Daniel Blokh
Dissidents Among Dissidents by Ilya Budraitskis, Verso, 225 pp., $29.95
In a 2014 lecture at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Timothy Snyder, the Levin professor of history at Yale, argued that Ukraine’s essentially European past justified its future membership in the European Union. Various features of Ukraine’s history, Snyder stated, were classically European, from its origins in a meeting of Vikings and local peoples to its experience of confrontation between Eastern Christianity and Western Christianity. Ukraine’s European path, which was disrupted during the Soviet period, could now be resumed by joining the EU. Putin’s military aggression made this project urgent: Ukraine’s Europeanization was now opposed by a competing Eurasian project. Ukraine therefore became Europe’s front against Russia’s Eurasian project. Snyder warned, “There is a Eurasian future, which you can all go into together, and there is a European future, a European Union future, which you can all go into together. There isn't anything else. That’s what you have in common.” The crowd began to clap, causing Snyder to pause his speech and remark that he wasn’t expecting applause. Then he brought the argument to its conclusion: “Europe will be together, or Europe will be Eurasia.”
An intellectual celebrity of Central and Eastern European scholarship, Snyder is a favorite of many Russia-watchers, including my own Russian and Ukrainian parents. Yet, in Dissidents Among Dissidents, a collection of political essays written over the past decade, the socialist Russian organizer Ilya Budraitskis finds an unlikely parallel to Snyder’s argument — in the work of Russia’s chief ideologue, Alexander Dugin. The mastermind of Putin’s ideology of Eurasianism, Dugin reframes both Putin’s subversion of democracy and Russia’s geopolitical aggression as justified responses to imposed Western hegemony. On the face of things, Dugin’s argument seems diametrically opposed to Snyder’s. Yet Budraitskis writes that “both of these constructs are identical in their fatalistic representation of the choices and the impossibility of any third position, no matter what its source or legitimations.” Snyder’s angle might be liberal, Dugin’s nationalist, but both are staging a clash of civilizations in which their position is legitimized by the essential evil of the other.
The alternative that Budraitskis suggests is leftist internationalism. Budraitskis, who was born in Moscow in 1981 and came of age in the chaos of post-Soviet Russia, gravitated from a young age to the works of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and the Western left. Since graduating from the Russian State University for the Humanities, he has contributed to a variety of projects promoting the Russian socialist opposition movement, including translating Marxist texts to Russian, collaborating with the art collective Chto Delat? (“What Is To Be Done?”), and launching the podcast Political Diary with political scientist Ilya Matveev. Crucially, Budraitskis’ leftist internationalism staunchly rejects both Western and Putinist imperialism, therefore deviating sharply from the Stalinist and pro-Putin politics of the stodgy Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Recently, his unequivocal rejection of the invasion of Ukraine has led him to move abroad, along with many anti-war Russians fleeing the crackdown on dissent.
Yet Budraitskis has also rejected the Russian liberal opposition that has coalesced around Alexei Navalny, a movement which seeks to replace Putin’s authoritarian system with neoliberal capitalism. Liberalism may be the lesser of two evils, but Budraitkis insists that only the universal struggle against capitalist exploitation can lead to international solidarity.
Budraitskis urges readers to avoid unconditionally supporting one side of a geopolitical conflict, a framing which “[radically reduces] a huge variety of differences into one central conflict capable of explaining all contradictions.” During the Cold War, this ‘campism’ pushed some leftists like Jean-Paul Sartre to embrace Stalin’s authoritarian bureaucracy, while other leftists like Arthur Koestler collaborated with the CIA’s anti-communist efforts. Today, the same logic has returned in the rhetoric of Snyder and Dugin; indeed, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, writers from the Council on Foreign Relations’ Elliot Abrams to the Boston Globe’s H.D.S. Greenway have explicitly referred to the present situation as the ‘new Cold War.’ No longer drawn along the lines of competing economic and nuclear blocs, this twenty-first-century geopolitical showdown nonetheless finds similar geographic boundaries: on one side, the liberal West, and on the other, the anti-liberal anti-West, with its anchor arguably in China but its most explicit articulation in Putin’s militarily aggressive Russia. Both of these sides exploit and oppress while claiming to speak in the name of the exploited and oppressed, and leftists are often unwittingly convinced by their rhetoric. “The Cold War’s atmosphere,” Budraitskis writes, “deprives intellectuals of the right to doubt—that is, it confiscates doubt from those for whom doubt is a crucial part of their professional vocation and political function alike.” The prevalence of modern leftists who support NATO expansion and those who sympathize with Putin because of his supposed ‘anti-imperialism’ prove Budraitskis’ point. In this absurd situation, Budraitskis suggests the possibility for solidarity around a third position. “That which genuinely unites people on both sides of this illusory divide between the West and the non-West is the continuing growth of inequality, the chasm between the ruling elites and the majority, and the alienation of the latter from political participation,” he writes. “Perhaps this is where an internationalist Marxism can regain its significance.”
