AS THE POWER of the nationalist wreckers in Holyrood declines, so the prospects for a comparable programme of socialist wrecking in Westminster rise. Many’s the Todday teacup whose soggy leaves have compared Keir Starmer’s greed with that of the seagulls outside the Snorvaig chip shop. My own fronds have been even more outspoken, giving “gannet” whenever the words Reeves and Rayner are spoken in the presence of a stew of kelp and bladder-wrack.
This is the way the Soviet Union collapsed into being a “regional power”, as Obama said of the Russian Federation when he kicked off the count-down to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2009. A year or two of Starmer and Britain will have to go “full Solzhenitsyn” if we are to escape the same spiral of corruption, secret salaries and the bureaucratic firewall preventing access to information about the exercise of public authority.
If we do not have the courage to sustain a campaign as long and uncompromising as that of the famous Nobel Prize winner, we will really be in the borshch.
So it is important that a book newly published by Princeton University Press be widely read and carefully considered: To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: the Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans. This is an absorbing study of the people who were well-known in the Soviet dissident movement. It gains a great deal by being a study of individuals rather than the “movement”. In this it is more Russian than Soviet; more right-brain than left, to use the McGilchristian dichotomy.
Professor Nathans’s text evokes the curious unWestern-ness of even the most “modern” Russians. That is rare in conventional academic studies which tend to place more faith in the written or spoken word than on the writer’s intuition about the subject. Perhaps it takes a Jewish historian to see in the heritage of Orthodox collectivism (соборность) what Protestant Anglo-Americans often take as oppressive, or Catholic Europeans as a failed attempt to be like themselves.
This book provokes many uncomfortable reflections on the “direction of travel” (dread phrase) in British society today. A north British example is the failure of Westminster government to curb the destructive insolence of nationalist Scotland in allowing a form of attempted mind-control to flourish under Humza Yousaf (e.g. the Hate Crime Act). Prof. Nathans’ observes right at the start:
“The distinguishing feature of totalitarian dictatorships was their insistence not just on the consent of the government, but on mass participation in state-driven projects of individual and societal transformation. Totalitarian regimes, in a nutshell, were participatory dictatorships.” (p. 9, emphasis added)
That goes well beyond Yousaffian self-censorship, approaching neo-Stalinist self-oppression. So what was the Russian popular response to enforced conformity after the end of the Gulag? The dissidents discussed in Hopeless Cause had a simple approach to opposition: even in an unfree system, their key to individual moral salvation was simply to behave as if you were free – and damn the consequences.
The first of the dissidents who had the courage to try that approach was Alexander Volpin. He was a mathematician, whose father was the famous poet (and lover of Isadora Duncan), Sergei Esenin. He was “the first to understand that an effective method of opposition might be to demand that the authorities observe their own laws.” (p. 23)
Volpin paid the price for his view by spending a total of six years in exile or in psychiatric institutions. The latter were the most terrifying aspect of post-Stalinist oppression in that they attempted what modern British “high street fashism” is also attempting by treating determined opposition to nonsense like the “climate crisis” or the Covid lockdown almost as a form of mental illness.
That implies the state can “cure” the “illnesses” of society by the use of law, police, prisons and legalised public violence. The Soviets attempted something similar by means of mind-altering drugs administered by force in prisons reserved for those who disagreed with the government and had the courage to say so publicly. However, Volpin had a reward for his sacrifice, which is mentioned in Prof. Nathans’s closing sentence: “Even as the Helsinki Final Act helped legitimate the USSR’s external borders, the dissident movement sparked by Volpin helped drain the Soviet system of legitimacy inside them.” (p. 614)
The most memorable book about Soviet psychiatric prisons is surely To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter (1978) by Vladimir Bukovsky. He appears a lot in Nathans’s text which has a whole chapter (14: The Fifth Directorate) devoted to the important change from NKVD murderousness (physical) to KGB murderousness (mental).
The head of the Fifth Directorate from 1969 to 1983 was Filipp Bobkov, a veteran of Lavrentii Beria’s NKVD. His task was the suppression of internal dissent. Bobkov was considered the brains of the KGB. He created, for example, the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public in 1983, long before either the SNP or the British Labour Party had cottoned on to the political utility of antisemitism.
The Fifth Directorate “during Bobkov’s tenure more than doubled from 201 to 424 supervising officers, overseeing some 25,000 agents and informants across the USSR, including a young KGB lieutenant named Vladimir Putin, who worked in the Leningrad Branch from 1976 to 1979.” (p. 395) The organisation “allowed the KGB to operate entirely outside the bounds of the justice system.” (p. 401) Like so many politicians in Britain today, Bobkov and his comrades were impatient with the constraints on power imposed by the rule of law.
One of their nastiest tactics was “profilaktika”, which essentially means convicting people before rather than after they have committed an offence. Our version of that today is the “non-crime hate incident”. True, it is still non-custodial, but for how long? The Soviet aim was to prevent “politically immature” individuals being contaminated by alternative ideas of government. Like the high-virtue savages in our midst who want to educate poor people about their moral errors by banning the domestic hearth, cheap petrol cars and affordable heating, “the Communist Party and the Soviet government showed great concern for the welfare of the Soviet person and for his (sic) moral and spiritual level.” (p. 402)
The essence of the Soviet attack was its lawlessness. “The Fifth Directorate was empowered to decide by itself who was likely to commit a crime, who should be summoned for a ‘conversation’, and whose education career should be derailed. The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet formalised this power in 1972 via an unpublished administrative decree granting [it] the authority to require subjects of profilaktika to sign a document confirming that they had been warned about the impermissibility of their anti-Soviet behaviour.” (p. 405, emphasis added)
SNP-Labour attempts to undermine the rule of law are only weak and feeble efforts at emulating the Soviets’ participatory dictatorship. Given the humourlessness of Yousaf, Swinney, Starmer et al, it is relevant that Nathans quotes Vitaly Mitrokhin, an ex-KGB staffer who defected to Britain, on what the KGB thought constituted “anti-Soviet behaviour.” One category was “telling political jokes.” How very Humza-ish of them.
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Hamish Gobson is the author of Living the Green Dream (forthcoming). It is a lightly humorous account of the immigration battle on the remote Scottish island, Great Todday, where Gobson lives and films seaweed for the Hebridean Centre for Marine Meditation.
Photo of Vladimir Bukovsky at Schipol in 1977 by Bert Verhoeff / Anefo – http://proxy.handle.net/10648/ac93b9d0-d0b4-102d-bcf8-003048976d84, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67731004 courtesy of teh Dutch National Archives
