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>> Anatol Shmelev: Welcome, everyone to this afternoon's event, the book launch for Ben Nathans Landmark history of the Dissident Movement, largely based on the collections held by the Hoover Institution archives. My name is Anatol Shmelev. I am the curator for Russian and Eurasian collections.
And our archives is fortunate enough to hold the papers of many of the brave people you will hear about in a few minutes, including Alexander Ginzburg, Andrei Sinyavsky, Yuri Yara Magaev, Pavel Litvinov, Alexander Esenin-Volpin, Irina Grivnina, Elena Sudakova, and Vladimir Bukovsky, one of our chief collections. In fact, the image that you see on the screen here is from the papers of Vladimir Bukovsky. On the left is Bukovsky himself, behind the flowers.
On the right is Boris Nemtsov, one of the leaders of the opposition to Putin who was assassinated in 2015. And in the middle is Vladimir Kara-Murza, who was recently exchanged for a number of soviet spies, much like Bukowsky himself was exchanged for chilean communist leader Luis Corvalán in 1976. So I don't want to say that history repeats itself, but there are certainly things to think about in terms of analogies. Thank you very much. With that, I turn the floor over to Stephen Kotkin.
>> Stephen Kotkin: Thank you, Anatol. It's safe to say that we wouldn't be here today without people such as Anatole and others in the audience today. The Hoover library and archives royalty that collected these materials, cataloged them, preserved them, made them available to readers like myself and Professor Nathans. Doctor Eric Waken, the director of the library and archives, couldn't be here today. Unfortunately, something came up unexpected at the last minute.
But he conveys his best wishes to everybody and we all benefit from his amazing leadership. There's no need to introduce Ben Nathans. He is a colossal figure in the field of Russian soviet history, University of Pennsylvania. He's got another one of those named chairs. You can read it on the screen. His book, which you'll hear about now, is instantly one of the greatest books ever produced by the collection that we have here, will stand the test of time.
It's an inspiration to us all, including the people who are here this week for the library and Archives workshop run by Professor Neymark and Professor Gregory. I see them in the audience. It's just a long and spectacular piece of work about themes that unfortunately, as Anatole Shmilioff referenced, seem not to have gone away. I first met Ben on Martin Luther King Way in Berkeley, California, when I was a PhD student at Berkeley.
And Ben was newly admitted to the PhD program, but, like many people of his caliber, were admitted to several programs. And so Berkeley was trying to recruit him, and for some reason, they thought a meeting with me would enhance our chances to recruit him at Berkeley. Despite that, he did choose Berkeley. In the end, it was a superior program, so I had nothing to do with that.
I think this is the first time that we've had an event here at Stanford with three members of the Berkeley PhD program on the dais. Anatole himself, who arrived the same year as Ben and I, finished not long after the two of them joined the program at Berkeley. So we also have a number of Stanford faculty here who have their PhDs from other institutions, including from Stanford. So no prejudice there, even though Cal is amazing PhD program.
Let me just say one more thing about Ben besides the fact that I've known him for 100 years, since he joined the Berkeley program. He's a fastidious scholar, and I use both of those terms extremely empirically. He's a scholar scholar. He wants to know everything that he can find about the subject that he's dealing with. He doesn't latch on to one piece in a eureka moment.
He wants the next piece, and the next piece, and the piece after that, including the material that maybe is orthogonal to the views that he's bringing to reading the material. I've watched him wrestle with the most complicated issues imaginable and always avoid the easy answer, the first impression, go deeper, find more, get the full picture, get it in the round, and be fair and judicious in elucidating that.
This is especially important for dealing with something as potentially polarizing as the amazing figures, the many lives of the dissident movement in the soviet case. They fought among themselves, as you'll hear, and of course, their reception, or lack of reception, by others, not just by the regime, but in some of the cases, by the exile communities that they. So it is a fraught subject that requires a person of his disposition and fastidiousness to do right.
We're very happy that the library and archive supports our ability to distribute this amazing book to everyone in the audience who's interested. And as Anatol Shmilov mentioned, you should definitely pick up a copy. No matter how good the presentation is gonna be, and it's gonna be very good, the book is a necessary read. Please join me in welcoming the amazing Professor Ben Nathans. >> Benjamin Nathans: Thank you, Steve, I appreciate that introduction. Can everybody in the back hear me okay.
All right, I do tend to wander when I talk, but I have a wireless mic on me and if there is a problem hearing me away from the podium, please raise your hand or otherwise signal to me that there's difficulty hearing me. Everything that's been said about the centrality of the Hoover collection for this book is true. I have spent several research visits at this archive, as well as archives in five other countries, Britain, Germany, Lithuania, Russia. If I'm leaving any out, Israel.
And I'm not exaggerating when I say the Hoover archive was the best archive to work at. Because of the incredible knowledge and helpfulness of its staff, the supremely efficient organization of its collection, and the sheer depth and quality of the materials that were required acquired here. It is always a pleasure to come back here to discover something new, and I do want to mention by name three.
Three of the people who were particularly helpful to me when I did the research for this book at the Hoover. And they are, first and foremost, Anatol himself, my classmate at Berkeley, whose knowledge of the holdings is unparalleled. Carol Ledenham, who is here with us, who was my guide to the Samizdat collection, among others. And Laura Soroka, who I hope is here.
Yes. Who took a special interest in this project for reasons of her own biography, and who never lost faith in the project coming to completion, even when that took much longer than either she or I expected. I'm very glad to see you here today, and I thank you. I also have to thank Steve Kotkin for being a supporter over many decades of the various projects that I've been involved in.
I have always counted on him for unvarnished commentary and critique, on drafts of work that I was writing at this or that stage. And like many people, not only at Hoover but around the world, I look to the kind of history that he writes as an example of what history can do, what it is capable of in terms of enlightening us about the past and helping us make sense of it. So thank you to Steve for the introduction, and thank you to the Hoover archive and library for bringing me here.
The plan is for me to speak for about 35 to 40 minutes and then to open the floor up to questions. And I very much welcome questions and comments on my remarks and anything having to do with the topic of dissidents. If you believe the slogan that is the guiding light of the Hoover institution, and I'll remind you, that is ideas advancing freedom. Then it seems to me you cannot but be interested in the story of dissidents in the Soviet Union.
