Abstract

The revival of dissidence was one of the paradoxes of the Putin era. During the terminal crisis of the Soviet Union and the early years of the Yeltsin presidency, the dissidents of the 1970s were celebrated as prophets of democracy and Russian nationhood. But unlike their East Central European counterparts, they achieved little political success in the post-Communist era. Despite Boris Yeltsin's pose as a disciple of Sakharov and his courtship of Solzhenitsyn, the most prominent dissidents were at the margins of politics by the late 1990s. To many observers, they were relics of another age. Yet under the increasingly..