Budraitskis participates in rehabilitating internationalist Marxism by casting doubt on many liberal assumptions about Russian politics which have long been taken for granted. In his 2016 essay “The Eternal Hunt for the Red Man,” Budraitskis targets the popular idea, promoted by the notable Belarussian journalist Svetlana Alexievich, that Russia’s modern ills result from its inability to revoke the mindset of the Soviet ‘Red Man’. Drawing a surprising parallel to the Stalinist belief that the lingering Tsarist Russian mindset was responsible for Soviet failures, Budraitskis argues that, in both cases, the past becomes a rhetorical tool to dematerialize reality and discredit other explanations for political failure: “The Red Man, deprived of any material explanation, turns into a purely moral problem that refuses any hard and fast resolution, leading to its reproduction.” The metaphysical Soviet specter, responsible for any present ills, proves not only an easy explanation for the West, but a convenient excuse for the modern Russian state when justifying its crimes and errors.
At the same time, Budraitskis also provides incisive critiques of the Russian nationalist positions that sometimes appear in his leftist intellectual milieu. In Putin Lives in the World Huntington Built, Budraitskis connects the foreign policy of Vladimir Putin (as well as George Bush, Marine le Pen, and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi) with Western conservative Samuel Huntington’s theory of a clash of civilizations. Skeptical of Fukuyama’s prediction that the end of the Cold War would usher in democratic universalism, Huntington instead foresaw a post-ideological epoch characterized by essentialized, cultural conflict, in which the only guarantee of world peace would be rejecting universalist ambitions and allowing each civilization to follow its own national path. Budraitskis argues that Putin’s regime has followed Huntington’s logic of inherent civilizational traits, evading criticism by framing its “repressive political regime, clerical rhetoric, obscurantism in cultural life and military pressure on neighboring countries” as “stages along the path taken by a civilization as it returned to its true nature.” Despite the cynical appeal of Huntington’s—and Putin's—anti-cosmopolitanism, Budraitskis argues, we should see that worldview for what it is: a cunning and effective tool for keeping the powerful in power and subduing a movement toward international solidarity.
Though Budraitskis incisively deconstructs common misconceptions about Russian politics, the closest he comes to communicating a better political platform is in the long titular essay about Soviet socialist dissidents at the core of this book. This seems ironic, as the Soviet socialist dissidents have disappeared together with the state that shaped them; yet Budraitskis’ dedication to relaying these dissidents’ lives, controversies and beliefs suggests that perhaps they had it right all along. The term ‘socialist dissidents’ refers to a wide array of Soviet groups and intellectuals who disapproved of the Soviet leadership—not from a liberal capitalist perspective, but rather from a Marxist one. Drawing from old Marxist treatises, the outlawed texts of Trotsky, and the Yugoslavian experience of anarcho-syndicalism, the socialist dissidents concluded that the stodgy bureaucratism of the Soviet Union was not socialism at all; rather, it was a state capitalism far removed from the worker liberation and self-management envisioned by Lenin. Publishing in underground journals and organizing clandestine meetings, these socialist dissidents shared the same space—and some of the same opinions—as other dissident groups, like the liberal capitalist dissidents associated with Andrei Sakharov, and the nationalist dissidents associated with Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
But their anti-capitalist sentiments and Marxist aims often led to divisions with the other dissidents. When Sakharov published a letter to Augusto Pinochet, warning that persecution of the poet Pablo Neruda might compromise “the epoch of restoration and consolidation of Chile that you [Pinochet] have declared,” Roy Medvedev, arguably the most prominent socialist dissident, published an impassioned criticism of Sakharov’s grotesque praise of the coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. Ultimately, these dissidents’ heterodox positions led to a double marginalization: their controversial opinions led to their suppression in the USSR, while in the West, their anti-capitalist principles made them far less convenient than Sakharov’s liberalism and Solzhenitsyn’s nationalism. But despite their marginalization, the socialist dissidents had considerable influence in everyday Soviet discourse—so much so that even my vehemently anti-socialist Ukrainian father was familiar with his doctrines.
Budraitskis’ chronicle of the dissident dramas omitted from Soviet history has urgent implications for contemporary Russia. After all, the brutality of the Soviet collapse, whose reverberations we continue to see today, suggests that Medvedev was right. Plunging headfirst into neoliberal capitalism was not the best alternative to stagnant bureaucracy. By shedding light on the diversity of socialist thought in the USSR, Budraitskis undoes the mistaken idea that communism is synonymous with the Soviet state, thereby restoring the severed link between pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet leftism. By destigmatizing Marxism, Budraitskis rehabilitates it as the best theory for understanding the perpetually widening gap between the rich and the poor, the austerity measures imposed on working class people around the globe, and the violent clash of empires over subjects irrelevant to most peoples’ true interests. In a sense, then, Budraitskis is picking up Medvedev’s torch, resisting Dugin’s nationalism and Snyder’s liberalism much as Medvedev resisted Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov’s, and insisting on an internationalist, anti-imperialist leftist movement. Dissidents Among Dissidents serves as an ideological genealogy of Budraitskis’ own beliefs: a third position, grounded in worker solidarity and not blindly aligned with either side of the ‘new Cold War,’ attempting to see the forest for the trees.