We live in an age of noisy protest. I’m writing this in London, where this weekend the multitudes are marching, as they are every weekend. Among the causes that bring people out to the streets are: a ‘no tyrants’ rally outside the US Embassy, anti-Israel boycotts outside Barclays bank branches, climate activism and a ‘Free the Penguins’ march outside the Sea Life Aquarium.
Across the city, there are pockets of sound: chanting, whistling, booing and singing. For many of us in the West, protest is noise. We associate the absence of voices with a sense of being subdued. We say people are being ‘silenced’ when we criticise a lack of freedom of speech.
Counterintuitively (to most people in the West, anyway), Russia has a long tradition of quiet dissent.
Take the pro-democracy protest of the Russian teenager Olga Misik that went viral in 2019. Powerful images showed a 17-year-old sitting cross-legged in front of armed riot police in Moscow, reading to them from the Russian constitution. With stubborn calm, she insisted on the principles they were supposed to uphold: the right to protest and freedom of speech.
Olga wasn’t trying to bring down the system. She was holding it to account, demanding the authorities abide by their own rules. In the eyes of the West, this, too, may seem counterintuitive. Our protest movements lean on traditions of civil disobedience, public acts of breaking the law. Think of Rosa Parks’s violation of segregation laws in Alabama, the illegal tactics of the suffragettes or the vandalism of Just Stop Oil.
In Russia, however, civil obedience has long roots. It is a tactic explicitly formulated and pioneered by the poet and mathematician Alexander Esenin-Volpin (1924-2016) in the post-Stalin era. As an unkempt eccentric who roamed the streets of Moscow in his house slippers, he was hardly the stuff of heroic legend. But his insistence that everyone should observe the written law of the Soviet Union to the letter caught on, creating a distinct movement whose legacy lives on today.
A book by Benjamin Nathans, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, sets out to deliver the definitive history of dissent in the USSR, from famous, Nobel Prize-winning dissidents such as the physicist Andrei Sakharov (father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb) and the novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (author of The Gulag Archipelago) to less well-known figures. To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause offers refreshingly clear-eyed insights into the idiosyncratic world of those who fought for freedom behind the Iron Curtain.
I first read and reviewed it when it came out last year (parts of this article are drawn from my Telegraph piece on it). Since then, it won the Pulitzer Prize of 2025, and I’m not surprised. The story Nathans tells is often surprising, sometimes very funny and always highly relevant for our own times. The book is now available in paperback and — while by no means an easy read — I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in the history of the Cold War or the dynamics of dissent and power.
The struggle wasn’t quite as hopeless as the book title suggests. It’s borrowed from the movement’s favourite drinking toast and speaks volumes about its habitual, gentle self-mocking. The Dutch writer Karel van het Reve, an ally of Soviet dissidents who helped disseminate their writings abroad, once received a certificate from them that declared him ‘an honourable and indispensable participant in all protests’ and demanded that ‘this document is to be presented to organs of the police, procuracy, and the KGB’.
Not taking themselves too seriously is one of many distinguishing features of Soviet dissidents, highlighting the need to understand them within the world that made them. As Nathans reminds us, Western observers ‘were quick to cast the contrarians as surrogate soldiers of Western liberalism’, when in fact they were nothing of the sort. Of course, they interacted with liberal democracies, not least because this always provoked a response, but they were inherently Soviet people. Looking at the West, many did not see a freedom-loving wonderland but had ‘misgivings about multi-party democracy, rampant consumerism, and perceived lack of firmness in confronting the Kremlin’.
They never wanted to destroy the Soviet Union. After all, the constitution of the USSR enshrined freedom of speech and assembly on paper. The problem was that nobody took that seriously, neither the regime nor the majority of citizens, who had learnt to circumvent the system. Nobody stuck to the law, and everyone knew it. As one dissident put it, ‘because of their way of life, the overwhelming majority of citizens in a communist society feel no need for civil liberties. And precisely for this reason, they don’t have those liberties.’ It seemed a vicious circle.
The Soviet Union was like a great play in which everyone knew their lines. Some of the cast believed the story, most played along in exchange for a relatively quiet life – a strategy that worked for many once Stalinist terror had given way to a less murderous form of socialism.
Nathans is also at pains to point out that Soviet dissent never managed to bring the house down. In fact, the point he makes is that it never sought to do so – a pattern with parallels in Russia today. But it ‘broke the fourth wall’, as Nathans puts it. It spoke directly to the audience, corroding the collective charade. It reminded people that the lines everyone repeated were just a collective illusion.
We’ll never know the true impact of their actions. Their effects were obscured by the continuous lip service most Soviet citizens paid the system right to the end. But they might help explain the lack of resistance to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Few were sorry when the final curtain fell.
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause empathetically traces the stories of those who broke the rules by being sticklers for the law. The book’s dense academic style and vast scope don’t make for light fare – it can be tough going, keeping track of a flurry of names and details all building on one another across its 800 pages. Yet readers who stick with it are rewarded with a host of original insights, shedding light on a remarkable cast of individuals who never succumbed to political apathy at a time when most others did.
A surprising read with my Sunday morning coffee. I knew of the prominent dissidents but little else. While one shouldn’t question the integrity of protesters in the former USSR, they faced a genuine threat to their welfare, my natural cynicism does look askance at many protesters in the UK. I’ll pop the book on the wish list.
Looks an interesting read , I’ve had some heavy reads previously, Gorbys memoirs being the first , which if you take your time it’s still bloody interesting,