The Many Shades of Soviet Dissidence

Abstract

The Many Shades of Soviet Dissidence Benjamin Nathans Barbara Martin, Dissident Histories in the Soviet Union: From De-Stalinization to Perestroika. 312 pp. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. ISBN-13 9781350192447. $39.95. Manuela Putz, Kulturraum Lager: Politische Haft und dissidentische Selbstverständnis in der Sowjetunion nach Stalin (The Camp as Cultural Space: Political Incarceration and Dissident Self-Perception in the Soviet Union after Stalin). 348 pp. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2019. ISBN-13 978-3447111256. €49.00. In the preface to her field-transforming study The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, first published in 1981 and currently in its third edition, Katerina Clark described the embarrassment she felt when revealing to colleagues the subject of her research. Are you delving into Platonov or Bulgakov, they would ask, or perhaps Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn? No? You mean … you're analyzing the Soviet Soviet novel? Those unreadable texts that slavishly follow the conventions of socialist realism? At this point, she wrote, her incredulous interlocutors would either "back out of the conversation or … mutter words of sympathy and amazement." "It is considered far more worthy," Clark noted, "to write on dissidents."1 What a difference 40 years make. To write about Soviet dissidents today is to risk seeming naive or, even worse, in thrall to a version of what the musicologist Richard Taruskin called "the Great Either/Or": in this case, the Cold War view that in the Soviet Union an unbridgeable chasm separated gray, mendacious official culture from the vibrant, autonomous, truth-seeking [End Page 185] world of dissent.2 It is not just that the collapse of the USSR has released us from the unspoken obligation to identify morally with one side of the chasm. Scholars of late Soviet history now tend to see official and dissident culture as part of a single field in which lines of distinction were blurry, shifted over time, and were subject to a variety of criss-crossings. The trend started, precociously, with Dina Spechler's notion of "permitted dissent," continued with Serguei Oushakine's influential analysis of samizdat as a form of "mimicry" of official discourse, and burst into view with Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, which argued that dissidents and party activists, "despite having opposing attitudes to authoritative discourse, shared a general approach to it: they privileged the constative dimension of that discourse, reading it as a description of reality and evaluating that description for truth." In Yurchak's framework, dissenters and the party faithful occupied the extreme poles of a single epistemic literalism, against which the "normal" majority of Soviet citizens, at home with ironic ways of inhabiting the world, defined themselves.3 Another approach to shattering the bipolarity of late Soviet culture can be found in Boris Firsov's Raznomyslie v SSSR, 1940–1960-e gody (Diversity of Thinking in the USSR, 1940s–1960s), which proposed raznomyslie as a pluralist alternative to inakomyslie (thinking differently), the attribute that allegedly distinguished dissidents from everyone else.4 The authors of these innovative works were notably not historians but scholars trained in political science (Spechler), anthropology (Oushakine and Yurchak), and sociology (Firsov). Their insights have substantially shaped the way historians engage the second half of Soviet history. Having achieved postbinary bliss, the study of late Soviet culture—including the dissident phenomenon—is now wide open for fresh approaches and interpretations. The two monographs under review belong to a new generation of scholarship less interested in casting Soviet dissidents as distinctly "worthy" subjects, as Clark wryly put it in 1981, than in exploring their embeddedness in the Soviet system. Both works employ an artful blend of archival investigation and oral history; both bear the traces of having begun as doctoral dissertations. [End Page 186] ________ Like assertions about innate artistic or mathematical genius, the claim that a given individual was born a dissident rarely stands up to scrutiny. How then were dissidents made? Barbara Martin takes up this question by exploring the trajectories of four individuals, authors of critical works on Soviet history that were condemned in one form or another by Soviet authorities in the 1960s and 1970s. Anton Antonov-Ovseenko was the son of the Bolshevik military commander Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, who...