CERTAIN EXPRESSIONS DISCOVER their true selves only after many detours, in another language and another time. Thus it was that the "dustheap of history," coined in 1885 by English gentleman-essayist Augustine Birrell, became, in 1917, the property of Leon Trotsky, who substituted for it the Russian svalka. As Bolshevik soldiers slowly encircled the Winter Palace, Trotsky, infuriated by Menshevik opposition to the coup, cried: "Let them go! They are just so much refuse to be swept into the svalka of history!" On the scene, John Reed translated svalka as "garbage heap," but it has since often reverted to the politer "dust-heap," or even "dust-bin," which is politer still. Stronger stuff is needed, and the fact is that, unlike Russians, who throw things out indiscriminately and immediately whether they are standing near a garbage can or a lake, Americans usually find their way to a clearly labeled trash receptacle, and consequently don't have "garbage heaps" as such. We do have town dumps, however, and that's exactly what a svalka is. It's a town dump.

I have been poking around, then, in the town dump of history. This particular dump is an odd one, however, populated by people who should, according to the historical logic of which Trotsky was so mercilessly fond, be driving past it in fancy cars. It is odd, almost outrageous to find Soviet dissidents here – the very ones who inaugurated a human-rights movement against a regime that seemed destined to last a thousand years. It has nearly faded from memory that between 1965, when Alexander Yesenin-Volpin responded to the arrest of two writers by organizing a public protest in Pushkin Square, and 1986, when Andrei Sakharov was finally released from his seven-year exile in Gorky, the Soviet dissident movement was, in the words of the Swedish Academy, "the conscience of the world." In those twenty years, the dissidents did what in retrospect seem like very small things: they published a newsletter detailing human rights abuses and delivered it to Western correspondents; they stood outside courthouses when other dissidents were on trial; they maintained contact with one another despite constant pressure simply to stay put. Their most famous protest consisted of seven dissidents and a baby assembling in Red Square (for ten minutes) after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and possibly their most audacious act was a plane hijacking that never even made it to the plane.

Nonetheless, through smuggled letters and books about the system (most notably Solzhenitsyn's), the dissidents exerted tremendous influence on Western public opinion, which in many countries was still informed by Communist apologists like Sartre, and they paid a heavy price for it. The Soviets had been getting bad press in the West since the thirties and they were, after all, trying to take over the world. The regime reacted, therefore, with disproportionate force: protesters were beaten in the streets by plainclothed KGB agents, incarcerated in psychiatric institutions, sent to waste away in labor camps, and, after 1972, often exiled to the West.

From there on out, the ironies are very much on the surface. The dissidents had fought, among other things, for the right to move freely across borders, as stipulated in the U. N. Declaration of Human Rights, and though they won the right to leave, they did not win the right to return. In the States, many of them continued to speak forcefully against Communism, for the most part accepting an odd alliance with Cold Warring Reaganites. And the final, most painful irony was that when the unthinkable changes they had dared imagine finally came to Russia, many of the dissidents were stranded over here, barred by lingering restrictions from the domestic debate – of this the Soviets made certain while they still could.

America is overflowing with stories of such wrenching displacement, but this happens to be the one I know. My parents, representatives of the large swath of the Soviet intelligentsia which surrounded and admired these several hundred actual dissidents, brought me over from Moscow when I was six years old. Since then, the dissidents have been my Abbie Hoffman and my Martin Luther King, the stuff of moral and anecdotal legend. It is difficult now to conjure the pathos and moral seriousness in which the dissident movement was shrouded in those years, the reverent pronunciation accompanying words like "Sakharov" and "Solzhenitsyn." It was particularly difficult to understand this over here, in Newton, Massachusetts, where I grew up the only Reaganite on the block.

"Hopelessly cut off from the rest of the world, they thought at least that world was like themselves," Joseph Brodsky wrote of the Soviet sixties generation. "Now they know that it is like others, except better dressed." Brodsky wasn't a big fan of America, and it's not hard to figure why – on his frequent trips from Northampton, Massachusetts to Brooklyn, he was forced to drive through Connecticut. Picture, for a moment, this: On the way down to New York to meet with several former dissidents, I, too, am driving through Connecticut. With a $300 speeding ticket outstanding in the state, I drive like an angel. The number of cops on the road is appalling, and while the New York state line is my only hope, when I near Manchester and spot a Wal-Mart I steer for the exit. I cannot help it; Wal-Mart sells good things cheap, and there aren't many in Cambridge. When I get off the exit, however, I find, instead of a leafy town with a Wal-Mart on the outskirts, an enormous strip mall. Surrounded by a scrupulously maintained bucolic area, with woodchips by the roadside, is a mountain range of national chain stores and Saharan parking lots that extend for several miles. It is a Sunday, traffic is heavy, my tape deck is broken, and no matter where I scan and seek vapid classic rock insinuates itself into my car as if by the will, as Vaclav Havel might have it, of some eternal Being.

Connecticut is no hub of Soviet dissidence, but consider this scene (a man slowly wending his way past BJ's, Staples, the Banana Republic, listening to Jethro Tull) the backdrop for everything that follows. This is where the dissidents landed, and where, during the nine long years since their enemies seemingly capitulated, they became historical refuse. It has been said that though the Jews survived the Holocaust, they might not survive America. Might this have happened to the Soviet dissidents? Have they, too, melted into the landscape? The act of resistance and oppression was, at times, a dance, and though we never had trouble telling the dancers apart, the geopolitical music has, jarringly, stopped. It is not yet certain what remains.

LAST FALL WAS A BITTER ONE for Russian readers of the Western press. No matter where one turned, prosperous Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, and Germans were celebrating, like so many laughing hyenas of capitalism, the tenth anniversaries of their respective revolutions. American journalists returned time and again to the moral exultation of those heady days. "Nobody predicted the fall of Communism," Roger Cohen wrote in The New York Times Magazine. "The physical forces did not exist within the country to bring it about. It was a victory of moral conviction. A silent victory." To which one wishes to reply, with Hemingway: Yes, isn't it pretty to think so? Though a few articles have criticized the former dissidents for compromises undergone in the service of the new Central European order, the resounding note is one of triumph. Until, that is, the conversation turns to Soviet dissidents, uncompromised and unsullied in their Connecticuts, and then a cloud of failure fills the room.

What went wrong? This is the question with which any discussion of Russia must now begin, no matter what justified optimism we feel about the Central European countries, and no matter how much residual brightness still lingers from years of phantom Russian growth. In Russia, things have gone terribly wrong. Andrei Sakharov is dead, Alexander Solzhenitsyn is politically unpalatable, Russian boys are again storming Grozny, and many who served as shining examples of moral and political courage in the dark years before the collapse of the empire – too many – are scattered across the dreary suburban plains of New Jersey, and Massachusetts, and the distant, barely subwayed regions of Brooklyn, where people go to disappear.

"WHY," ASKS YURI YARIM-AGAEV, a physicist and former Moscow Helsinki Group activist who was forced to leave Russia in 1980, "why aren't the only people who fought against this system, who risked their lives and their careers to fight it, who hastened its collapse – why aren't these people in power in Russia? Not only are they not in power, [the ones who stayed in Russia] have nothing to live on. All these criminals who supposedly lost their power and privileges in 1991 – and how! – they seem to be doing fine.

"Meanwhile, those who fought them, the only people who did so, are in this sort of situation... Look at Yuri Fedorov. He was in the camps 17 years. You'd think he could be resting somewhere in a comfortable place. It's absurd."

Fedorov himself, when I visit him at his home on 110th Street in Manhattan, does not put it this way. In 1962, he was sentenced to three years in a Soviet labor camp in Mordovia for printing political pamphlets, the content of which he can hardly recall today. That first sentence is a relatively fond memory for Fedorov, who was just 18 when it began. "It was my education," he says. "There were so many professors and students there... We had books you couldn't get anywhere else."

Five years after his release, however, he "traded," as Sakharov put it, "the unbearably difficult life of a former political prisoner for the even more difficult life of a current political prisoner" when, along with 11 others, he plotted to hijack a plane out of Leningrad, fly it to Sweden, and there demand political asylum and passage to Israel. Armed with 11 truncheons and an inoperable pistol, the group was apprehended at the airport; Fedorov says they expected no other outcome, and that the whole operation was meant merely to draw attention to Jews unable to leave the Soviet Union despite increasing persecution. It did so spectacularly. When the two leaders of the attempt were sentenced to death, world opinion swung mightily into gear: The sentences were hastily commuted to time in labor camps, and the Jewish emigration movement, which would secure exit visas for 250,000 people over the next 10 years (among them my family), began in earnest.

While most of the would-be hijackers were released before their sentences were finished (either through trades or due to immense pressure from the international Jewish community), Fedorov, who is not Jewish, was forced to serve out his entire 15 years. Two years after his 1985 release, he was in New York, and now lives in a heavily Jewish portion of the upper Upper West Side. He is a quiet, thoughtful, and polite man; the rancor one might associate with plane hijackers, even fake plane hijackers, is conspicuously absent. Smoking the obligatory Benson & Hedges (what doth it profit a man if he emigrate to the West but cannot smoke fancy cigarettes?), he is wearing a white dress shirt and suspenders when I come to see him, and, with a trim gray beard, looks more like a history professor than a man who spent more than half of his adult life in Soviet labor camps. I wonder why he hasn't repatriated, now that the regime he fought has crumbled.

"When I returned to Moscow, after the camps," he says, "it was no longer my city. I knew it well, I remembered it well, but there was nothing there for me. I was part of that culture, it was my culture, but I got cut off from it. The strings that bind you break. One string breaks, then another. And suddenly, the guitar no longer plays."