Because these were people who were struggling for various forms of freedom, inner, outer, social, spiritual. In what I think could be described as one of the least hospitable environments for that pursuit. So if you follow the Hoover's guiding mission of using ideas to advance freedom, I think this story will be of interest to you. In some ways, the history of the soviet dissident movement never should have started. The movement never should have existed in the context of that society.
A society emerging from several decades of totalitarian rule under Stalin, which, of course, Steve Cochin is the preeminent analyst of. And it was the decision by Stalin's successors to remove the use of political terror, which is to say, the random application of state sponsored violence in order to instill fear in the maximum number of people. That's the essence of terrorism, is its randomness. Nobody can feel completely safe from the state.
It was the removal of that technique from the repertoire of governing practices by Stalin's successors that opened up the space that made the movement possible. And in the story that I have tried to tell in this book, it all begins with an eccentric mathematician in Moscow named Alexander Volpin. Who was not just a mathematician, but a student of mathematical logic, which is to say, someone who was interested in the nature of truth statements in mathematics.
This interest in mathematical theory or metamathematics led him in the pursuit of a perfect language of communication between human beings. A language that would replicate the precision and accuracy of mathematical statements themselves. He never did find or invent that ideal language.
But along the way, for reasons having to do with his own biography, his having been arrested for writing satirical poetry in the 1940s, for reasons of his own biography and his own interactions with the soviet regime, he happened upon a language that at least approximated what he thought would be a language of ideal clarity and precision. And that was the soviet constitution.
It may surprise you, but the soviet constitution passed on December 5, 1936, practically at the height of the terror, or on the eve of the terror under Stalin, actually contained what sounded like some rather robust protections of civil liberties, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly.
And when Vulpin stumbled on this text, which virtually nobody took seriously, because it seemed to be no more than a piece of paper, he had a kind of eureka moment where he realized, if we could make this language real, if we could take the theory embedded in Stalin's constitution and actually exert some kind of pressure on the soviet government to live up to its own laws by making those laws and their violations transparent,
publicizing them, that might be a way of changing the behavior of the soviet state. Neither Volpin nor his many disciples in the movement ever used the word containment. But I came to the conclusion that what they were up to, this soon to be born dissident movement, was an extended campaign to exercise containment of the soviet state by using its own laws as their form of leverage.
And it was, in essence, a domestic counterpart to the kind of containment that George Kennan was urging the United States to practice vis a vis the Soviet Union after 1945 from outside the country. So Volpin, ever the mathematician is developing these theories of leveraging soviet law, of taking the seemingly irreproachable doctrine of insisting that the state observe its own laws. Of using that and waiting for an occasion to put that into practice.
And he found that occasion in the fall of 1965, when two Soviet writers, Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sanyavsky were arrested after a nearly ten year campaign. Having been unmasked as the real writers behind a series of works published abroad under pseudonyms. The gold mine, the thing that every historian dreams of, that I found here at the Hoover, was the KGB dossier of Andrei Sanyavsky.
Which documented the KGB's own decade long detective hunt for who this guy, writing under the pseudonym of Abram Terz, actually was. Turns out he was a rather prominent literary critic, gainfully employed at the Gorky Institute of World Literature. So the arrests happened in September of 1965. Those of you who know a little bit about soviet history will realize that this is just about a year, just shy of a year after Khrushchev has been deposed from office.
And everybody in the Soviet Union, and for that matter around the world, is wondering what's gonna happen next. Is there going to be a slide back into Stalinism? Who are Khrushchev's successors going to be. Be, and what are they gonna do to this country that has just begun to emerge from the Stalinist freeze? Volpin takes this as his moment and decides that he's gonna organize a public demonstration, not in defense of the writers. He's not interested in reading what they wrote.
He's not interested in taking the measure of its anti-Soviet content, which is the alleged crime for which they're arrested, but rather to organize a public meeting which will insist on something very simple. That the Soviet judiciary honor its own judicial code and all of the regulations embedded in the constitution, and that means an open trial. He decides to call this meeting the glasnost meeting, literally the transparency or publicity meeting.
And glasnost, which you all know is one of the slogans from the Gorbachev era, becomes the first watchword of the movement. The idea is, the only way to prevent a retrogression back into Stalinism after Khrushchev is to have maximum publicity for everything that the Soviet government does, including when it arrests two writers on allegations of anti-Soviet activity.
He holds the glasnost meeting, the transparency meeting, on the anniversary of the ratification of Stalin's constitution, December 5th, 1965. There are multiple eyewitness accounts of this meeting. It lasted all of about 20 minutes. Some people say there were 50 people there. Others say there were 200. Part of the source of the confusion is that it was very difficult to distinguish between participants and their friends who wanted to watch but not get too close and possibly get arrested.
Only a handful of participants were arrested at the trial. The KGB, having done a good job of advanced intelligence, knew all about it long before it was held. And they were ready to pounce, to seize the various banners, and to break things up, really, within a quarter hour of when it had started.
But Volpin learned a valuable lesson there, and that was that there were people out there, people he did not know personally, who he could marshal to support this kind of protest, a protest that was trying, as hard as it could to operate strictly within the bounds of soviet law, that announced itself as simply acting on the free speech protections contained in the soviet constitution.
Those of you who have enough mileage on your odometer or have read the history of the civil rights movement in the United States, know that the watchword of that movement, the key technique, was civil disobedience. This was the technique that was practiced in the Jim Crow south. And the logic was very simple. You deliberately violate Jim Crow law, whether it's in Memphis or in Nashville or in any of the other major cities, across the south.
You deliberately violate Jim Crow law in order to call attention to its injustice, but ultimately to bring in the federal government to trump that law and to revoke local laws that would be found inconsistent with the american constitution by the federal government. That's the logic of civil disobedience. And by the way, it's a logic that goes back to Henry David Thoreau, who thought he shouldn't have to pay taxes to the us government that was waging the mexican american war.
It goes back to Leo Tolstoy in Russia. It goes back to Mahatma Gandhi in India, Rosa Parks. This was a longstanding tradition. I took this little detour by way of highlighting the contrasting logic of this emerging dissident movement in the Soviet Union. Their watchword was civil obedience. We will model legal behavior protected by our own constitution in an effort to set an example to the Soviet government in the hopes that it might do the same.
So the glasnost meeting lasts all of 15 to 20 minutes. Members are dispersed. Banners are seized and torn up. The trial of the two writers proceeds in February of 1966. They are found guilty, as everybody knows they would be. They are sentenced to five and seven years, respectively, in the camps. But here again, Volpin has a novel idea. Since the courtroom was not truly open to members of the public, he decided to recruit the wife of one of the defendants.
