Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was unexpectedly confronted by a dissident movement that …
Yakir’s own trajectory would soon put the lie to that last claim. But he was hardly the only one who thought this way. “Twenty years ago Sinyavsky and Daniel would have been executed,” a Moscow State University student told a visiting American. “Today, they only get a few years. Ten years from now their works will be published. Isn’t that progress?” He was right, of course, though, like Amalrik, slightly premature in his prediction: it would take not one decade but two before Sinyavsky’s and Daniel’s stories were published in the USSR. Amalrik had warned against precisely this way of thinking, which he paraphrased as “the situation now is better than it was ten years ago; therefore in ten years it will be even better.” For his fellow dissidents, he had a sobering message: don’t mistake movement for progress.
— To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause by Benjamin Nathans (27%)