He had not visited Russia again until he came for a week in July of 1998. What he saw of his old friends upset him terribly. "These people, they fall through the cracks," he says. "Maybe they would have anyway, but it doesn't help if they couldn't make a career because of their politics." Immediately upon his return to the States Fedorov founded the Gratitude Fund, a nonprofit organization that collects aid for former dissidents. He has compiled a list of 50 people whose lives were damaged in such a way that they can no longer support themselves, and is now sending financial aid to seven of them. Of course, there are many people who cannot support themselves in Russia, but the moral distance between a person who lost a fairly comfortable job within the subsidized Soviet economy and one who spent his years in active resistance to the regime is significant. Furthermore, it was part of the sly genius of Gorbachev's perestroika that it allowed the Party bureaucracy to make the necessary ideological or shareholding adjustments, so that by the time the whole edifice collapsed it was difficult to remember who was who, and people for the most part remained in their places. "Hundreds of former political prisoners, unjustly forgotten, now live in poverty," the Fund's website points out. The dissidents, it seemed, had won. But the victory, if such it was, has been unaccompanied by sustenance, not to mention spoils.

"Everyone suffered in their own way," Fedorov says. "They would never ask anyone for money. But we" and here Fedorov uses an expression that means, literally, "We are all ours." Which means, roughly, "With one another, we can say what we mean," and which I believe gathers its sense from the fact that with most people in those times one could not say what one meant. For the dissidents, political action was a necessity less because they thought they would be good at it than because they realized no one else would dare. Fedorov, though he lacks the bearing of a social worker or even a social activist, engages in the Fund with the same belief. "I'm the only one they'll take help from," he explains.

In this sense, Fedorov's emigration, or exile, has proved invaluable.

"I wouldn't be able to help them from over there [in Russia]. Who's got time, over there? But to many people in this country, who emigrated, these names mean a great deal."

Fedorov shows me his list: under each name, it details prison, camp, and psychiatric hospital sentences – two years, five years, ten years – and the nature of the crime – disseminating the human-rights publication Chronicle of Current Events, protesting the invasion of Hungary. There are a number of "fabricated cases." I am surprised to see how many widows of former political prisoners are on the list, but I shouldn't be. That's what the camps were for.

Nor should I be surprised that Fedorov is unhappy with my notion that the language of dissidence has become, in its pitch and pathos, a language we are better off without.

"I did broadcasts for Radio Liberty when I first came over," he recalls. "And, yes, I spoke with emotion. Because people were still in the camps. Now it's the same situation, except people, instead of being in camps, are living in poverty. Maybe that tone of pathos, as you call it, seems wrong now, but I think that in ten years, people will talk about it with even greater emotion. No one yet realizes what went on. People gave up children, wives, god knows what else. In a country of 250 million, a few hundred people stood up and said to the government, 'You are bandits and you are liars.' The rest of the country was singing their praises."

Fedorov's pleasant apartment is far from all of that, but Fedorov himself is not. When I come to visit, Fedorov eschews the living room for his too-small kitchen. Alexei Murzhenko, one of his closest friends and a fellow hijacker from 1970, died on December 31 in New York, and Fedorov remarks that his generation, still in its 50s, is beginning to die off. There is a tragic seriousness to his position that I can only faintly appreciate and, perhaps, do not want to appreciate. It is an anachronism, this seriousness, and if it speaks to our current situation, it does so in a language which rings false when stripped of its original context. Nonetheless, we talk for two and a half hours, and when Fedorov's wife comes home at half past five, she finds us leaning, like old dissidents, over a kitchen table with the lights still off.

"TO PUT IT BLUNTLY," Yarim-Agaev asks when I arrive at his home, in Aberdeen, New Jersey, "why didn't the dissidents come to power?" Aberdeen is one of those towns alongside the New Jersey Turnpike, about an hour from the Holland Tunnel, whose purpose seems exclusively domicilic. The houses are set off from the streets by lawns, but there are neither proper sidewalks nor convenience stores. The town is divided into lettered sections; all the street names in a section begin with the same letter, creating incongruous combinations penned by some Hallmark drone of a city planner. Thus, Ivy Way, Ivy Hill Drive, Idlebrook Lane. When I enter, Yarim-Agaev is watching a Republican debate on C-Span. We sit in the living room and talk about Yuri Fedorov's Gratitude Fund, where Yarim-Agaev sits on the Board of Directors with three other distinguished dissidents.

"It's an absurd situation," says Yarim-Agaev, who was a member of the Moscow Helsinki Watch group that monitored and reported on Soviet human-rights violations before being forced into exile in 1980. "Talking about it makes it seem less absurd. But it's absurd."

And Yarim-Agaev, who then ran the Center for Democracy in the Soviet Union out of a New York office until 1991, blames everyone.

"I don't think of it in terms of Left-Right politics, but in terms of the status quo. The U.S. was faced with a question: Do we keep this weakened, corrupt nomenklatura, that at least knows the rules of the game, Do we keep, that is, the status quo? Or, do we support a group of people who have proven their independence through the most difficult trials? I think the West made the simplest decision and chose the nomenklatura."

Dissidence is a state of mind for Yarim-Agaev, dangerous no matter what its political orientation. "Had I been here in the sixties," he says, "I would probably have been protesting the Vietnam War. But I would have been wrong. The Soviet dissidents were blessed, as funny as that sounds, in that the system we were fighting was the most evil force on earth. So when we developed, we developed in the right direction, into a very sophisticated political and philosophical movement. The Vietnam War was a war the U.S. was right to be fighting.

"Our problem in America was that the people whose psychology was closest to us, in terms of protesting, were politically against us. And, really, by the time we came around [in the mid-seventies and eighties], there wasn't much left of the protest; there was just a Left establishment."

The dissident movement was not only the most important thing to happen to Yarim-Agaev, it was the most important thing ever to happen. "It was the culmination of the twentieth century's battle against totalitarianism," he says. "In moral and philosophical terms, it was the highest fruit of this battle.... We were incredibly well educated, we had immense moral authority. It wasn't lawyers they needed in 1991, it was a model of behavior. We were that model."

But, says Yarim-Agaev, the crumbling regime had hedged its bets. "By the mid-eighties, there were two groups who were certain the U.S.S.R. was falling apart: the dissidents and the Party élite." The regime made certain it was nearly impossible for its old enemies to return until a new, more understanding élite had secured its position, and, says Yarim-Agaev, "Some parts of the U.S. government began establishing relations with the people creating a new set of circumstances.

"I was told in July 1991 that [Vladimir] Kriuchkov, the head of the K.G.B., had taken me off his black-list, so I could return, if I wished," Yarim-Agaev recalls. "I said, 'Well, I haven't taken him off mine.'" This bravado seems a little misplaced now. "I mean, what was I supposed to say to that?"

"A friend of mine, a dissident, was telling me how excited and proud he was after being in the barricades with Yeltsin [during the August putsch] in '91," he says. "It doesn't make sense to me. I don't know, maybe if I'd been there, I also would have been proud." But by the time Yarim-Agaev was allowed to visit Russia, in the fall of that year, too much had changed. "I came with a program, I was on television, I did interviews. Maybe it was a crossroads still, but by then all the places of power were taken." He has been back several times since then, and a few months before the ruble plummeted in August 1998, drawing on his experience at Banker's Trust and DeutscheBank, Yarim-Agaev even offered a financial stabilization plan to the Russian higher-ups. No one was interested. "No one really cared about stabilizing the economy," he says. "They just cared about stuffing their pockets."

And though he has theories aplenty to explain what went wrong, none seem adequate. "All the forces of this world were ranged against us," he says, an opinion shared by nearly everyone I spoke to. "And the truth is, a large part of Soviet society didn't want us."

"That Yuri Fedorov has to start a fund to help dissidents, while the people they supposedly defeated are perfectly comfortable, it's absurd," he repeats. "And talking about it makes it seem less absurd."

So we stop talking. It is past midnight when I leave the house. What else to do? You come in, you try to extract from these people some vision of their situations, and then you leave. Everyone I talk to, when I leave them, seems sad, as if our conversation were an opportunity for distillation – of their ideas, their ambitions, their lives – which they failed, somehow, to realize. It is at least partially my fault, because I'm a lousy interviewer; I don't direct the conversation and I never seem get around to the really tough questions. I let them go on and on, and boy are these dissidents capable of it. And Yarim-Agaev, especially, seemed comfortable with the journalist; well reasoned and consistent, his speech is honed to work in the carefully measured bites that used to be so effective when he was in Moscow, in the good old days, relaying scoops to the Western press.

Since it is past midnight when I get back in my rickety Nissan, and it is Thursday, I listen to the rumbling timbre of Bob Fass on WBAI, 99.5 on your FM dial. Fass is a legend, a holdover from the capital-S Sixties whose show consists of old, extremely maladjusted hippies recounting their unhappy stories. Talk about the town dump of history. When I lived in New York, Fass's "Radio Unnamable" was my "Seinfeld" and my "Monday Night Football." I'd make certain I was in the car, or at home, or someplace where a radio was. It's a remarkable show, moving and irrelevant and somehow broadcast as if into a void... and you realize, listening to it, that these people lost, too. That the moral-political movements generated by the sixties, both here and in Russia, failed in remarkably similar ways, and that their human wreckage now populates the same suburban expanses. As the moral rhetoric of the American sixties was hijacked by Clinton, so Yeltsin managed to appropriate the dissidents' moral authority at the tail end of perestroika. But there is no call-in show for Soviet dissidents, no "Woodstock: The Movie," no ads for Nike running shoes. Out here, in the suburbs, there is merely the trash collecting on Tuesdays, cable television, and a telephone that could, however improbably, still ring.

At the end of Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald allows Nicole a moment of nostalgic rumination on the fate of her failed ex-husband, Dick Diver. Perhaps, she thinks, Dick is merely biding his time, is waiting it out, "like Grant in Galena," before recovering his former glory. Driving away from Yarim-Agaev's house, listening to the endearing crazies of the Bob Fass show, I think of this line that had lodged itself in my mind before I ever learned what it meant. Which was this: Ulysses S. Grant, back home after being forced from the Army for drunkenness, was eventually consigned to working at the family store, in Galena, Illinois. Depressed, humiliated, a failure in everything he had ever tried, Grant perked up a bit when the war clouds approached and, a month before Bull Run, sent a letter to the War Department. "I feel myself competent to command a regiment," Grant wrote, and, like Yarim-Agaev in Aberdeen, with his plan to revive the Russian economy, received no reply.