This is Larisa Bogoraz, the wife of Yuli Daniel, who was a professional linguist by training, and among other things, was an excellent taker of shorthand notes. As a relative of a defendant, she had the right to be present in the courtroom, and she created a verbatim transcript of the proceeding. And that transcript was typed and retyped, circulated in the technique known as samizdat, literally self publishing.
So that if the Soviet government wasn't gonna open up the proceedings of this trial to the Soviet population, the dissidents would take things into their own hands. It was basically a way of weaponizing publicity, and without anyone planning the next steps.
The meeting of transparency, the trial, the circulation, the clandestine circulation of the transcript, the protests against the sentences meted out to the two defendants, the arrest of the people who had compiled the transcript, their trials, those protests. It all mushroomed into what I call a chain reaction, a kind of spontaneous metastasizing of dissident activity, whether it's engaging in public protests or producing and reproducing samizdat texts.
Or writing open letters to the government demanding open trials of those who've been arrested, trying to defend the original two writers, all of this snowballs out of control in a process of chain reaction. That is the spontaneous mechanism that multiplies the movement. It multiplies it from a dozen activists surrounding Vulpin in 1965, three years later, to roughly 1000.
And when I say 1000, I mean 1000 people who were willing to put their names and in some cases their address and telephone numbers in a brazen display of self publicity, again enacting the idea that they're not doing anything illegal, therefore they have nothing to hide. A thousand people put their names and coordinates onto these open letters that were sent to the Soviet government. That, in a way, is the maximum extent that the dissident movement ever reached numerically.
And I want to just highlight for your reflection that 1000 people in a country that had roughly a population of 280 million is a tiny, tiny drop in the ocean. And the number of active dissidents, people who would put their names on petitions, never got much more than 1000. But I need to qualify that. The first qualification is that those thousand came from all over the Soviet Union, which, as you know, was then, as Russia is today by far the largest country on the planet with eleven time zones.
This was not just Moscow intellectual. These were people from cities across the length and breadth of the Soviet Union. And I know this because the KGB did my research for me. They investigated who these people were, where they came from, who was reading Samistat, where they were getting it. The second thing to emphasize is that the figure of a thousand, this drop in the ocean, is in some ways an illusion, because those are only.
That's the inner circle of the movement, of what was becoming the movement via chain reaction. Another concentric circle around them would be composed of the people who were either producing or receiving or passing on samizdat texts. And if you've never seen a samizdat text, I urge you to look at some of the examples they have right here in the Hoover archive. They are not visually impressive, right? They're not beautiful covers designed by graphic artists.
They are hand typed on greasy, torn onion skin paper, originally a sheaf of them with carbon copy paper in between that someone would pound copies of like a chain letter. You get one copy, you're expected to make ten or twelve yourself to pass on around the platen of a typewriter, if any of you remember what a typewriter is. One former typist of samizdat described the feeling of typing ten copies from one as you emerge with the shoulders of a lumberjack.
Because you're pounding on the keys to make sure they go through all of those levels of onion skin paper and carbon paper in between. If we take the number of people who are producing and consuming samizdat, then we're talking about tens of thousands, again, across the length and breadth of the Soviet Union, according to the KGB's own research.
Because this whole drama was unfolding during the Cold War, there was a third concentric circle in who was participating in some shape or form in this movement. Whenever a samizdat text was produced, there was a reasonable chance that it would be smuggled abroad. There were western correspondents who could do this, who had embassy privileges. There were the embassy staff themselves of the various western countries.
There were tourists, maybe some of you, who visited the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 70s and early 80s. And a significant proportion, a selection of samizdat made its way out of the country. And a portion of that made its way to shortwave radio broadcasting services, mostly sponsored by the CIA and MI6 and other intelligence services of western countries. You know their names. The BBC World Service, including its Russian broadcasting arm.
The Voice of America, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Europe, the Deutsche Welle. All of these had the capacity to broadcast what we would now call audiobooks, audio versions of samizdat texts back to the original audiences in the original language. And if we take the number of people who were listening to those broadcasts to the best that we can estimate them, then we're talking millions, possibly 10 million Soviet citizens.
A lot of Soviet retirees especially loved to listen to the BBC in the evening. And we have massive amounts of anecdotal evidence showing that this was the case. So, yes, it was a tiny movement.
And part of my burden in this book was to explain how so few people could have such an outsized impact on the climate of opinion in their own country and arguably in the dynamics of the cold War, since they eventually interfered in the Soviet Union's relationship with the United States and other western powers. So, as I said, the chain reaction phase of this story reaches its peak in 1968 when you get 1000 people signing open letters and petitions.
The goal of the movement was to make the Soviet Union more of a law abiding state. And unfortunately, what I discovered is that it did not have that impact. It failed to make the soviet government more law abiding because the lesson that the KGB drew from the various arrests and crushing of the protests was that the court system was not working in the government's favor. True, they always got a guilty verdict.
They were always able to sentence people accused of anti soviet activities to long sentences in the camps or in prison. But the political dividends of these trials were decidedly on the side of the dissidents themselves. It was bad publicity for the soviet government. And so rather than becoming more law abiding, they chose increasingly extrajudicial techniques to go after dissidents.
And by that I mean holding what they called prophylactic conversations, to warn, translate, threaten people before they could be arrested, to tell them, if you continue to do what you're doing, you will lose your job, your children will never get into a university. Any number of punishments.
Other extrajudicial punishments included exiling people without a trial to the interior of the country or telling them that they might want to think about emigrating, because the alternative to that would be surely a prison sentence. And the third and most extreme, the thing that created the most concern inside and outside the country was rather than arresting someone, rather than subjecting them to a trial, even by Soviet standards. They could be held indefinitely in a psychiatric institution.
And in the worst cases, be treated involuntarily with antipsychotic drugs, which essentially disabled their ability to think, live alone, read or write. The west was often accused of engaging in psychological warfare against the Soviet Union, which meant a propaganda war. And of course, that was a huge aspect of american policy towards the soviet bloc for the entire duration of the Cold War. But the Soviet Union also engaged in its version of psychological warfare.
Only the goal there was not to change how people think by exposing them to ideas and texts, but to stop them from thinking by placing them in psychiatric institutions and disabling their minds with very powerful drugs. So the dissident movement faced a crisis moment. And part of the reason why I gave the book the subtitle that I did the many lives of the soviet dissident movement, is that the movement almost died several times and had to reinvent itself.
It was on the way to becoming a social movement in the classic sense of the word, of mobilizing significant numbers of people with public activities. But the KGB crackdown after 1968 essentially asphyxiated that goal. It made it impossible to expand that inner circle beyond about 1000 people, many of whom were connected to each other by ties of very intimate friendship and trust.
And those of you who knew or know, Russians and Russia know that adult friendships are an extremely important part of people's lives than is now. But you couldn't infinitely expand the circle of adult friendships. And the KGB was able to intimidate enough people through. Prophylactic conversations or threats of psychiatric imprisonment to put an end to that phase. After a near death experience for the movement in 1968, it had to reinvent itself.
Or, as I try to argue in the book, it had to reformat itself. And in this long process of searching for a form through which to work, a form through which to organize the movement happened upon models outside the Soviet Union that it found completely magnetic the solution to its problems. And that was the model of the NGO, the nongovernmental organization. And the preeminent NGO that inspired dissidents to reinvent themselves as something other than a social movement was Amnesty International.
>> Benjamin Nathans: I won't go into all the details of amnesty's story. You may know it was founded in 1961, in some ways at the height of the Cold War, and was determined not to be sucked into the vortex of this or that side, east or west of that war, but rather to be above that conflict and to invoke a way of thinking, namely human rights norms, that was allegedly above that conflict, that was universal and therefore, by definition, international.
And the soviet dissidents fastened on to that language of human rights. They had begun essentially as a civil rights movement, a counterpart, in a way, to our own. They wanted to make real the civil liberties that were enshrined in the Soviet constitution. None of their responses, I'm sorry, none of their petitions to the Soviet government ever received a single answer in writing.
The only answer to those demonstrations, public letters, petitions, etc., was arrest and imprisonment, a nonverbal answer, in other words. With the failure of the chain reaction and the reinvention of the movement as an NGO, they took the logic of invoking law to contain the behavior of the Soviet state to a different level, to an international level.
And he began invoking human rights norms that the Soviet Union had signed as part of international agreements and trying to use those as a form of leverage. And this is where they tread on the most dangerous ground. Because the soviet government guarded foreign policy as a kind of royal privilege, no one but the Kremlin was supposed to have any say in the Soviet Union's relationship with the outside world.
And yet the dissidents were able to command the attention of the west in a way that nobody could have foreseen. It's impossible to overstate the significance of the western journalists. People like today's Evan Gershkovich, who were stationed in Moscow and who became the publicity lifeline of the movement to their increasingly western audience.
Many Westerners, I think, made a perceptual mistake of seeing dissidents as little liberals who just had the misfortune of being born on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. They did something that Americans are often prone to do, which is to project their own beliefs and commitments onto people who they think are representing those same values abroad. As one dissident once said, there's a big difference between a westerner and a westernizer.
There are plenty of westernizers among Soviet dissidents, but that doesn't make them little western liberals who are fighting our battle on the other side of the Iron Curtain. >> Benjamin Nathans: So the movement reinvented itself, reformatted itself as an NGo. Now an NGO is like an oxymoron in the Soviet system.
There aren't supposed to be nongovernmental organizations, and the Soviet state ruthlessly guarded its monopoly on the public sphere and public discourse about anything remotely political. And, of course, in the Soviet Union, everything was potentially political. Nonetheless, by 1973, a dozen dissidents had managed to found a Moscow chapter of Amnesty International, the first chapter of that movement in the socialist world, in the Second World.
The drama of that founding I don't have time to go into now, but it's one of the most interesting things that I discovered working in amnesty's archive, because it was an enormously controversial thing inside amnesty itself. They were used to going to bat for, or, as they put it, adopting prisoners of conscience in countries all over the world.
But they never dreamed that some of those prisoners of conscience might want to become their collaborators and might even want to join their organization with their own chapter. So part of what I tried to explore in this book is how did human rights work outside the West? I tried to get away from our habit of seeing them as a western export product and look at the way people in non-democratic settings, in authoritarian settings, mobilize that language, and to what end.
It was as much a learning experience for amnesty as it was for the dissidents. In a way, stepping into the international arena by exporting damning information about Soviet violations of international human rights norms. They're not just violating their own norms, but now international norms, was the fatal move of the dissident movement.
Because the KGB, after more or less tolerating or at least allowing dissidents to live, even as they were punishing and exiling many of them, once they crossed over into cold war politics, the end was near. And by 1980 1982, pretty much all of the movement had been crushed. The Helsinki watch groups, designed to publicize soviet violations of the latest in a series of international human rights accords, namely the Helsinki Accords. Of 1975 were all crushed.
I would estimate that of that original inner circle of 1000 people who openly signed petitions, roughly half, about 500, had been forced out of the country. And simply removed from the arena where their activism was most meaningful. It was a precursor I think to the parallel strategy that the Putin government has used in the last few years to let many, many more people leave the country as a kind of safety valve. Just let them go and get the troublemakers out of Russia itself.
In general, many of the techniques that I looked at in terms of the KGB repertoire of dealing with dissidents have sadly come back into use. Including the use of involuntary incarceration in psychiatric institutions, which is, once again, being practiced in Russia. Let me wrap up by returning to the analogy to the american civil rights movement since it's something that we know from our own history, our own curriculum, our own experience and the legacy of it is still alive today.
So I mentioned the contrast between the logic of. Of civil disobedience, on the one hand, and the logic of civil obedience. And I mentioned that civil rights activists in the United States were trying to get the federal law to supersede and trump, and in some cases, dismantle local discriminatory Jim Crow legislation, especially in the south. There's something particular to the American system that made that technique work, and that something is the principle of judicial review.
This country is almost unique in the world in empowering judges to overrule legislation that they find contradictory to the constitution. There is no judicial review in the Soviet system or in the Russian system today. We are the outlier in that respect, not the Soviet Union. But that mechanism of enforcement where a higher level law can trump a lower level law did not exist.
And essentially, there was an escape hatch for the Soviet government where it could rewrite its own laws in order to allow it to continue its own persecution of people who spoke freely. The same thing happened on the international level. So by the time the dissident movement reinvents itself as an NGO, trying to mimic the mechanisms of Amnesty International, trying to leverage international human rights law against Soviet law and Soviet practices.
Once again, there's no organization, there's no enforcement mechanism that can force a country, let alone a superpower, to actually abide by international law, including human rights law. So it was a logic without an enforcement mechanism. And I think it's fair to say that the Putin government has been extremely sophisticated in its manipulation of that absence of enforcement.
It has been able to use Russian law today to sanction and essentially legalize the kinds of suppression that are going on, despite the fact that, in theory, they violate today's Russian constitution. As an exercise for my students, I sometimes ask them to think, when was the greater rupture? After Stalin died or after the Soviet Union collapsed? We're used to thinking of the collapse, what happened in 1991, as the earthquake of Russia's late 20th century history.
But I'm seeing more and more continuities and parallels between today's post-Soviet Russia, and the late Soviet period than I am between the late Soviet period and the Stalinist era. And I'm anticipating some objections to that hypothesis. But I think it's a useful device for thinking about where the deepest forms of change have actually occurred and what kind of regime we're looking at today.
So let me just close again by thanking my sponsors here at the Hoover institution, not just for today's talk, but for the several fruitful archival visits that I spent here. The first and most exciting of them was the one sponsored by Paul Gregory and Norman Naimark at the summer research workshop. That's where I stumbled on the Sinyavsky papers that kind of opened the door to what the KGB was doing.
The KGB is and always will be the single richest source of information about the dissident movement, that and their own memoirs, of which there are well over 150. I'd be happy to take questions from anybody in the audience and also from you. Thank you. >> [APPLAUSE] >> Stephen Kotkin: Well, there you saw both the storytelling skills and the analytical skills as promised. Before we go to the live studio audience as well as our members on Zoom, let me press you on some of your themes.
You made the important point that we shouldn't impose our own way of thinking or our own understanding of human rights on places that developed human rights. You also use the term dissident movement quite frequently. So one might say that there's a bunch of nationalists, Ukrainian nationalists, Georgian nationalists, very significant population, potentially larger than what you're calling the dissident movement or the human rights framing.
And that they are at least as big a story, maybe a bigger story in terms of opposition to the Soviet regime. Again, they're not liberal. Many of them are illiberal. How do we deal with those people vis-a-vis the ones that you spotlighted in your talk here? You could also turn on the religious side, right?
If you were an evangelical Christianity, for example, you're not, but if you were an evangelical Christian, you might tell a different story about freedom in the Soviet Union, lack of freedom, which in their case is freedom to practice a certain religion. And maybe they're less concerned with the nature of the regime per se and more concerned with their salvation of vis-a-vis God. So on the one side, the nationalists, self-styled nationalists, that's not a label I'm applying myself to.
On the other side, the evangelical Christians, but others, right, the practicing Muslims, and we could go on in that category, you know well, and you yourself have written about the Jewish community previously. So in some ways, there are multiple strands here in addition to what you're calling the movement or the human rights framing of this. So explain to us a little bit how that fits in or doesn't fit into the larger story you're trying to tell.
>> Benjamin Nathans: Sure, I don't wanna be obsessed with terminology, but I do think I owe it to you to point out that none of the dissidents liked being called dissidents. It didn't like that term. It didn't like it semantically because it implied people. The word itself means those who sit apart. And they didn't sit apart, they were some of the most civically engaged citizens of the Soviet Union. They also didn't like that it was a foreign term imported into Russia, dissident.
And the regime weaponized that foreign word to stigmatize those to whom it was applied. So when someone made the mistake in Moscow once of referring to Andrei Sakharov as dissident, his wife Yelena Bonner popped up and said, my husband is not a dissident, he's a physicist.
And when Alexander Solzhenitsyn was sitting in Vermont in exile, having been expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974, by the 1980s, he wrote a private letter to President Ronald Reagan in which he insisted that he was neither a dissident nor an emigre. He was a Russian writer. And you'll notice that in both of those examples, the two individuals choose to be identified by their work, by their profession.
I tried to recreate the lives of dissidents in their Fullness as people who had careers and families and ambitions before they got the label of dissident, which was first put on them by western journalists trying in the best of faith to cover this emerging movement, and then, as I said, weaponized by the soviet state to stigmatize them. There are many definitions of who comes under that rubric, whether they liked it or nothing.
And I chose not to include the nationalists and religious minorities, including evangelical Christians and other christian minorities, because they, without exception, were not interested in reforming the soviet state. I wanted to use the term in an analytically rigorous way and therefore apply it to the people who actually wanted to change the soviet state. And I put it that way quite deliberately. None of the dissidents aimed at toppling the Soviet regime.
Like most soviet people, and like most people in the world, they couldn't imagine that the soviet regime could collapse in their lifetimes or could be brought down in their lifetimes. There are a handful of examples of extraordinarily prescient people who had a sense that the regime was enormously brittle and could collapse under the right circumstances. But the overwhelming majority had no such imagination and no such aspirations.
So I decided to focus on those who were oriented towards the strategy of getting the Soviet state to abide by its own laws. And the more I read in the primary sources, including the ones here in the Hoover archive, the more that felt consistent with the practice of the people. At the time, most nationalists did not want to be known as dissidents because that implied that they were trying to reform the soviet system.
And if you were a Lithuanian nationalist, circa 1975, the last thing you wanted was to get mixed up in Soviet politics. You were looking for an exit ramp for Lithuania. The same thing for the jewish national movement, which was dead set on not getting mixed up in soviet politics and instead focusing like a laser on emigration as the one and only solution to the jewish predicament in the Soviet Union. So I think the distinction does carry weight analytically.
And I would even go so far as to say that in terms of the consequences, and you're absolutely right, that on the level of sheer numbers. Nationalists and evangelical Christians and other religious minorities were way larger than the dissidents by many, many factors. Especially in a place like Ukraine, which has a population of 40, 50 million at the time. Nonetheless, since I do believe that small groups of people make history very often wherever they're positioned.
The people that I'm referring to as dissidents and who were known as dissidents at the time, the so called rights defenders, Prava Zesniki. They did more to discredit the Soviet Union as a system. They did more to expose this regime as fundamentally archaic precisely because it failed over and over again to observe its own laws, the laws that it had drafted and ratified and sanctified.
More damage was done reputationally to the soviet government by this tiny cohort of dissidents than by all the national movements and religious movements combined. It's true that when the Soviet Union broke up, the fault lines turned out to be largely national, or at least republican, putatively national. But I think it's a terrible mistake to think that it was nationalism that destroyed the empire.
Nationalism replaced the organizing principle of the empire, a principle that it had itself enshrined by creating ethnic republics. But that was not the force that blew things apart. The dissident movement also didn't blow things apart. I don't want to exaggerate my claims for the relationship of the movement to the collapse of communism. Gorbachev destroyed the Soviet Union, again, without any intention of doing so.
But some of Gorbachev's ideas, including, as you may recall, his watchword of glasnost or transparency, his watchword of democratization, these were absorbed from the dissident lexicon. And Gorbachev says as much in his memoirs. He says the moral influence of the movement was far out of proportion with its numerical size. And that's about as close as you're going to get a soviet official to admit that ideas were coming in from outside the party.
>> Stephen Kotkin: Okay, Solzhenitsyn might disagree that the human rights activists were more influential than he was in blackening the Soviet regime. And Solzhenitsyn was a Christian, one might actually say illiberal Russian nationalist, or at least Slavic, Eastern Slavic nationalist. His impact, he doesn't fit the human rights advocacy. He fits the overthrow position much more. But anyway, it's important for us to understand the decision that you made.
Second point before we go to the studio audience, I see Bert Patton out in our audience today. Your analysis of continuities, Brezhnev and Putin, as opposed to the break with Stalin's death. The Okhranka archives, the archives of the tsarist secret police, are also here at the Hoover Institution, which is why I mentioned Bert's name. Bert eloquently describing that collection for us. And we see continuities with the tsarist era in some ways. I don't wanna say the continuities are 100%.
Obviously tremendous discontinuities throughout history, even between the Brezhnev and the Putin regime you would acknowledge. But you see ways in which people living with the injustices are trying to figure out what their strategy is for battling the injustices, overthrow reform, work within the system, work outside the system. And you also see the secret police as the main readers, the main audience in some ways for the tsarist era, resistance, social justice, however you wanna describe them.
Again, the vocabulary is important, but I want to be neutral there. And one can see with the KGB that they're like the tsarist secret police in paying the closest attention to these people and filtering those people down to us. Now you're sophisticated in making sure you don't adopt the KGB point of view or anything, even as they're the filter for a lot of the information.
But I wonder if given that your earlier work was also on the tsarist period, I wonder if you'd make a comment to us about About whether there's something longer term here in the Russian experience, like the intelligentsia term. Again, I don't wanna call it dissident in the Czarist period. I'm careful with the vocabulary. But if you would weigh for us on that.
>> Benjamin Nathans: It's a great question, and there's so much to say about it because you're asking a very long-range question across- >> Stephen Kotkin: But you're the guy to ask that question. >> Benjamin Nathans: Well, I will be for the next five minutes. >> [LAUGH] >> Benjamin Nathans: So historians who go off to work in archives, not so much this one, which is in a very beautiful, pleasant setting.
But when you go halfway around the world to more difficult settings and you're spending nine, ten hours a day poring over documents, some of which are utterly boring and have nothing of use for you, the thing that lets you get through that experience is when you are surprised by what you find. And any historian worth his or her salt loves to be surprised in the archives.
And the thing that surprised me most, it happened sometimes here, but it especially happened in the archives in Lithuania and in Russia, is that the KGB in the period that I worked on, in the post-Stalin era, was not very interested in ideas, let alone ideas that advance freedom. When they interrogated dissidents, and I read a lot of dissident interrogation transcripts, they were not interested in their childhoods. They were not interested in what had led them to the movement.
They were not interested in plumbing their spiritual depths. They had seemingly abandoned all of the obsessions of the Stalin era KGB. They just wanted damning information. They wanted to know who you got this Samizdat text from, which Western journalists have you been in touch with? Did you ever go to the American embassy? They wanted forensic evidence so that they could widen the circle of incrimination as much as they could.
And we have the world's leading expert on the KGB here in the front row, Amir Weiner. This is a KGB that is bent on professionalism, on not descending to the sort of dungeon tactics of the Stalinist era. They don't torture people. They very rarely beat dissidents in prison. They're not hell bent on extracting their deeper, innermost secrets. They just wanna widen the circle of the investigation so that they can be seen as competent as possible, and they become very good at that.
This is something that differentiates them from their predecessors, both in the Stalin era and, I think, in the pre-revolutionary era. In the pre-revolutionary era, the Eckankar was interested in ideas. They wanted to know who was reading what and which authors were influential and who was influencing whom intellectually and spiritually. How do we explain that rupture?
I think that after Stalin departs from the scene, the Soviet Union, under Khrushchev and his successors, is trying to become a modern state. They are trying to exit from the vortex of totalitarianism. And let's remember, the most dangerous thing you could be in the 1930s, you know this as well as anyone. The most dangerous thing you could be in the 1930s was a high-ranking member of the communist party.
And within that group, the zone of most heightened risk was to work for the security services, the NKVD. It's ironic, but that was the most dangerous job of all, because a very high proportion of those people were sucked into that vortex themselves. So if only as a mechanism of self-preservation, they wanted to put an end to the auto-cannibalism that was the Stalinist system.
And it has been suggested by [INAUDIBLE] and others, a German historian working in Berlin, that Khrushchev was engaged in a kind of civilizing mission, trying to make the Soviet Union a long-term project that could survive its own violent instincts. Or, as one of my dissidents put it, many of them were scientifically trained, highly scientifically literate, as was the Soviet population as a whole.
The Soviet Union, after Stalin, to borrow the language of thermodynamics, had achieved a steady state. It had managed to channel the revolutionary heat into something that looked like it could last forever. And that really is the way it seemed to most people at the time. The Soviet Union was a forever country. Not just the future, but a forever country.
So there are many more things that could be said about the continuities and the discontinuities, but those are the things that leapt out of to me in the process of my research. >> Stephen Kotkin: Well done. Let's go to our audience now. Wait for the microphone. Who's got the courage to ask the first question? This is, after all, about courage. Yes. >> Benjamin Nathans: We have one in the front row. >> Stephen Kotkin: Right here in the front, please, Sameer. Please identify yourself, if possible.
>> Katherine Jolluck: Hi, Katherine Jolluck from the history department. I wanted to go back to the beginning of the talk. You locate the beginning of what became, in our language, the dissident movement with Volpin. Could you talk about what about him and his thinking caused that turn from being a mathematician, interested in kind of a theoretical notion of perfect language, to then move into what is really a political endeavor?
