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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%)

Whether under socialism or capitalism, civil and political rights inscribed in constitutions don’t implement themselves. To gain force, they have typically required political mobilization in the form of popular resistance to officials jealously clinging to the prerogatives of state power. “Until people learn to demand what belongs to them as a right,” insisted Vladimir Bukovsky, “no revolution will liberate them. And when they learn, there will be no need for a revolution.”

— To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause by Benjamin Nathans (20%)

In the decade after Stalin’s death, the dissemination of oppositional leaflets—single, often hand-written sheets of paper denouncing this or that aspect of the Soviet order—was so common that the KGB printed forms to help agents record and aggregate data on location, content, and suspected authorship. In 1961–62 alone, more than a million such leaflets were discovered. Known as “anonimki,” these typically unsigned works were produced by their authors in the dozens or hundreds, stuffed in mailboxes in the entryways of apartment buildings, left on benches inside metro stations or parks, or dropped from balconies of department stores and other populated spaces. A leaflet was precisely what Volpin had insisted his 1965 Civic Appeal was not, and what Grigorenko was determined to abandon along with the rest of the underground repertoire.

— To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause by Benjamin Nathans (19%)

Women were also the leading force in organizing assistance for the families of arrested dissidents, the majority of whom were men. What stands out, however, especially in comparison with similar movements in other settings, is precisely the prominence of women at the epicenter of dissident activity—a phenomenon to which the foreign journalists (all men) who assiduously covered the movement were seemingly blind. Not only was Gorbanevskaya the moving force behind the founding of the Chronicle of Current Events; over the course of the journal’s fifteen-year lifespan, five of its ten editors and twenty of its forty-nine compilers were women. Among the roughly one thousand signers of open letters and petitions in the spring of 1968, somewhere between a third and a half were women. The most important lawyers for rights-defenders standing trial were women. Women exercised considerably more influence in the Soviet dissident movement than among analogous movements in Soviet-bloc countries in Eastern Europe, or among the various nationalist movements (Russian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and others) within the USSR. If anything, their influence recalls that of their counterparts in the revolutionary movement of late imperial Russia.

— To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause by Benjamin Nathans (18%)

My intention was not to deal with the problem of truth, but with the problem of the truth-teller, or of truth-telling as an activity:.…who is able to tell the truth, about what, with what consequences, and with what relations to power.

—MICHEL FOUCAULT, FEARLESS SPEECH

— To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause by Benjamin Nathans (Page 1)

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, “THE CRACK-UP”

— To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause by Benjamin Nathans (Page 1)