IN NEW YORK (or, rather, directly across the river, in Jersey City), I stay with my friend Matvei Yankelevich, a conceptualist writer, a phenomenal dresser, and the publisher, most recently, of Emergency, a samizdat theater-theory-manifesto broadsheet. Matvei comes from a famous dissident family: his grandmother is Elena Bonner, whose late husband was the physicist Andrei Sakharov, Nobel Peace Prize winner and dissident saint. It was because of Sakharov that Matvei's father, Efrem, was forced from his job and was immediately calumniated in the Soviet press for being a "lazy slacker." Twenty-five years later, Bonner, who divides her time between Moscow and Boston, and continues to voice her dissent against a criminal Russian regime, calumniates Matvei for being a "lazy slacker" and declares that the one thing she wants before she dies is for him to get a Master's degree and a steady job. "I don't know," he says to me, his grandmother's moral stature heavy on his shoulders. "Maybe I should."

I convince him that he shouldn't, and we spend the afternoon drinking tea and kicking a soccer ball around his loft. Matvei's translations of the avant-garde poet Daniil Kharms, who died in a Leningrad prison in 1942, recently appeared in Open City. I tell Matvei he's the dissident now, and that his family is oppressing him.

"I'm no dissident," he laughs. "Maybe because I refuse to enter the 9-5 gulag and have psychological problems with holding a steady job... but my father was forced out of work and threatened with prison and forced into exile. It's not the same thing, I don't think."

Matvei does, partially, have a point. Efrem Yankelevich never settled down to a steady career in the States, despite a degree in engineering. He dedicated himself instead to lobbying for Sakharov's release from exile in Gorky, where he had been forced in 1980 after criticizing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. After Sakharov's release under Gorbachev, Efrem, who has since moved to Israel, where he does some writing and translating work, continued to serve as Sakharov's spokesman in the West. What ended for Yarim-Agaev's Center for Democracy and the many publishing houses and émigré journals, and, really, for an enormous industry of dissidence in 1991, ended a little earlier for Efrem with Sakharov's death, in December 1989.

"For my father, I think, it was very hard after the Soviet Union fell apart," says Matvei. "That was pretty much what he did. After my grandfather died, he didn't really know what to do. Dad was Grandpa's representative in the West, and after he died, he didn't really know what to do."

BACK IN CAMBRIDGE, I attend a party densely populated by Ukrainian graduate students in physics at Harvard and M.I.T. I demand and receive yet another lay-level report on string theory: it will, I am told, explain everything in the universe, and reconcile Einstein to Einstein (no small task). Late in the evening, I come upon a young Ukrainian physicist regaling a group with tales of the Soviet Union: they made us do this, they lied to us thus, the Leaders said that. It's an odd performance, given that the Soviet Union collapsed a good ten years ago, when the teller couldn't have been older than 12.

"Are things better now?" I ask.

"Of course they're better," says the Ukrainian physicist.

"What about the corruption, what about the murders?"

"It's always been like that."

"All right, and the miners? The miners haven't been paid in months."

The physicist then patiently explains to me, for I am clearly not a physicist, that there are too many miners, that the Soviets exhausted the coal deposits, that the miners are no longer necessary. As if, having found themselves outside the newfound logic of the market, they had ceased to resemble human beings.

Well and of course things are better now, in countless crucial ways, but neither will it do simply to switch the signs. Unfortunately, this is what one gets from most émigrés, no matter their age, and though one is not so naÔve as to feign surprise, it remains difficult to hear this from the older people, who left years ago, who found the false orthodoxies of their native country so disgusting, so offensive, that, to escape them, they were willing to uproot their families and begin entirely anew. The fact that so many immigrants from the Soviet Union become, six years after their arrival, faithful Republican voters, is a testament to the power of ideology. When Russian Jews arrived at Ellis Island at the beginning of the century, they imported socialism. The more recent Russian immigrations have, on the other hand, imported true believers in the string theory of laissez-faire capitalism. Brief note toward a unified theory of politics: people, or at least Russians, have ideas, and they act on them.

HERE IS A LIST, off the top of my head, of some prominent people in the dissident movement who live within a four-hour drive of me: Alexander Yesenin-Volpin (Revere, Massachusetts); Yuri Orlov (Ithaca, New York); Pavel Litvinov (Tarrytown, New York); Ivan Kovalev (New Jersey); Vladimir Albrecht (Lynn, Massachusetts); Valentin Turchin (New Jersey); Yuri Fedorov (West 110th Street); Valery Chalidze (Benson, Vermont); Yuri Yarim-Agaev (Aberdeen, New Jersey). A parting present, of sorts, from the Soviets to their successors.

"For many people, it was immensely difficult to become settled here," says Alexander Gribanov, the archivist at the Andrei Sakharov Archive, when I wonder why they don't return. "These people are not young. To go back there and start over again, it would just be too hard."

And there's another reason, too. Vladimir Bukovsky, one of the most visible of the sixties generation of dissidents and a member of the Gratitude Fund's Board of Directors, recently wrote a book, Moskovsky Protsess, about trying to put the Communists on trial in the early nineties, and about all the documents he discovered, but could not generate Western demand for, in the Soviet archives. I thought the book a fairly infuriating collection of interesting historical details drowned in a flood of Cold War bile. Gribanov, however, is more sympathetic. It's not a rant, he says, but a tragedy. "One watches, in that book, a man who has collected an enormous amount of experience, an incredibly bitter experience, and how he realizes that no one needs it, no one even wants to hear it, that it's utterly useless."

The Sakharov Archive at Brandeis University researches the greatest of the dissidents from within one of those offices in a university library that students never know the function of. It is, in fact, a large room housing several burgeoning shelves of archival material on Sakharov and the human-rights movement in the Soviet Union. Gribanov, one of three full-time staffers at the archive, probably fits the archetype for Russian dissidence better than anyone else I spoke with. A literary medievalist by training, he wears a gray checkered sweater and squarish glasses, and speaks with a quiet, insistent seriousness.

"The dissident movement wasn't nearly so much political as moral," he says. "It didn't possess a specific political content.... I traveled to Budapest last year and met with a few of the former dissidents. Politically, they said, they didn't believe they'd been influenced by the Russians at all. But psychologically, psychologically they felt a tremendous effect. The idea that in the depths of this terrible oppression a group of madmen were fighting back – it was incredibly important to them."

Gribanov was among those who, because he wasn't a computer programmer or a physicist, had trouble settling here. Now he seems to be among the lucky ones: with the Archive, he is able to breathe the air of dissidence that has been dispersed elsewhere by the empire's collapse. Of Sakharov he speaks with unalloyed moral and intellectual awe.

"[K.G.B. chief Yuri] Andropov," recounts Gribanov, "perpetually wrote memos to the Central Committee, to the effect of: ëSomeone must meet with Sakharov, who's going to meet with Sakharov? Who's going to meet with Sakharov?' But no one wanted to meet with him.

"What were they afraid of? That Sakharov would tell the Western press what had been said? Probably not: They could determine in advance what was said. That they wouldn't be able to control themselves? Unlikely: These men had a wide experience of controlling themselves in more difficult situations than this, in international situations. So what were they afraid of, why did no one meet with him? I do not know."

But the implication is (and Gribanov shrugs in a way which implies it) that no one wanted to meet with Sakharov because his very moral authority would – what? Crush them under the weight of their shame? Convert them? Explode the bases of the entire Lie? Yes; something along those lines.

As for the immigrants, Gribanov explains, their predominantly right-wing views are bred of a definite experience. "They've realized how fragile are those structures that keep a society healthy," he says. "And so they're very concerned, very worried, lest those structures be disrupted. In Republicans they see a conservative approach to those structures; in progressive politicians a much more threatening approach."

This sounds reasonable enough, and yet to have a man dressed in an aging checkered sweater, over whose chair hangs a beige corduroy jacket with brown leather patches at the elbows, who is constantly smoking (Benson & Hedges), whose face radiates intelligence and skepticism and tolerance in the greatest tradition of the Left – to have such a man tell you he supported Reagan is remarkable! And then again, not so remarkable. Reagan was just entering office when we came over, and for the entire generation that arrived in the late seventies and eighties he will forever symbolize the welcoming arms that met us, the astounding difference of this new world. While the liberals shucked, shawed, and prattled on about universal health care in the USSR, Reagan believed us! Not only that, he was willing to act on this belief: he so hated the evil empire (how evil, we well knew) that he would plunge the country into debt, ship arms behind the back of Congress, bring us to brink of armed conflict to beat them! Universal health care? Some of these people had spent decades in labor campsówhat universal health care could compensate for this? And besides, the health care was terrible, and it was rarely free. So it is perhaps understandable, if unfortunate, that most immigrants have yet to overcome that initial enchantment, have not felt that Reagan's hatred of the Soviet Union came, unlike their own, at no cost, and left no intellectual scars. Reagan found the dissidents useful for selling hard-line initiatives like Star Wars and the deployment of Pershing missiles, but Reagan was not like them. And yet they'll mourn him when he passes, and buy the commemorative coffee mugs when they appear.

The Sakharov Archive hasn't very much to say to the students walking by – though they are preparing a book of K.G.B. documents from Sakharov's files, and have inaugurated an annual lecture on human rights – but this past fall they set up a very interesting exhibit at the Goldfarb Library called "Faces of Resistance," consisting of 50 enlarged photos of leading dissidents from all over the Soviet Union. "It was strange," says Gribanov. "These kids could hardly care less about Soviet dissidents, but there was a lot of interest. There was something there."