I just wonder if you could elaborate on that move into what he then pursued. >> Benjamin Nathans: Sure, I'm tempted to respond by saying no move was necessary, because one of the glories of Russia's intellectual tradition is a contempt for disciplinary boundaries. So, yes, he had a PhD in mathematical logic, but like many Russian and Soviet intellectuals of his caliber, he considered the entire domain of human knowledge to be his field of inquiry.
That meant poetry, that meant economics, that meant the law, as well as mathematical logic and everything that he actually specialized in. So in his search for a perfect ideal language, he was reading Wittgenstein, who had a similar ambition and who was translated into Russian in the 1950s. He was reading Norbert Wiener of MIT, who is the godfather of cybernetics.
And as some of you may know cybernetics was the dreamed of master discipline through which all arenas of knowledge, from biology to linguistics to, you name it, astronomy, could all be unified in a single quantified language of feedback and response. So Volpin, in a sense, was an extreme case of what I think is a general phenomenon of cross-disciplinary boldness and inquiry. He simply took it in directions that others were not willing to go.
You asked why or how did he become interested in making a political case for the use of an ideal language? Here again, I have to bring to your attention Attention, the way he and other dissidents thought of themselves, which is absolutely apolitical. It's strange because we see them as being these enormously courageous, politically engaged soviet citizens taking advantage of a crack in the monolith to exercise some kind of agency in public life.
But by appealing to law and later domestic law, and later to international human rights, they were absolutely convinced that they were above politics. It's a mistake that activists in Russia today don't make anymore, and it's one of the great differences between them and the dissident movement. Until they began to be poisoned and shot and imprisoned, they were running for public office. They were founding political parties.
They were not falling into what I think ultimately was the trap that Soviet dissidents set for themselves, although they didn't have a lot of alternatives, the trap of trying to remain outside or above politics. So it's difficult to answer to the second part of your question, because Volpin himself would have denied that he was a political being. >> Jacob Shumski: Hi. Jakob Shumski. I'm visiting from the University of Vienna in Germany. I'm a participant of the authoritarianism workshop.
I have two questions. The first one would be whether you consider socialist dictatorship, communist dictatorship, a good environment for this kind of dissidence, whether you could compare it to other dictatorships, like right-wing kind of fascism. What would be the difference? And second one, I'm wondering, what is the, let's say, presence of this dissident heritage in today's Russia? Is it at all a point of pride?
Do you know public figures who would consider themselves former dissidents and earn some kind of a prestige from this brand? Okay, thank you. >> Benjamin Nathans: Thank you. In the epilogue of the book, one of the things that I do is briefly compare the soviet dissident movement to other movements that I think can shed light on what is particular about it. So I compare it to the resistance movement in Nazi Germany.
I compare it to the american civil rights movement, which I did a little bit here today. I compare it to the dissident movements of the eastern bloc countries, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, et cetera. And finally, I compare it to dissent in China. One thing that leaps out from that set of brief comparisons is the remarkable structural similarity of dissident movements in all of the Soviet-style countries. And here, uncharacteristically, the Russians are ahead of the East Europeans.
It's the East Europeans who are taking their cues from the Russian, the Soviet dissident movement. And I mean this in every imaginable way. So Havel's notion, Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia, his notion of the parallel polis and of living in truth owes an enormous intellectual debt, which he fully acknowledged to Solzhenitsyn's short essay, Live Not by the Lie.
You can trace the lineages from the soviet movement to its east european counterparts, but also structurally, they all adopted the technique of demanding fealty to the law, demanding that their own states live up to their own legal statutes and eventually international legal statutes. So the parallels there are almost too obvious. They just leap out. I don't see those kinds of parallels in the whole range of other authoritarian regimes.
No member of the german resistance under Hitler, whether a member of the general staff that organized the famous assassination attempt on Hitler in July of 44, whether the underground Communist Party, whether the the evangelical church, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others, none of those people would have ever dreamed of invoking nazi law to contain the behavior of the nazi state. It simply did not exist as a technique.
So there it's the contrasts that really stand out and that let us see what is distinctive about Soviet-style regimes and the dissident movements that they engender. One of the major themes of my book is that orthodoxies produce their own specific heresies. I don't want to see the dissidents as little western liberals plopped down on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. These are soviet people, and they formed their movement from soviet ingredients.
And that structure of a movement was then exported after the 1960s to the various East European countries. Your second question was about the legacy of the movement today. If I had managed to finish this book before 2022, I would have had a very different epilogue. My goal would have been to trace the kind of roller-coaster of reputation of the movement in the years after the Soviet collapse.
From the sense of euphoria: we gave Gorbachev his agenda; we helped bring down communism; we helped bring down the Soviet empire, isn't this a glorious finale to this story that unfolded during the cold War? That quickly gave way to: you dissidents are responsible for Russia's freefall into poverty, disrespect, and dissolution. So the same people were alternately praised and blamed, depending on how you looked at the outcome.
And that roller-coaster ride continued in the early 2000s and afterward. Once 2022 hit, once the methodical crushing of Memoriale and the Andrei Sakharov center and the Helsinki watch groups, which were the institutional legacy of the dissident movement in the Putin era, once all of those organizations had been liquidated and their members forced to flee the country, it was no longer very interesting to me to trace the ups and downs, because the verdict has been rendered.
Russia, not just its government but its population, has essentially turned away from the legacy of the movement. And the ripples of protest after the crushing of Memoriale were, to me, depressingly small and weak. Yes, there were a few public demonstrations, but essentially the leading civil society organizations of Putin's Russia were crushed with barely a murmur of protest by the population at large.
So it's a story, if we're taking Soviet public opinion, Russian public opinion as a whole, it's a story of a return to a sense of ghettoization and isolation. And now the Andrei Sakharov center operates as best it can from its exile in Berlin. Oleg Orlov, who was one of the leaders of Memoriale after the death of the founding generation, was one of the prisoners freed in the recent exchange.
He's also one of the prisoners who never wanted to leave Russia, who was never asked if he wanted to leave Russia. And as Vladimir Karamurza pointed out in that phenomenal press conference that he and Ilya Jasin and others held in Berlin within hours of their passage out of Russia, the Russian government can't even do a prisoner exchange without violating its own laws. It continues to be a government that simply is incapable of law abiding behavior with respect to.
To its own population, so the legacy gets invoked by individuals. Kara-Murza is a disciple of Vladimir Bukovsky, he says that openly. You will occasionally hear the more historically literate members of Pussy Riot citing the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial. We shouldn't be distracted by these token invocations of the legacy.
