry readings in Moscow’s Mayakovsky Square in the early 1960s, “Taking the classics of Marxism-Leninism as their point of departure, and appealing to those works, people tried to force the authorities to abide by their own shining principles.”
From a tactical standpoint, this approach anticipates that of the dissidents, who tried to make the Soviet state abide by its own constitution and judicial procedures. Both appealed to a version of Soviet orthodoxy in order to transform the conduct of the Soviet state, an approach the anthropologist James C. Scott calls “strategic use of hegemonic values.” But it mattered which version was in play: the Soviet Constitution and the Criminal Code consisted of compact, already legally binding injunctions and prohibitions, while Marxism-Leninism filled dozens of volumes of texts spanning nearly a century and comprising letters, essays, articles, manifestos, and dense economic treatises, few of which were specifically designed to guide the behavior of state institutions.
There was no personality cult hovering over the anonymous articles of the Soviet Constitution and the Code of Criminal Procedure. “You know as well as I do that our constitution is bad,” Petr Grigorenko, a former major-general in the Soviet Army, once wrote to a fellow dissident. “It doesn’t suit us at all. But it suits the authorities even less.” Unlike the neo-Leninist underground, moreover, dissidents had no desire to revive Bolshevik revolutionary traditions, with their ideological discipline, armed conspiracy, and noms de guerre. It was not simply that they shunned the use of violence. They did not seek to capture the state; theirs was a mission of containment by law.
Quite a few rights-defenders, to be sure, began their search for first principles with the idea of a return to Leninism. “I am a Leninist,” Alexander Ginzburg, an editor and purveyor of self-published samizdat texts, told a friend in 1959. “I wish everything were the way it was under Lenin. What I am fighting is the remnants of Stalinism.” As a university graduate in the mid-1950s, Ludmilla Alexeyeva knew that tsarist Russia had been “an impoverished, unjustly governed country.” Her grandparents told her so, and so did Pushkin and Tolstoy. But she was plagued by a sense that “society was not becoming more just.” “Life was not getting better. Could it be that we had been going in the wrong direction?” The only way to find out was “to start at the source”: “I had to read Lenin from cover to cover.” Thanks to the USSR’s enormous, heavily subsidized print-runs of Lenin’s writings, she had no trouble acquiring the Founding Father’s collected works. For Alexeyeva, reading was a contact sport; her underlining and marginal notes “made each page look like a battlefield.”
But the result was not what she expected. Lenin emerged as a “gambler” who invoked class struggle and other impersonal forces, “Marxian abstractions invisible to the naked eye.” His world was “orderly but barren. It had no place for real people. I could not detect an iota of concern for soldiers, workers, or peasants. Nor could I detect even a glimmer of doubt. He was convinced that he knew precisely what needed to be done at any given moment, and he was capable of vicious attacks on anyone who disagreed with him on even the most minute of points.” By the time Alexeyeva had read up to 1917, “I realized that I had lost all respect for Lenin.”
Equally troubling, the Founding Father was repeatedly discovered contradicting himself. When Grigorenko sat down in the early 1960s to “seek proof that the present Party-state leadership had deviated from Leninism,” Lenin’s writings themselves now appeared “contradictory” or flat-out wrong. “Returning to Leninist principles” turned out to be impossible because, while Lenin emerged as a supreme tactician, he lacked principles. He condoned extreme violence and his language itself was violent. He defined dictatorship of the proletariat, Grigorenko discovered, as “power based not on law but on force.” Poring over a memo in which Lenin had written that it was time to “rough somebody up” or “put someone up against the wall,” the young writer Vladimir Voinovich had assumed that “perhaps Lenin was serious about the ‘roughing up’ part, but as for the wall, or ‘execute as many as possible’—that was somehow meant figuratively. At some point I understood that no, it was not meant figuratively at all.” Reflecting on his own experience, the historian Aron Gurevich described this process as losing one’s “Marxist-Leninist virginity.”
Not every Vova took leave of Leninism, of course, and not all those who took leave of Leninism turned to the defense of civil and human rights. Some made their way to the Church, or the Nation, or Culture, or various criss-crossings of the three—or to nothing in particular. Nonetheless, by the late 1960s rights-based legalism had effectively eclipsed revolutionary Leninism as the lingua franca of opposition in the Soviet Union. Leninism as a living mobilizational ideology had run its revolutionary course and was now the stale dogma of the lip-service state.
The turn away from Leninism, however, hardly meant a rejection of socialism, which for most Soviet citizens, including most dissidents, had become an accepted way of life, something taken for granted and only loosely related to Leninism, or, for that matter, to law and rights. During the quarter-century of Stalin’s rule, through extraordinary exertion and sacrifice, the Soviet people had built the world’s first socialist system, whose vitality was conclusively demonstrated in the minds of many contemporaries by its emphatic victory over Nazi Germany. Khrushchev sought to revive revolutionary elan and push the USSR to the final stage of history, the transition from socialism to communism, during which the state apparatus would finally wither away. But few of his fellow citizens were in a hurry to follow him. Even fewer understood where he was going. Some suspected that he didn’t understand either.