I suspect I know what it was. There is a profound longing in our culture, at least aesthetically, for People of Conviction, since we have thoroughly destroyed and discredited our own. They fill a gap, then, these photos of grainy men, surrounded sometimes by piles of papers (physics formulas? samizdat?) in a Moscow apartment, other times by a Siberian expanse. They present all the right questions, but in a perfectly distant way – Is it moral to live peacefully in an immoral society? Is silence sometimes the equivalent of murder, or isn't it? And you? Would you have signed their petitions? – as if the questions, for us, were no longer current, as if the age of moral reckoning, like the age of disco, had passed.

Alexander Yesenin-Volpin signed all those petitions. Many of them he wrote himself. His father was the folk poet Sergei Yesenin, who sang Russia's bucolic splendor with a sprinkle of Leninism, rose to astounding heights of Soviet popularity, and, in 1925, hanged himself. A renowned mathematical linguist, Volpin had already been incarcerated twice against his will in psychiatric institutions by the time writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky were arrested in 1965 for publishing their work abroad. Volpin organized a demonstration in the center of Moscow when that happened, demanding that the trial be open to the public. At the appointed moment, he unfurled a banner – "Respect the Constitution" – and launched the Soviet human-rights movement.

"There is a concept in linguistics that divides a sentence into its code and its content," says Gribanov. "What Volpin ... did was set up a code, whose content was not yet determined, by which to act in a free society. He pretended that this society already existed."

Volpin now lives in a hulking concrete housing project for the elderly in Revere, an eyesore among the neighborhood's vinyl-sided one-family houses. Revere itself is a working-class town distinguished by residents with thick Boston accents. Volpin, one of the first dissidents forced to leave, in 1972, has found himself a most incongruous place to land – it is almost as if he were hiding out. It occurs to me then, as I approach his building, that, paradigmatically, I am Nazi-hunting. The town dump of history, as Trotsky knew so well, is where the losers go, and there is a suspicion in America, expressed in countless movies and novels, that escaped Nazis, the old Über-losers themselves, still hide somewhere in our suburbs, hoping only for a quiet life. Yet the people I am searching out are the good guys, the heroes, men of unquestionable courage and character. How strange to really find them here, not to be told, when I ring their doorbells, that they have moved back to Moscow after all.

Volpin is now 75 years old, but I find his tiny one-bedroom apartment cluttered with file cabinets and notebooks. Out of all this he directs my attention to two neatly hand-written sheets of incomprehensible mathematical notations that lie on the floor atop The Boston Globe. Volpin is working, he tells me, on proof theory, and he expects to revolutionize the field. "First, no one will understand it," he says. "Then no one will believe it. They won't know what to do with it for a while. They've been teaching it one way for 70 years, and now they'll have to teach it another way."

He shrugs, smiles. He has all the stage props of a mad scientist – the careless white hair on the balding head, the wispy white beard whose ends he occasionally tugs, and the disturbing conviction that he's about to overturn a scientific orthodoxy – but instead of the desperate plea for understanding, he is quietly, abashedly sure of himself. He speaks with a slight aristocratic drawl and seems to find everything he's done entirely unexceptional. "I was never a politician," he says. "Politics is trying to get power, and making laws, decrees. That wasn't me. I just did what every conscientious citizen would do." In the same shrugging, smiling tone, he explains what he considers perfectly obvious: "You have to fight the power, wherever it is, and you have to tell it when it lies." Shrug. Smile. "You have to say, 'Damn you, you're lying!' And spit in their face." Chuckle. Grin.

I have always been baffled by people's ability to tease out political differences where none seem to exist, to draw political conclusions from the slightest variations. But with Volpin, everything's on the surface. Aside from the courage it required to persist in his activity despite exile and incarceration, and this despite being born into a position of what could have been incredible privilege, Volpin is chiefly famous for his idea that you can fight the regime by demanding that it follow its own laws. While there is a political shrewdness to this, there is also a luminescent and revolutionary humanism: unlike American radicals of the sixties, Volpin proposed, against every self-righteous impulse in the current of dissent, to treat the monsters in power as rational beings. "Any person feels uncomfortable when they're caught in a lie," he explains. "When they put [Vladimir] Bukovsky on trial, they kept, formally, to the 'open doors' law; that is, the doors were open. But they made it so you couldn't get in anyway, because the trial was on the second or third floor, and they were blocking the stairs. But, formally, they kept to it."

Several times during the course of our conversation, Volpin launches into lengthy monologues on Russian history which, though not entirely comprehensible, go something like this: "Trotsky was the head of the Petrograd Soviet in 1905, so in 1917 he sneaked back in. But of course he had no national jurisdiction, just as the mayor of Moscow can't overthrow Yeltsin. Yet the Constituent Assembly [convened and promptly dispersed in December 1917] managed, before they dispersed it, to declare Russia a republic. Now, Yeltsin in 1991, on December 21, or was it December 25? Do you remember which? No, well, he issued a presidential decree, or, no, it was a presidential order, that formally and legitimately disbanded the Soviet Union. It was perfectly legitimate. Although they might have said that in 1922 – " and so on. In other words, Volpin maintains his logician's faith in the letter of the law. "My colleagues were always saying to me, 'But this is life. You want life to be like a theorem?' Oh, if all the mathematicians had been active in civic life, the Communist regime wouldn't have lasted two years."

I try to provoke him. This is difficult, because Volpin does not hear very well, and I am forced to shout. Shouting amplifies the grammatical uncertainties (case endings) I typically slur over in Russian. Nonetheless, I need to broach the question that was once at the heart of dissident thinking, of retribution. Alexander Galich promised the lackeys who expelled Pasternak from the Writers' Union, "We won't forget your laughter or your apathy/We won't forget a single one who raised his hand." Solzhenitsyn warned his own tormentors in the same union that "the time is near when each one of you will seek to erase his signature from today's resolution." But while many of the former Communist countries have attempted to de-commission the old cadres through a process called "lustration," Russian society has steadfastly refused. So I shout, approximately, "What about trial? Should there have been a more serious attempt to try old Communists?"

"A trial was bound to be a farce," he says. "They should have been tried 40 years ago, but now? Revenge would ruin everything that's been accomplished.... There is no more nomenklatura as such. It's been broken. They might still have bank accounts and they might even still have power, but they have to hide it. They can't appeal anymore to Marxism-Leninism, the class struggle. That's something."

"But dachas! They all have dachas!"

"So let them have dachas. What, they can't build more dachas? There's no room?"

I nod, okay.

"The most important thing has been done," he says. "We had a peaceful revolution."

"Why haven't the dissidents come to power?"

"Who wants power? We didn't want power. There was a myth under the Communists of national-patriotic unity. That was a lie, and we exploded it. People in the West thought maybe the Communists were building socialism – not very well, but, you know, with some successes – and we told them it wasn't so. We told them. Now it's ended. The rest, it'll take a generation, at least. Father M'en' [Orthodox minister killed in 1988]. [Journalist Dmitry] Kholodov [killed in 1994 while working on corruption in the military]. [Liberal politician] Galina Staravoitova [killed in 1998] in Petersburg. They have to stop killing people right and left. First that, then everything else. It could take 200 years. It's a violent world, drenched in violence. People are afraid of one another. It shouldn't be that way."

"This new government, Yeltsin, I don't know – to hell with them.... What am I going to do, keep hammering the same nail in over and over? I did my part in Russia, for six years I did it and then it was time to scram. Now I have this." And he indicates the mathematical proofs scattered across the floor.

Volpin is disgusted and encouraged and weary; he does not indulge regrets. Thirty years ago, when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, Volpin argued in the samizdat Chronicle of Current Events that imprisoned dissidents should be released because, when it came time to visit other galaxies, "these people will not shame our planet." Now he allows a smile when I ask about Sakharov, the only dissident who ever had enough popularity, potentially, to be elected president.

"Yes," he says. "Andrei Dmitrievich might have become president. And this would have been good."

But, in their careless, inexorable way, things continue. Volpin and I conclude the conversation with a pleasant monologue on proof theory.

"If I leave behind me a theory that will become the basis for mathematics for several decades, that'll be sufficient. See, certain paradoxes insinuate themselves into the foundations of mathematics. That's where I begin. Otherwise they'll say: You're contradicting Goedel!"

SOME OTHER TRANSLATIONS, in addition to "garbage heap" and "dust-heap," that have been proposed by various historians for Trotsky's svalka: "dust-bin"; "rubbish bin"; "trash can"; "trash pile"; "wastepaper basket." But what if, anticipating the environmental movement of the early 1990s, Trotsky had in fact meant: "recycle bin"?

Because if, for all our historical empathy, we end up over here, in our Connecticuts, in our Californias, even in Cambridge, Massachusetts, what are we to do? The collapse of the Soviet Union has rendered irrelevant so many reference points, from massive defense spending to James Bond, that we have yet to recover our intellectual bearings. It is as if we've spiraled off into some demilitarized zone utterly lacking in symbols and meaning, a post-ideological vacuum where the old "ideas" have been labeled irrelevant, but the old problems persist. A jumble. And in fact a funny thing happened as this article slouched its way toward the copy editor: George W. Bush concluded the first major speech of his presidential campaign with a quotation from the fire-breathing millenarian Solzhenitsyn. This is an interesting moment, then, in our political life, as Bush pushes a hard line toward Russia and again uses the dissidents as a cudgel against an accommodationist Left. If Bush can get away, as his forebears did, with expropriating the moral authority of the dissidents, it will be because in the past nine years we have offered Russia a deracinated, market-modeled form of democracy, largely stripped of the utopian promises of equality and independence that have marked the best of liberal Western thought.

Even those on the anti-Communist left who had been long prepared for the collapse of what they knew to be a monstrous system have found themselves conceptually hamstrung by the reality of Eastern Europe. Paul Berman, a former S.D.S. activist who has written extensively on Vaclav Havel and his generation, journeyed to Prague shortly after the Velvet Revolution in 1989, his heart filled with utopian hopes.

"We thought that some revolutionary eruption would take place," he says. "It seemed possible that these notions of libertarian socialism might actually have a base in society, a hidden base that was going to emerge. It seemed like a realistic notion, it drew on a number of relevant historical examples. And it didn't happen."

