In the years following the death of Stalin in 1953, the West began to witness a phenomenon long grown unfamiliar: Soviet citizens publicly expressing disagreement with the policies of their government. The rebirth of dissent in Russia astonished many observers. Some believed that a hermetically sealed “totalitarianism,” enforced by unrelenting terror, had eliminated for all time the expression of independent views. Others believed that the Soviet population had been intellectually lobotomized by decades of “thought control” and was no longer even capable of formulating independent views. As so often in the past, Russian history had confounded the expectations of outsiders.

This development has elicited not only surprise but a certain sense of historical déjà vu, for the forms in which contemporary dissent is cast often bear a close resemblance to the forms antitsarist protest assumed in the nineteenth century. Once again, an embattled little minority of intellectuals is determinedly resisting the power of a mighty state; the hallowed tradition of literature as an instrument of dissent has been resurrected; lives are being shattered by prison, exile, and emigration.