Soviet dissidents commonly saw themselves as reviving a tradition wider and older than Leninism, namely, that of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia. The pre-revolutionary “social movement” was a touchstone for collective engagement by intellectuals in public life. More than a few historians have endorsed this alleged pedigree. Having barely survived Stalin’s mass terror, so the argument goes, the intelligentsia spirit of direct engagement with the “accursed questions” once again stirred courageous individuals not only to speak truth to power, but to live that truth in their own lives, inspired by engagé archetypes such as Alexander Herzen, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Lev Tolstoy, and other pre-revolutionary writers.
Thousands of outstanding members of the intelligentsia had perished in Stalin’s prisons and camps, but lifelines could nonetheless be established between those who came before and those who came after. “I felt an instinctive bond with the Decembrists” [reform-minded Russian army officers who staged an uprising in December 1825], wrote Alexeyeva, describing herself in the 1950s. “Just a few years earlier, their country had won the war with Napoleon. It is citizens who win wars. But the war was over…and the regime no longer had any need for citizens, for citizens have a way of being a nuisance. They demand reforms; they demand the rule of law.” Foreign observers, too, found analogies to the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia irresistible. “[Andrei] Sakharov is my man, as he is, I am sure, yours,” Isaiah Berlin wrote to Arthur Schlesinger, “the authentic noble liberal voice, very like Herzen’s.”
The fact that rights-defenders and their admirers understood the dissident movement as reviving the moral and intellectual habits of the Old Regime intelligentsia tells us much about the latter’s enduring appeal. It was the intelligentsia, after all, that had produced impassioned critiques of serfdom and autocracy and other forms of oppression, captured in works of literature that catapulted Russia into Europe’s cultural pantheon and that have remained Russia’s pride ever since. What nobler and more obvious lineage could dissidents have chosen for themselves?
They measured their society not as the late imperial Russian intelligentsia had, in relation to an imagined future purified by revolution, but against a specific, recent, and still traumatic past.
Closer inspection, however, reveals a host of complications. To begin with, dissidents in the post-Stalin era, in contrast to their pre-revolutionary predecessors, emerged predominantly from scientific, mathematical, and technical fields. While well versed in Russian literature, their ways of thinking were nonetheless stamped by different standards of rigor and universalism. “My position,” announced the dissident physicist Valery Chalidze, “does not depend on which country I live in.” Compared to their forerunners in the tsarist era, with their party congresses held abroad, their executive committees, and their active recruitment in imperial Russia’s universities, Soviet dissidents remained a comparatively small and informal conglomeration of activists.
The tsarist intelligentsia, moreover, was imbued with a sense of moral duty (typically tinged with guilt) toward Russia’s impoverished and illiterate masses, a duty that expressed itself in various forms of “going to the people” with a mission to civilize them. Soviet dissidents, to be sure, developed their own civilizing mission. “Critically minded people,” according to Chalidze, “who do not hide their criticisms and who honor the principle of loyalty [to the existing legal system], provide the public with an unexpected example of law-abiding freedom of thought.”
This was exceptionally important for “developing a culture of thinking in a country where, for half a century, the governing ideology has claimed sole access to correct ideas” and where, in any case, “the majority of the population…has a low level of legal culture.” But many dissidents felt profoundly ambivalent toward a society that, despite having become better educated and more urbanized, was also more dependent than ever on the state. They did not share their intelligentsia predecessors’ belief in the privileges of backwardness, the idea that Russia could leverage Europe’s experience to leapfrog ahead in the process of self-modernization.
Nor did Soviet dissidents share the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia’s confidence in the “radiant future” or any other version of inevitable historical progress. When the American journalist Lincoln Steffens visited Soviet Russia in 1919, he famously proclaimed, “I have seen the future, and it works” (Soviet Russia at the time was in the throes of civil war, epidemic, and incipient famine, which would soon claim over ten million lives, most of them civilians). A half-century later, Soviet dissidents concluded that the future had indeed arrived, and it was not working. They measured their society not as the late imperial Russian intelligentsia had, in relation to an imagined future purified by revolution, but against a specific, recent, and still traumatic past: Stalinism.
For dissidents to assume the mantle of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia was therefore no simple matter. While they may have understood themselves as avatars of a tradition stretching back over a century, they inevitably appropriated that tradition in a selective manner, highlighting certain elements, leaving others in the shadows, and transforming still others beyond recognition.
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From To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans. Copyright © 2025. Available from Princeton University Press. To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause has been shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize.