Book Review : Soviet Dissidents Prevail in ‘Final Act’

The Final Act: The Dramatic, Revealing Story of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group by Paul Goldberg (Morrow: $19.95, 320 pages)

“The only reliable way to find the limit of Soviet patience,” Paul Goldberg writes in “The Final Act,” “was to push them beyond it.”

“The Final Act” is the story of a tiny band of Soviet dissidents who tested the patience of their government by demanding their human rights, and by doing so in the bright glare of world public opinion. The title of the book refers to the formal designation of the so-called Helsinki accords of 1975--”The Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.”

To the more cynical observer, the Helsinki Accords were not much more than a belated recognition of the Soviet sphere of influence that Stalin and the Red Army carved out in the last days of World War II. Of course, the Final Act also included a section on human rights--mere window-dressing, the cynic might say, a meaningless gesture. But a few courageous and imaginative dissidents within the Soviet Union learned of the human rights provisions of the Final Act, and then challenged their own government to honor them.

Veteran Dissident

The leader of the group was Yuri Orlov, a diminutive, red-haired physicist and a veteran dissident who was audacious enough to demand that the Soviet Union, as a signatory of the Final Act, extend a measure of human rights to its own citizens. He convened a ragtag group of fellow dissidents as the “Public Group of Assistance to Implementation of the Helsinki Agreements in the U.S.S.R.,” a typically Soviet bureaucratic mouthful, which translated into open defiance of the Soviet Union and the KGB over the issue of human rights.

From its modest origins in Moscow, the “Public Group of Assistance” became a beacon of principled dissent throughout the Soviet Union and around the world.

Author Goldberg was born in the Soviet Union, emigrated to the United States as a teen-ager and today works as a journalist in Washington. He has a native Russian’s command of the language, politics and sensibilities of the Soviet intelligentsia, and his book is full of surprising revelations about the dissident movement--starting with the fact that the very term dissident was introduced into the Soviet Union by “some lazy translators for shortwave radio stations” who preferred it to the longer and more challenging Russian word inakomyslyashchiy, which literally means “otherwise-thinker.”

“The word dissident began to be mentioned in the Soviet streets, at first as a linguistic novelty, and later, as if it had been in the Russian language forever.”

The dissidents themselves--familiar, even famous names among them--come to life in Goldberg’s book: Orlov; Andrei Sakharov and his wife, Yelena Bonner; Anatoly Shcharansky; Alexander Ginzburg; Andrei Amalrik.

We also meet some of the less familiar but all the more colorful dissenters, including a character named Mikhail Bernshtam, a volatile “self-educated demographer” who aspired toward a military coup that would put an end to Soviet oppression by the execution of 20,000 people. “He derived that figure,” Goldberg explains, “by estimating the number of key officials in the party apparatus.”

Dangerous Exploits

Goldberg allows us to witness the heady, sometimes zany, often dangerous exploits of these men and women during their skirmishes with the Soviet state and its fearful security apparatus.

When the KGB summoned Orlov to be interrogated, for instance, he decided to hasten the formation of the “Public Assistance Group” before the KGB could arrest him--and Orlov and Bernshtam rushed by taxi to the Moscow apartment of Andrei Sakharov to recruit the dissident physicist and Nobel laureate as a member. (He declined to join, but designated his wife, Yelena Bonner, as his surrogate.) On the sidewalk in front of the apartment building, we glimpse a comic battle between these two headstrong dissidents over who will pay the cab fare. (Bernshtam won.)

Goldberg also shows us the human face of various dissidents throughout the Soviet Union--Jews, Armenians, Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, Mennonite pacifists and a dozen others, all of whom bear grievances against the Soviet state, and all of whom rallied to the leadership of the “Public Assistance Group.”

Explains Goldberg: “Orlov would eventually unite the small factions of disaffected Soviet citizens including democrats, Zionists, Russian nationalists, ethnic separatists, Catholics, Baptists, Pentecostals and Seventh-day Adventists, and . . . similar groups would spring up in the Ukraine, Lithuania, Georgia, Armenia, Czechoslovakia and Poland.”

Not long ago, a man like Yuri Orlov or Anatoly Shcharansky would have been literally taken out and shot, or--at best--condemned to the Gulag for 20 or 30 years.

Light Sentences

As it turned out, the dissidents were rounded up and given somewhat lighter sentences--many were ultimately pardoned or allowed to emigrate. “In 1976 the KGB was bound by procedure,” Goldberg observes. “The new KGB had to wait for crimes to be committed before starting to prosecute.”

Still, the whole point of “The Final Act” is that a society may be judged by what it considers to be a crime in the first place. The dissidents were punished for acts of conscience, for exercising the most fundamental human rights of free speech and free thought, and for daring to defy the physical and intellectual totalitarianism of the Soviet Union.

What we learn in “The Final Act” is that a few brave men and women can bring the struggle for human rights into the very heart of tyranny--and we learn too that their moral example can survive even the most determined efforts to eradicate it.