The Dissidents: A Memoir of Working with the Resistance in Russia, 1960-1990

by Peter Reddaway

The nearly forgotten story of Soviet dissidents It has been nearly three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union—enough time for the role that the courageous dissidents ultimately contributed to the communist system's collapse to have been largely forgotten, especially in the West. This book brings to life, for contemporary readers, the often underground work of the men and women who opposed the regime and authored dissident texts, known as samizdat, that exposed the tyrannies and weaknesses of the Soviet state both inside and outside the country. Peter Reddaway spent decades studying the Soviet Union and got to know these dissidents and their work, publicizing their writings in the West and helping some of them to escape the Soviet Union and settle abroad. In this memoir he captures the human costs of the repression that marked the Soviet state, focusing in particular on Pavel Litvinov, Larisa Bogoraz, General Petro Grigorenko, Anatoly Marchenko, Alexander Podrabinek, Vyacheslav Bakhmin, and Andrei Sinyavsky. His book describes their courage but also puts their work in the context of the power struggles in the Kremlin, where politicians competed with and even succeeded in ousting one another. Reddaway's book takes readers beyond Moscow, describing politics and dissident work in other major Russian cities as well as in the outlying republics.

Genres: History, Russia

370 pages, Hardcover

Published February 11, 2020

Reviews

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author, Peter Reddaway, is a political scientist, a professor, and spoken of as an expert in political matters relating to Russia. For decades he has been instrumental in bringing the issue of human rights to the West and also in aiding the publication of dissident writings.

Not for the faint-hearted - this is an informative and engaging read, bringing to the fore the abuse and the continued struggle of those who strive to provide the West with a true account of how things have always been and remain so to this day.

I have a keen interest in Russia - past and present - my mother’s side of the family are from there and so seek books of this nature. Should your interests be in that which has plagued the Russian people for more than 100 years, I would recommend this.

[Karl · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting historical memoir of an individual that witnessed much of the late dissident movement in the final decades of the former Soviet Union. This is important history and has chilling echoes in the current situations of repression now occurring in the Russian Federation. I was familiar with some of the dissident movements and the concept of samizdat, but was not as aware of the punitive use of psychiatry and psychiatry hospitals or the extent of regional nationalist repression like that of the Crimean Tatars. This was written in an easy to read style and has in depth references for further consideration.

[Will Norton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fully documents the method of declaring insanity on political dissidents in the USSR during the 1960s and 1970s. It is highly detailed in this Soviet dealing with dissent in this manner. Apparently the use of extra legal procedures using this methodology was commonplace on those who spoke out against the regime during the height of Soviet political power and the cases are labelled and addressed from both a medical perspective and a political perspective. The fall of communism after liberalization is also documented near the end of the book.

[Kian Tajbakhsh · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story of the struggle for human rights under Soviet communism became well-known to Western audiences through iconic figures such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov and Vaclav Havel. Less well known are the Western activists and scholars who brought dissident voices to Western publics, created organizations to support those activists, and prodded Western governments to include demands for human rights in their foreign policies throughout the Cold War. In this one-part memoir, three-part history, a leading Western scholar of Soviet dissidents, recounts his efforts in support of human rights during three decades of the Cold War (1958-1991). Reddaway, a British academic specialist of Russian studies, provides original details that are not found in the few other memoirs devoted to this topic, such as Jeri Laber’s The Courage of Strangers (2002).

Especially noteworthy is the unstinting efforts by the author and collaborators in exposing the Soviet government’s practice of designating political opponents as mentally ill and confining them to psychiatric prisons. From the late 1960s the author’s many articles in the New York Review of Books and elsewhere publicized this odious practice culminating in an authoritative survey of Soviet psychiatric abuse published in 1977. The decade long campaign to expel Russia from the World Psychiatric Association, ultimately achieving only qualified success in the late 1980s, is interesting but is a poignant reminder of how geopolitics and human rights have always been in constant tension – a conundrum one wishes the book would have addressed more explicitly and analytically.

Unfortunately, the “consuming commitment” that clearly motivated the author rarely comes through the dry prose. The book succeeds more as a compendium of recollections rather than a memoir probing the personal dilemmas and frustrations faced by the author and his companions. Still, at a time when the human rights agenda that the book recounts is fast receding into irrelevance with the escalation in nationalist assertiveness and resistance to universalist agendas in the context of the return of great power politics, we should be thankful for a testimony of a life dedicated to the some of the best the West has offered humanity.