For me, for my money, the most telling fact out there is a public opinion poll conducted in Russia back when you could do that in 2014 by the Levada Institute, in which it was discovered that fewer than one in five Russians could name a single Soviet dissident by name. That's an amazing fact. The history of this movement deserves to be the patrimony of Russia, but it doesn't feel that way now, and it's gonna be a long time before it ever is.
>> Verna Yu: Hi, thank you for a very fascinating talk. My name is Bernou Yu, I teach modern Chinese studies at the University of Oxford, and I'm over here to use the Hoover archive as well. I used to be a journalist and I covered the Chinese dissident movement for 20 years. So a lot of what you said really resonated, and I'd be really looking forward to your chapter on China.
So, number one, I mean, what do you think was comparable between the Soviet dissident movement and the Chinese dissident movement and any differences or similarities? Secondly, I think you would agree that the Chinese dissident movement has a very different outcome. Would you say that the outcome of the Soviet movement has a lot to do with the top-down approach? I mean, what was happening in the leadership?
Was it as much as what it's about in the leadership as the bottom up movement or was it sort of an interactive kind of process? >> Benjamin Nathans: Yeah. >> Verna Yu: Thank you. >> Benjamin Nathans: Well, given what you've said about your work, I hesitate to say anything about the Chinese [LAUGH] dissident movement, because I have a strong sensation that you know a lot more than I do. But in my comparison, in the epilogue, a couple of things sort of jumped out at me.
One is the Soviet dissident movement was composed overwhelmingly of scientists, or let me put it this way, of people in the STEM fields, physicists, biologists, computer scientists, engineers. There were a good number of humanists as well. What there wasn't was lawyers. And that's a strange thing for a movement whose central strategy was about leveraging the law.
And it was telling that there weren't a lot of lawyers in the Soviet dissident movement, because their way of interacting with Soviet law was in some ways quite amateur, quite literal minded. I know this from the memoirs of lawyers who came to the aid of dissidents put on trial and who had to tell their defendants, you don't know how the Soviet legal system works. For one thing, you can't have a law declared unconstitutional, because no judge is empowered to do that.
Here's what's really distinctive about the Chinese case. There are lots and lots of lawyers. In fact, the dominant force in the movement, from what I can understand, are people with professional legal training and who really know the Chinese legal system as professionals, not as jailhouse lawyers. And that has, I think, shaped the way they deploy law very differently from the Soviet case.
I really don't feel qualified to say how different are relations between Chinese dissidents and the rulership as opposed to the Soviet case. What's interesting about the Soviet case is that even in instances where we have a strong hunch that dissident ideas were being absorbed by osmosis, if not by someone like Gorbachev, who did read samistat texts, by the way, and his wife, who was even better educated and better read than he was, Raisa Gorbacheva. She read even more of the dissident texts.
They could get them when they wanted to. But at lower levels, we know that people like Chernyaev and Arbatov, these are sort of just below the public surface of the regime. In the 1970s and 80s, we know that they were quite well aware of what the dissidents were saying. But in the Soviet system, there was an almost impregnable taboo against acknowledging the provenance of ideas from outside the party.
And Gorbachev says this in his memoirs, the only meaningful reform that could ever have been enacted in the Soviet system was from inside the party, translation from him. That's Gorbachev, someone who was fundamentally sympathetic to a lot of what the dissidents were about. Transparency, the rule of law, not putting people in prison for their beliefs. Even he subscribed to the idea that like it or not, in that system, significant reform can only come from the inner sanctum.
As a just lay observer of the chinese situation, that seems to be very much the case there, too. The party guards its monopoly ferociously. And whatever it admits about the sources of its thinking, it cannot be seen as borrowing ideas, much less getting advice from people outside the party. It's an impossibility, or it's regarded as an impossibility, as a life threatening gesture. >> Stephen Kotkin: We're now in injury time. I'm gonna add a few minutes to the game here.
We haven't given our Zoom audience a chance. So let's go to the Zoom audience for the final question. >> Speaker 1: In an effort to compile a few different questions from online, can you expand on how Soviet governments and today's regime, as well as Western governments sort of interact with Soviet dissidents in both time periods?
>> Benjamin Nathans: Yeah, the book is long, and I had to exclude certain subtopics just for want of space and time, and one of those was, what did the United States government, especially the intelligence services, know about the dissident movement, and how did they appraise it? I did do some work in the Johnson Library and the Carter Library, and the Nixon Library, didn't make it into the book. Maybe it'll make it into an article someday.
And essentially, what I found was a consistent conclusion that the dissidents posed no significant threat to the Soviet state. And so while for purposes of psychological warfare, it made a lot of sense to speak out about them, to protect them when possible, and, in general, to allow them to function as a thorn in the side of the Soviet government.
I never found evidence that people in the State Department, or the CIA, or the National Security Council really thought that dissidents were a significant threat to the Soviet government. So it was a very sober, I think, assessment on the part of the American governing apparatus. I obviously can't tell you what people inside the CIA think today of the remnants of dissent in today's Russia.
But I can't imagine that they have any kind of optimism about the capacity of whoever's left after a million people have fled that country, including some of the best and brightest and most inclined towards western style reforms. I can't imagine anybody worth taking seriously in the US government thinks that there's some kind of movement about to erupt that's gonna topple Putin.
And in general, if there's one thing I've learned over the years as an historian studying people who try to make sense of their own life and times, that's a lot of what we do as an historian, is to try to get inside the minds of our protagonists. The single greatest weakness that I have found in people over the time that I've been studying them is the tendency to believe what they wanna believe rather than what's true.
It's known in shorthand as wishful thinking, but it's an incredibly widespread [COUGH] phenomenon, and I see it all the time in the way Russia is covered by the media today. This notion that Putin is this evil dictator and the Russian population is cowed by his regime. And if just a few things can be adjusted, the population will rise up. That is just not the picture that I see.
As appealing as it is on a moral or political level, I don't see that, and that certainly was not the case in the late Soviet period. And to its credit, the CIA understood that by the 1960s that there was actually a tremendous amount of patriotism and loyalty to the Soviet government. And I think we would do well to have that same kind of sobriety in the way we assess things today. I wish it were different, but that's not what I see.
>> Stephen Kotkin: Ladies and gentlemen, to the success of our hopeless cause, Professor Benjamin Nathan. >> [APPLAUSE] >> Stephen Kotkin: Let's give it up. >> [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC]