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%)