In his book A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968, Berman tells of a visit Frank Zappa made to Czechoslovakia in 1989, which came to represent for the author the yawning gap between the cultures. "You've been living with secret police for a long time," Zappa told an adoring crowd of time-frozen hippies in Prague. "It will take Americans a while to realize that we have them, too."

"A silly remark!" Berman replies. "Truly thoughtless.... Nevertheless, every American who traveled to Eastern Europe in those revolutionary days ended up in conversations like that.... Dickensian horrors spilled from our lips.

"I was astonished by how simplemindedly pro-Western and pro-American people were," Berman now says. "Frank Zappa's comments were absurd. He was talking about not getting records distributed. These people had, what, one in four or five people working for the secret police? But what did need to be said at that time, the people in the East needed to be given a dose of reality about life in the West – they were extremely ignorant... it was just common human decency to explain to them that their golden fantasies of life in Detroit weren't true."

Nonetheless, the experience has woken Berman from certain dogmatic slumbers.

"We do have a [longer] experience with capitalist democracy," he says, "and we are sometimes capable of deluding ourselves into forgetting how much better we live than the rest of the world... and because of that, we often end up with a sort of arrogance."

Berman has written, with unique intellectual honesty, on what the Eastern bloc's struggle toward liberal democracy and free markets must mean for leftists over here. The Eastern Europeans "could see more accurately than we could that Western society represented a seriously forward step over Eastern society," he says. "I don't think this means we should abandon our own criticism, our own social movements; the flaws are real," he continues, but we must also respect the Eastern European longing for capitalist democracy, even if it flies in the face of our deepest hopes. Because their deepest hopes, we already possess. "I've been as baffled as everyone by the failure of something more attractive to take hold [in Russia]," says Berman. "But I fear that these people who talk about Russia going its own way, some specifically Russian way that won't resemble the West, are consigning Russia to a perpetual second-rateness... because there is no other way. My instinct is that there are no other alternatives, except second-rate ones."

This, wrapped in the form of infinite leftist resignation, is essentially what Francis Fukuyama declared upon the collapse of Communism 10 years ago. The Rand Corporation philosopher (about whom Berman has written at length) argued that 1989 signaled the culmination of the Hegelian synthesis, the "end of history"; that, in other words, there was no other way but the way of capitalist democracy. Fukuyama has recently admitted that the Russian collapse, which he prefers to call "the apparent stalling of reform," is indeed a historical event, but this, and the Asian financial crisis, do not trouble him. "While these developments are rich in lessons for policy," he writes, in his ominous way, "they are in the end correctable by policy and do not constitute a systematic challenge to the prevailing liberal world order." If a cogent answer to this has been articulated, it has not yet influenced our thinking, which has found Fukuyama's narrative so compelling as to give it a corner office in our foreign policy. A crucial adjunct to this orthodoxy, with important and self-reinforcing ramifications for our policy-making, has been the journalistic coverage of Russia.

THE MOST AUTHORITATIVE JOURNALISTIC VOICE on Russia for the past ten years has belonged to David Remnick,who headed The Washington Post bureau in Moscow and is now editor of The New Yorker, which shows what you get if you speak authoritatively on Russia. He came to Moscow as a Post correspondent at the beginning of 1988, thrust straight into the cauldron of ferocious historical change. "The week I arrived," he says, still amazed by the pace of events, "they were rehabilitating Bukharin. They were introducing the concept of opposition."

Remnick's book on those final years of Communism, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lenin's Tomb, is a monument, scrupulously researched and written, the sort of book that if you drop it, the neighbors will complain. With a frenetic urgency, it captures the political tumult and the optimism of what looked like a revolution.

"The [1991 attempted] coup, I can say this now, it was great fun," he admits. "It wouldn't have been fun if they hadn't been drunk, if they'd had power and knew what they were doing. That wouldn't have been fun."

Remnick was more attuned than most commentators to the culture, which looked as if it would become dominant, of the urban intelligentsia, whose brightest stars were the dissidents. "It might sound sweetly naive," he says, "but, it's true: if you meet people who have a certain profundity, who have to deal with questions greater than bowling parties and television..." And Remnick begins mournfully reciting the various conversation topics of the urban bourgeoisie: "schools, real estate, bowling parties."

"There was a certain style of friendship," he says, "and, to be honest, I envied that. The kitchen tables, the dropping by. The idea of dropping by doesn't make sense here, where everyone's on such a schedule."

Remnick has written eloquently on the appeal the fatal seriousness of Russian culture held for Western writers such as Bellow, Roth, and Updike. "The visitors all fell in love a little," he wrote in The New Yorker in 1994. "None were foolish enough, of course, to want to trade places with their mythic counterparts, but there invariably came a moment when a Western writer found himself wondering, painfully, why democracy necessarily meant a marginal place for serious writing and totalitarianism an impossibly exalted one."

And he has been adamant about defending the dignity of a dissident culture many Russians would gladly leave behind. "When I came back [in 1994], there was this attitude, this level of irony, and people were talking about Solzhenitsyn with open contempt," he remembers, and moves, somewhat unexpectedly (we are, after all, on the 20th floor of the new Condé Nast headquarters towering over Times Square), into the language of moral indignation. "Sure, he's said some silly things, and probably no one's going to read The Red Wheel. But so what? Look, here's Solzhenistyn's contribution to mankind: he wrote the first novella to speak about the camps; he wrote two more novels about the Soviet system; and he wrote The Gulag Archipelago, which changed the politics of entire countries."

But therein lies the trap for Western liberals, for while maintaining an affection for dissident culture, Remnick has also welcomed the changes in Russia, and Lenin's Tomb is filled with stories of the transformative quality of those events, of their ability to metamorphose passive pawns of a totalitarian regime into active participants in a nascent democracy. So he is annoyed by the essentialism of disaffected dissidents like Fedorov and Yarim-Agaev and Bukovsky, who claim that the new élite are the same Communists, incapable of change. "People can't change?" he says. "It's ridiculous to say these people can't change.... You know, there's a certain kind of dialogue, a style of drama to [the dissidents'] speech, a dramatic fatalism. Of course people can change."

The 1994 New Yorker article quoted above was titled "Exit the Saints," and ruminated, with a minimum of nostalgia, on the passing of the Russian writer-prophets, and their replacement with an ascendant class of writer-professionals. "There's a new breed of person now," Remnick says. "It doesn't have the romance," he admits, but "when you're dealing with romance, it's dangerous."

Sadly and inevitably, the kitchen culture is disappearing. "I think a lot of it is gone now," he says. "When money enters the picture, things change. People lived that life, drinking tea in the kitchen, not under any terrible danger, and when opportunity appeared, they took it." Remnick shrugs. "It's not like they're sitting around watching 'Friends.'"

Within the liberal tradition, though painfully conscious of the failures that have clouded his earlier optimism, Remnick has been consistent in applauding every tiny step that Russia makes toward a more "normal" way of life and a civic society. And, he says, "to expect a place that was totalitarian, a place that was as fucked up as it was, to become, overnight, a [prosperous, Western liberal democracy] it's the height of preposterousness."

This needs to be reflected in the reporting, as American journalism has always had difficulty producing a complex image of Russia. "It's hard to follow more than two figures – it used to be the General Secretary and the leading dissident," he says. "These guys have long names." What is more, Russian society used always to be depicted as an ontologically different place. "The shift in reporting came in 1986, '87," he says, "when we started talking about it as if it were more a normal country, not a secret society with strange rituals we were privileged to witness.... For me, as a reader – and that's what I am now – what's most interesting are David Hoffman's reports in The Washington Post on how Moscow's money works. That's the story I would look for now."

The emphasis on normality and transparency which distinguishes Remnick's work has also been its limitation. He has rejected the collective intellectual shrug authorized by Winston Churchill's famous description of Russia as "a riddle, wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a mystery." Remnick's undertaking, while it lasted, was Herculean. One feels in his second book on Russia a compulsion to subordinate it to his journalistic intelligence, to make it, by dint of that intelligence, the "normal" country that it is not. If the project has failed to conjure through its level description, the inception of a normal country, it is because, as my friend the philosopher Ilya Bernshtein has said, "Russia is, in fact, a catastrophe, wrapped in a disaster, wrapped in God knows what."

FOR CATHY FITZPATRICK, executive director of the International League for Human Rights, the fall of the Soviet Union has, far from ending history, only made it that much more difficult. A prolific translator as well as a longtime human-rights activist, Fitzpatrick directed research at Helsinki Watch in Moscow from 1981 to 1990. After 1989, she says, "I waited for The New York Times to cover human rights from the Moscow dateline, but I often waited in vain. They did, sporadically, but not as much as the European press [or The Washington Post]. I could never understand why the Times ignored the dissidents who did remain in the late 1980s, and why some of the later reporters in the early 1990s stopped covering human-rights, and stories like Sergei Kovalev traveling to cover the massive atrocities during the war in Chechnya, or being removed as the Russian human-rights commissioner, never saw the light of day here. Maybe Russia just became like any other country, an Italy, a Peru, who knows?"

I give her my theory of narrative, that where we used to spin a moral tale we now spin the tale of progress. "Maybe it was never really about morality, but politics, for most people," she answers, "which is why they found it so easy to stop talking."

The League's Manhattan office is not, mildly speaking, in the Condé Nast building, and looks much the way the office of a dissident-ish organization ought to look: a little squalid and bare, with exposed wiring, small offices littered with papers, several lived-incouches and a solid wall of file cabinets for their incessant reports on human-rights abuses, and recommendations for action, from all over the world. Fitzpatrick sits at an enormous computer screen, firing emails across the globe, organizing conferences, preparing reports to the United Nations, abetting dissent in Belarus and Azerbaijan.

"Was it the fault of the dissidents that they didn't come to power?" she asks. "No. They were up against terrible odds. The Russians dug up mass graves, millions of them – a million Rwandas – and they just put them back. They never did anything with them, never had a trial. For me, the tragedy is, funny as it sounds, that there weren't enough lawyers. In other places, you had lawyers, people in the professions, with expertise. In Poland, you had the Church. In Russia, it was scientists. There's not a church basement in Russia to hide a dissident in." But even more, perhaps, than the structural differences whereby the Russian élite proved itself more solidly entrenched than the Polish or the Czech, was a human factor. "The difference is these people were mangled by the camps," she says, the way dissidents in other countries were not. "Physically and psychologically, the Soviet Union mangled them.

"I wish I had a fund for old dissidents like Yuri's. Because what do you do when you get out of the camps? Say you're Ivan Ivanov. You come out of the camps and you come here and you can't get any help from the [U.S.] government – if you're not Jewish, especially, you don't feel comfortable asking the synagogue groups for help. What do you do? You call up Cathy Fitzpatrick, is what you do. And I say, 'No, you can't sleep on my couch. There's already someone there.'

"There are dissidents in the U.S., too – civil-rights workers, the people who picketed City Hall [in New York, after the Amadou Diallo shooting] are dissidents. But that society created a different persona. [It created] a person who was willing to go to jail, to be interrogated, to get beaten up. There are people here who did time, 30 days, 60 days. But nothing like five years labor, seven years exile."

And yet, of all the people interviewed for this article, Fitzpatrick is the most active, and the closest to her pre-1991 self, even if she does find it more difficult to garner attention from the press. Human-rights, Remnick pointed out when I quoted Fitzpatrick's criticism of post-Soviet press coverage, "is what she does," but it is also what she believes to matter. While the dissidents insist that a few principled individuals brought down a regime, Remnick stresses the forces unleashed by Gorbachev's reforms, and a leftist like Berman points to semi-inexorable historic processes, Fitzpatrick thinks history is made by little people – ones we hardly notice – working on their own initiative and irrespective of the tidal waves of markets and oil prices and the Politburo and the Pentagon. One would like to believe her. And perhaps insofar as history is merely the stories we tell ourselves to keep from stopping short in our tracks from despair, then what Cathy Fitzpatrick says – everything she says – is true.

IN TERMS OF RUSSIAN CULTURE, I managed to grow up in a time capsule. Lacking any direct contact with the country, and, for a long time, not really wishing for any, I stewed in my parents' Cold War resentments while Russian kids my age lived, daily, first through the collapse, and then through the horrors that succeeded it. A profound reverence for the dissidents was one of my cherished inheritances, and when I did go back to Russia, in 1995, it was startling to find that hardly anyone cared about them, or the remaining Lenin statues, as much as I did. This sense of my own obsolescence was mostly forgotten until I had the indiscretion to bring the dissidents up with my wife, Anya.

Anya grew up in Moscow and came to the States just two years ago. Her aunt had been married to a dissident – Andrei Velikanov – in the 1970s, and Anya has some very specific impressions of the movement. "They sat around in kitchens and complained about the Soviet Union," she tells me. "That's all. And now? Now they're here."

Though, strictly speaking, it was the intelligentsia who famously sat around in kitchens while the dissidents were out protesting in the squares or sneaking samizdat to foreign correspondents, the protests weren't altogether frequent, and one assumes there was a good bit of downtime, and, yes, that it was probably spent in kitchens.

"Still," I say, "they brought down a horrible, despicable police state."

"They brought down nothing. The state brought itself down."

Suddenly I realize I am interviewing my wife. But I can't stop. It would be very awkward, at this point in the conversation, to fetch my pad and pen, so I order my mind into a state of maximum memory retrieval and toss my dear Anya a leading question.

"But weren't they the best? Weren't they the bravest?"

"They weren't anything, they didn't accomplish anything, they may as well never have existed! Look, start at the end. Who's in power? It's the same people as before. So it couldn't have been the dissidents who brought down the regime, otherwise they'd be in power, no?"

Anya is a graduate student in Russian literature, and she has repeatedly told me she doesn't wish to discuss this article. But given another leading question, off she goes.

"There's nothing left of them. Nothing, not even dust, just some," with arch-contempt, "archives. They're not out there radiating truth. And the whole thing, all the sitting in all the kitchens, it did not matter one bit." She sits down on the couch. "I'm mad at your dissidents," she says, more quietly. "The same Communists are in power, our parliament is a convention of thugs, and where are they? They're all over here."

It's true: though a handful have returned, and others never left, many are here. And I'll add another reason to the reasons why. When my parents and my sister and I went to Sheremetyevo-2 airport in February 1981, about 20 relatives accompanied us. It was just five years before Gorbachev began overturning the world, but so far as my relatives were concerned it may as well have been 1918: each of them was certain they would never see us again, that we were disappearing over a particularly vast ocean, with particularly difficult rules for crossing, that they would never know. My parents thought so, too. Some of the people I interviewed for this article were, upon their arrival here, met by the press, and some were met by the indefatigable Cathy Fitzpatrick, but most everyone, like us, was met by friends whom they, too, had never thought to see again. My father was, luckily enough, a good computer programmer, which, though not so wonderful a thing to be as it is now, was not so bad then, either; others, like Yarim-Agaev, Volpin, Valentin Turchin, Yuri Orlov, were accomplished enough in their (technical) field to land jobs or grants at universities. But many people were like Fedorov, who had spent his life in the camps, or had been fired from jobs or expelled from universities because of their dissident activity, or proximity. It was just too hard to get settled here, and since they all thought they were doing it forever, that the police state they had left would go on in perpetuity, settle forever they did. They bought homes in the suburbs, they got married, they voted for Reagan.

And there's another very good reason for not going back, aside from the fact that very few people in Russia have jobs that pay them enough to live on. As Volpin said, people in Russia get killed. They get killed for saying too much or saying it to the wrong people or thinking too much, or they get killed randomly, for no reason at all. One by one, many of the people who have spoken truth to power have been killed. We have been too hasty with our praise for the new Russian democracy, too formalistic. Because if there are fewer dissidents arrested now, the atmosphere of chaotic, meaningless violence has, possibly, increased. The mutant post-Soviet regime has realized that the massive inflation of moral rhetoric that the Soviets allowed – a prominent dissident, as Remnick points out, was as much of a news item as a General Secretary – was a blind alley for the authorities, and that business can be more efficiently handled if people are simply killed in the streets, without the incriminating minutes of trials and interrogations. In the past 10 years, the only countries where more journalists have been murdered are Colombia and Algeria, both immersed in protracted civil wars. This, more than anything, is what's incomprehensible to someone sitting in the parking lot of Wal-Mart, approximately half a kilometer from the store entrance. The violence in Russia has permeated every layer of its society. Its children are raised in violence. It murders its poets and its prophets and its entrepreneurs. And it has ever been so: Russia has always been one of the dark places of the earth.

So there is little moving back from here to there; it is, in fact, hardly thinkable, and this is new. For some of the most powerful literature of dissidence was also the literature of exile. Alexander Galich's most moving song is not one of his many dirges to murdered artists and poets, but a heartbreaking promise that he would return. Joseph Brodsky's persistent rehearsals of exile and repatriation served as the very core of his work. Running through all this was the idea that, some day, if not some day soon, the Communists would fall. "We must wait," Ivan Bunin, the first great philosopher of exile, said in a 1924 speech called "The Mission of the Russian Emigration." "We must wait before we acquiesce to the new 'world order,' to its current conquerors." This was the mission of the Russian emigration, and while the Soviet Union existed, in whatever form, my parents' generation, like Bunin's, could maintain the conceit – if they so wished – that they were exiles, not émigrés, and that their task, in part, was to maintain and husband Russian culture until this particular dark age had passed, and then, when it did so, to return. My parents left the country but shipped an enormous library with them, including the Vsemirnaya Literatura collection of French, German, and English literature in Russian translation. They continued speaking Russian and writing Russian, and in fact their Russian, immensely sensitive to foreign encroachments, maintained a purity that Muscovite Russian could not. As late as 1989, Brodsky could write, "Time, when confronted by memory, learns of its impotence." After 1991, however, there can be no such thing as exile, and we find that time, and the Soviets, have triumphed after all. The dissidents and the émigrés surrounding them have become, in their unhappy way and largely against their will, Americans, and as the fragile continuities of Russian culture are pieced together again in that country's universities and galleries and journals, it must become clear that the rift of emigration has proved irreparable, that neither this generation, nor its children, will ever return to stay.

IN MID-1997, when the AIDS cocktail first came on the market and there was serious talk of a "cure," a flyer appeared on my college campus that informed us, simply, "It's not over yet." In smaller print, it cited a statistic about the cocktail's less than total effectiveness, and the existential effect was remarkable. Perhaps that is about the best we can hope for, as far as slogans go, as far as things we know to be true. Ten years ago, it seemed (didn't it?) as if we might finally enter a world in which peace and prosperity were not mere political watchwords. Communism was evil, and since Communism had collapsed, what was there to keep us from the just city, the good life? If only someone had told us: It's not over yet.

Some of the old dissidents in other countries, who'd faced less vicious regimes, managed a savvier approach to their democratic revolutions. In The New Republic, 10 years ago, you could read Adam Michnik stubbornly, patiently insisting that the realm of politics is not an ethical realm, and that the transition from totalitarianism to democracy "must consist of a compromise among the main political forces." Soviet dissidents were less prepared than others for the new paradigm: in the same magazine, Vladimir Bukovsky argued that "the evolution of Yeltsin in the last year has been quite spectacular," but "only a figure of impeccable moral authority can lead the country to its spiritual recovery after so many years of lies and crimes." Michnik, who could call emigration "moral suicide," wrote his article from Poland. Bukovsky wrote his from Cambridge, England. Uncompromising, uncompromised, in Cambridge, England, he remains Amid all this, also in that magazine, came the sage, grave voice of Irving Howe. "A dream long corrupted has now been shattered," Howe wrote in October 1990. "Partly in consequence, we will be living through a time of reduced expectation, modest sentiments. In the short run, that may not be such a bad thing, but with time serious people will again be stirred by thoughts of new historical possibilities. Man cannot live by commodities alone."

Ten years have passed, and it seems our historical possibilities merely diminish. I have a vague, subterranean hope that internet shopping will raze, raze the strip malls to the ground – but aside from this, I am fearful. Eighteen years ago, my parents, enabled in part by Yuri Fedorov's insane attempt to hijack a Soviet airplane, flew me from a country that, under threat of force, paid obeisance to one false set of gods, to a country that, under threat of social ostracism, pays obeisance to another. For a suburban adolescence, for the best education that money and math scores could buy, for the English language, I should be grateful. But I am not grateful. What has this country done to us, and what has it done to the dissidents? It is more than a simple banalification, for who would not look dull in our suburbs and our parking lots? It seems a tawdry fate, for those who are here, to grow old in a country where nothing seems to matter, when their great achievement, in the Soviet Union, was to declare that the way you conducted your public life did matter. Because even there, even under Brezhnev, it was possible to live tolerably enough. Not in the thirties, not during the war, but in the sixties and seventies when many families had received their own apartments, if a set of requisite compromises were made in the public sphere, you could go home and do as you pleased. So what if the dissidents have lost their dissidence, if they have not survived our suburbs? We must learn to speak a moral language in this country, now. "Damn you, you lie!" says Alexander Yesenin-Volpin, a tiny 75-year-old man, a mathematician five times incarcerated against his will in mental institutions by the cruelest regime on earth, from his tiny apartment near the ocean, in Revere. "Spit it back," he says, mischievous, "in their faces!"

Much, then, is taken, but what abides? When I reviewed Remnick's Resurrection a couple of years ago, I thought he'd doted too much on Solzhenitsyn, whose irrelevance in post-Soviet Russia was obvious enough. But now I think Remnick was hovering near an important point: there is something terribly wrong with a place that has no use for Solzhenitsyn. "Solzhenitsyn," says Paul Berman, and I can hear him shaking his head. "He's not our guy. But," Berman says, "he said things that were true." That's just it. The dissidents did what no one else has done: they spoke the truth. It is partially their tragedy that, in the United States, that same truth was processed into a well-rehearsed conservative orthodoxy, which proves in part that truth depends on context. But it has not been entirely appropriated, not entirely lost; let's take Solzhenitsyn, the editions of whose books in my family tell their own story of the past twenty-five years. In the mid-1970s, my grandmother smuggled the three-volume Gulag Archipelago into Russia by train. Afraid she'd be too nervous if she tried to hide the book somewhere in her suitcases, when the customs police boarded the train at the Soviet border at Brest she simply sat in her place, reading volume three, with the two other volumes on the table beside her. My parents, when they emigrated, bought a Russian copy of Gulag in gouge-priced Schoenhof's Foreign Books store, in Harvard Square. And I own a dull but serviceable 1991 Russian edition that happens to be the first ever printed in Russia, and volumes one and three of the cheap American Harper & Row paperback. The reference point has vanished, the dance is ended, the evil empire is crumbled and mutated, but Gulag Archipelago still reads with all the force of its conviction. A political book, it is mostly about specific lives, crippled in specific ways. Deep, deep in part six there is a section on prisoners after their release: how, sometimes, former prisoners learn to appreciate their freedom, but also how difficult they find it, how many lose their strength and will precisely at the threshold of the new world. It's not over, it's never over. "But the sad thing is," concludes the writer who composed the century's most remarkable document in secret, over the course of a decade, whose notes for the manuscript were seized in 1965 by the K.G.B., setting him back significantly, who by the sheer force of his words and his belief in them caused tremors in the highest halls of the most cynical, inhuman power on the planet, "the sad thing is we all die eventually, without having accomplished," says Solzhenitsyn, "a thing."

Notes:

1. Yesenin-Volpin's protest against the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel marked the beginning of the Soviet human-rights movement, which would come to be approximately synonymous with Soviet dissident. One can, however, find subversive activity before the arrest, and counting dissidents -- like counting noses -- continues to be a much-loved activity. In a broad sense, opposition to the Soviet regime began on the night of October 25, 1917. But in terms of organized activity in the modern (post-Stalin) period of Soviet history, one can point to the numerous student groups that formed in the wake of Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" denouncing Stalin in 1956 (many of whom protested the invasion of Hungary and were consequently sent to camps); the poetry readings in front of the Mayakovsky statue in Moscow in the late fifties and early sixties; the beginnings of samizdat with Alexander Ginzburg's Syntaxis (1960), the circulation of Joseph Brodsky's trial transcript (1960), and the poetry anthology Phoenix (1961); even Solzhenitsyn's officially sanctioned publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in Novy Mir (1962). However, just as the beginning of the American civil-rights movement is generally dated to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, though Rosa Parks is certainly not the first black dissident, so too is Yesenin-Volpin's 1965 protest a pretty good place to locate the start of the Soviet dissident movement.
Back to article.

2. It wouldn't be fair to say that all dissidents residing in the States have become right-wingers, but the tendency is certainly dominant. Here are some fairly typical comments from Valery Chalidze, one of the founders of the dissident movement, now living in Vermont: "Americans should not forget that there are people among us who, during the Cold War, were on the other side! And we should keep an eye on them to see what they are up to now, and which new methods they will endorse to undermine our constitutional freedoms and poison the thinking of children in our schools. They are still among us, and they are not the kind of people to say 'we were wrong.' They struggled against the American republic as we know it and they will continue this struggle." That's from Chalidze's website, which is full of similar gems. More? Okay, here's Vladimir Bukovsky, who courageously documented the Soviet practice of sending dissidents to insane asylums, surveying the geopolitical scene created by the Western governments: "Well what did you expect... from the international socialist nomenklatura?" Bukovsky sees a no-smoking sign and writes, "Just imagine if they put up a sign banning gays, or blacks, or even dogs! The next day the whole world would be up in arms . . . Homosexuals can serve in the army, women can become priests, but we [smokers] don't even get a tiny smoking area." Well said, Bukovsky. "But," he adds, "undoubtedly the most fatal trend for our civilization is the movement to 'emancipate women.'" And this isn't even to mention the nationalist dissidents closer to Solzhenitsyn.
Back to article.

3. Slavoj Zizek, for one, recently concluded in The London Review of Books that Czech President Vaclav Havel has become a "comic caricature" of the heroic dissident he once was. Meanwhile, Adam Michnik, the Polish dissident who famously refused to shorten his jail sentence because he would have to promise to abstain from political activity, writes merrily in Dissent that "because of our recent acceptance into NATO, our country is a safer place." Cohen asks some tough questions of Michnik, but ultimately celebrates the new capitalist order and Michnik's part in it. It is this stuff of post-utopian compromise, indeed, that so gladdens the heart of Jed Purdy, who singles out Michnik as a model for civic action in this age of cynicism. And, considering the success of Round Table experiments like Poland and Hungary, Michnik seems to have been right about compromise, and the Soviet dissidents wrong.
Back to article.

4. A thumbnail sketch of Russian history since 1991: Yeltsin's apotheosis came in August 1991, atop a tank during an attempted hard-line putsch. By the end of the year, there was no Soviet Union, and a popular Yeltsin was free to do as he wished. He appointed a mercilessly free-market economist, Yegor Gaidar, as his Prime Minister. Gaidar, with Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs whispering Rasputin-like in his ear, began "shock therapy," releasing prices on most consumer goods, which resulted in hyperinflation and the disappearance of everyone's savings. Yeltsin, meanwhile, who did not call new elections to the Supreme Soviet (parliament) in 1991, began to find the parliamentarians a most unpleasant bunch. When he moved to disband the body in October 1993, a militant faction within the Supreme Soviet actually called for an armed uprising and seized the main television tower. Gaidar, for his part, urged Muscovites to come out into the streets to support the government. Thousands heeded this call, and the Army supported Yeltsin, eventually setting up tanks across from the Supreme Soviet building and firing upon it. This was the beginning of the end for Yeltsin, for though he received a good deal of support from liberals who felt threatened by the hard-liners in parliament, the liberal consensus was shattered. Also at this time, market reforms were carried out in a corrupt way with a total lack of sympathy for the population. Their increasing unpopularity became obvious in 1993, when right-wing clown Vladimir Zhirinovsky's party won 25 percent of the votes for the new parliament, which prompted Gaidar to make a surreal appearance on national television, begging people in the Eastern regions, who had yet to vote, to come to their senses (by this time Gaidar had been replaced as premier by the rather shady utilities mogul Victor Chernomyrdin, but continued to lead the pro-Kremlin parliamentary bloc). The ultimate moral disaster came in December 1994, when Yeltsin ordered Russian tanks to invade Grozny, in Chechnya, attempting to oust an elected separatist. The war lasted nearly two years and was a disaster. Meanwhile, in Moscow, a period of relative prosperity reigned as foreign capital poured into the "last investment frontier," and Russia sold off its natural resources. In the 1996 presidential campaign, Yeltsin broke every campaign-spending law on earth and manipulated a pliant media. He was supported in this by both Russian liberals and the Clinton Administration, because everyone feared the Communist candidate Zyuganov, who never had a legitimate chance. The Western press continued to sell Russia as an economic success story right up until August 1998, when Russia announced that it would, in effect, default on its foreign debt. The ruble plummeted, causing prices, but not salaries, to rise. Western capital fled, Russian capital fled, and a clearly ailing Yeltsin undertook a series of increasingly absurd firings of his premiers, finally landing on ex-KGB hack Vladimir Putin. After a number of journalists were murdered with no culprits ever found, Galina Staravoitova, a leading liberal politician, was shot to death outside her Petersburg apartment. Then, in August 1999, Russia again sent troops into Chechnya. This time there was enormous popular support -- triggered in no small part by the humiliation of the NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia - and practically no opposition from the former "liberals"; the December 1999 Duma elections were nothing short of a popular mandate for war. Yeltsin's New Year's Eve resignation makes the upcoming presidential elections Putin's to lose, though the man has never been popularly elected and, aside from some unpleasantly graphic martial rhetoric, has given no indication of his politics. In short, anyone who continues to claim that Russia is progressing admirably toward a civil society is, mildly speaking, joking.
Back to article.

5. Vladimir Bukovsky, an early dissident leader who exposed Soviet abuses of psychiatry against dissenters; Eduard Kuznetsov, originally arrested for his participation in Phoenix-61, a poetry anthology, and later the leader of the 1970 hijacking attempt, whose death sentence mobilized world opinion; and Alexander Ginzburg, the creator of the first samizdat zine in 1960, and the compiler of the Daniel-Sinyavsky trial transcript in 1965-66. (Ginzburg, when he was arrested and asked to indicate his "nationality," i.e., Jew, answered, instead, "prisoner.") Except for Ginzburg, who is 63, they are all in their fifties. All live abroad.
Back to article.

6. Yarim-Agaev tells this story: Shortly after he arrived at Stanford University in 1980, Andrei Sakharov and was exiled to Gorky for criticizing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. A year later, Sakharov and Bonner protested the denial of an exit visa for their daughter-in-law by staging a hunger strike that would last 17 days and seriously affect their health (they were forcibly taken to separate hospitals, but Sakharov managed to pass his wife an encouraging note in the Russian translation of Nabokov's Speak, Memory). Yarim-Agaev, for his part, developed a plan for the American scientific community to show their solidarity with Sakharov. "The idea was, scientists at one university would fast for one day, then scientists at another. We'd start with Stanford, M.I.T., Harvard, and move all around the country, day by day, and it would always be a new story. I already had a lot of people ready to do this. For them it's purely symbolic, one day, not like for Sakharov, and the day before we're about to start, I get a call from Sidney Drell [Stanford Physics Professor and Carter National Security Council consultant and detente activist; later co-editor of Sakharov Remembered: A Tribute by Friends and Colleagues, (650) 926-2664], and he's telling me that we can't do this. I say, 'What do you mean we can't do this?' He tells me it'll just make it worse for Sakharov. I tell him, no, our silence will make it worse for Sakharov. The Soviets understand only pressure. We talk about this for a while, and, I'll tell you, I've not seen many times that an American professor really lost his cool. But, finally, Drell just starts yelling, 'I don't give a damn about Sakharov! We can't let this hurt our relationship with the Soviet Academy of Sciences!'" (Drell denies this conversation ever took place.) "Was that really important?" I persist. "Was there important work going on that the Americans needed to share?" "No way," says Yarim-Agaev. "At that point, there was nothing at all Soviet science could tell the Americans that the Americans didn't know. Not a thing."
Back to article.

7. What were the camps like? Did they beat you? What were the psychiatric wards like? Why did your father kill himself? Why aren't you back in Russia, what are you doing here?
Back to article.

8. One thing to know about the émigrés is that the Third Wave, which came in 1972-1981, really looks down its nose on the Fourth Wave, which came after 1988. The Third Wavers were largely urban Jewish professionals who considered themselves intelligentsia back in Russia, and they lionized the dissidents. To them, the Fourth Wavers are merely economic opportunists who lack compelling political reasons for leaving. Also, the Fourth Wave is not as heavily Jewish as the Third Wave. One of my interviewees told me he hadn't particularly enjoyed his stay in Brighton Beach. "But there're so many Russians!" I said. "Those are, so to speak," he said, "the wrong kind of Russians." (Footnote to the footnote: There are two different wave-counts, one by Russians and another by Americans. Russians consider the White emigration after the Bolshevik Revolution to be the first wave, and the unofficial emigration of POWs and Vlasov's army after WWII to be the second. Americans count Jewish immigrations, so their first wave is the storied 1870-1914 Ellis Island/Lower East Side one, and the second is the postwar influx of Eastern European Holocaust survivors.)
Back to article.

9. And Gribanov is not unaware of the paradox. "Reagan once invited a group of dissidents over for breakfast at the White House," He recounts. "Things went well enough, but finally Andrei Sinyavsky asked about the Secret Service guard stationed behind him-whether he couldn't have something to eat." It was a typical Soviet comment to direct at a shadow, to bring attention to that shadow, as you would to a K.G.B. tail. "Then the Reagan people realized that inviting the dissidents was a mistake," Gribanov says.
Back to article.

10. Rather dramatically: Staying at the Hotel Angleterre in Leningrad, Yesenin called down to the front desk for a bottle of ink. Room service was slow in arriving, and found him dead upon entering. Before hanging himself, he'd slit his wrists and written his last poem in blood:

Farewell, my friend, farewell
dearest one who is in my heart.
It's preordained that we part
now -- our paths converge ahead.

Farewell, my friend -- no words, hands
hold -- endure!
In this life death is nothing new,
though living's nothing newer.

Back to article.

11. Yesenin-Volpin's ideas were crucial, also, for handling the K.G.B. interrogation, which, for most dissidents, was the existential moment, the interface between good and evil toward which every dissident life inexorably marched. The question for many years was how, under threat of physical torture and finally annihilation, to beat the interrogators, how to act honorably, how to survive. For Solzhenitsyn, describing the bloodbath of the Stalinist purges, the answer was total renunciation of everything that was not the individual self:

"You must enter without nostalgia for your old, warm life. You must say to yourself, as you cross the threshold: my life is over - a little early, perhaps, but there's nothing to be done about that. I will never again see freedom. I am going to die - either now or a little later, but it will be more difficult later, so better that it be now. I have no more belongings. All my loved ones are dead, so far as I'm concerned, and, so far as they're concerned, I'm also dead. My body, from here on out, is useless to me, it's someone else's. Only my soul and my conscience remain dear and significant to me.

"The interrogation will crumble before such an arrestee!"

But, says Solzhenitsyn, how will you do this when you have no point from which to speak? It is easy enough to die for your convictions, but what if you were raised to love your country, and now your country wishes to destroy you? Yesenin-Volpin's enormous contribution to the dissident movement (codified in the pamphlet "How to Behave During the Interrogation") was to explain that one could insist on the actual Soviet Constitution.
Back to article.

12. It's interesting that Sakharov, recalling the trial in his memoirs, doesn't remember the open doors, but instead the K.G.B. agents blocking the way, who "reminded one of the SS types from countless movies about the war." Sakharov demanded several times that he be allowed to see a higher authority about being seated at the trial, to which the KGB-ers yelled back: "Are you a Soviet man, or not, Academic Sakharov?" By which they meant: "If you were a Soviet man, you would not ask us to enforce the laws, because a Soviet man understands that's not what laws are for. You are, consequently, an anti-Soviet man, which means we can do anything to you that we want." When Bukovsky was sneaked out a back door, and the dissidents waiting in the front hall rushed to the exit to wave goodbye, the agents again blocked their path, this time to the outside. One of them barred the way of Elena Bonner, Matvei's grandmother, who yelled, "Let me go, you fascist!" Another of the dissidents managed to make it outside and yell, within earshot of the car, "Attaboy, Volodya!"
Back to article.

13. Another wonderful passage in Berman's book, along the same lines: "In Prague, during the revolution's second month, I went to a party in a clean, modest, cinder-block housing project in a suburban neighborhood. Afterward a doctor and I left together, and as we strolled to the curb, he gestured to the building where our party had been held and said, in a tone of disgust, 'This is socialist housing.' He meant, 'Dear visitor from America, this travesty of a dwelling is what the Commies, those bastards, have done to us.' What oceans of delusion about America lay in that single sneer! Any American could have told him: You want to see housing projects? I'll give you housing projects. Ever hear of the Bronx, buddy?"
Back to article.

14. This is a full-disclosure footnote on my relationship with David Remnick, whose editorship of The New Yorker, according to one calculus, makes him the most powerful man on earth. When I was young and brash, before the realities of the world had made their deep impression upon my brow, I reviewed Remnick's Resurrection for The Moscow Times. I liked it okay, but I had just read Lenin's Tomb and was disappointed with the sequel. If anyone could have written the book on the new Russia, it was Remnick, and basically I thought he elided too many of the questions he was able to raise, and that the book wasn't quite expanding the journalistic paradigm enough to make sense of things. So the chances were good that Remnick was coaxing me up to the 20th floor of the Condé Nast building in Times Square to beat me up. Consequently, I had stayed up most of the previous night with two friends, debating how to handle the most powerful man on earth. "I don't have a chance against Remnick," I told them at about half past three. "He's probably in the War Room right now, plotting against me. With Nick Lemann, and Updike, and..." "And Steve Martin," suggested Ilya Bernshtein. But Remnick seemed well rested, and was extremely gracious about my review. On the other hand, Remnick swears kind of a lot for an editor of The New Yorker, so fans should expect more swearwords in the magazine in the months to come!
Back to article.

15. This is how they taught us to write at Let's Go, to avoid libel suits. Just as Chomsky says, fear of lawsuits and general "etiquette" imposes its own Orwellian language. Thus, a poorly run hostel had "laid-back management," a dirty hostel was "not overly sterile," and an area of town full of drunk Eastern European assholes was "fun-loving." The whole guide, which I nonetheless think is the best one available, was written in a complex web of euphemisms that only made sense once you were actually in the town and could say: "Oh, that's what they meant. Clever."
Back to article.

16. Andrei's sister, Tanya Velikanova, held a famous press conference in 1974 during which she protested the regime's crackdown on the Chronicle of Current Events by handing issues 28, 29, and 30 to Western correspondents. "Among the dissidents," my trusty guide to Soviet dissidence tells me, "only Andrei Sakhraov had greater moral authority than Tatyana Velikanova" (Rubinstein, p. 268). This sort of comparative moral evaluation is common in writings of that era - everyone has their favorite dissident, and one almost suspects that there's a Moral Top 20 floating around somewhere, typewritten, on a charmingly flimsy sheet of paper, with tea stains.
Back to article.

Keith Gessen is a writer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

What if anything, does today's world have to learn from the dissident's experience?
Share your thoughts on the Loop.

FEED Lo-Fi Home | FEED Hi-Fi Home | Media & Culture | Technology | Loop

©1999 FEED Magazine