The <i> Kompanii</i> They Kept : THE THAW GENERATION Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era <i> by Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Paul Goldberg (Little, Brown: $18.95; 344 pp., illustrated; 0-316-03146-1) </i>

By now, almost everything they fought for has been granted by the reformist hands of Gorbachev & Co. In their own country, their names and feats of self-sacrifice are nearly unknown to a whole new generation. Meanwhile, the Soviet dissidents whose story is told in this book have faded into oblivion in the West, where many now live in emigration. But Ludmilla Alexeyeva, one of the founders of the Soviet human-rights movement, is philosophical: “We take no offense at Gorbachev and his associates for not citing us as sources. We are happy that our ideas have acquired a new life.”

Alexeyeva has previously written a detailed history of the Soviet dissident movement (“Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious and Human Rights,” Wesleyan University Press, 1985), but in this engaging book, she has joined with journalist Paul Goldberg to produce a more personal account of her generation’s political awakening and gradual move to dissidence.

Born in 1927, Alexeyeva was nearly 30, a graduate of Moscow University and the mother of two sons when Khrushchev made his secret speech unmasking Stalin in 1956. Like many others in what was to become the human-rights movement, she came from a relatively privileged Soviet background. Her father, a devoted Komsomol (Communist youth league) member, rose from poverty to become a bureaucrat, and in the peak purge year of 1937, the family moved into a comfortable apartment house that was rapidly being vacated by the purges. The father himself barely escaped arrest, only to be killed in World War II.

Still, Alexeyeva remembers her childhood as relatively happy, and, full of optimism, she entered the history department of Moscow University in its first postwar class. Initially, nearly all of her classmates were female, but they were soon joined by frontoviki , war veterans with little previous schooling but lots of patriotism, who were admitted outside the entrance competition. Unprepared for even the minimal intellectual demands of the purge-ridden university, they soon learned that a career could be built of loyalty and slogan-mongering. Alexeyeva and her friends faced two choices: opt out of political activity entirely, leaving the careerists in control, or join the party and try to reform it from within. At first, Alexeyeva chose the latter course.

Alexeyeva’s crowd got their real education in kompanii , informal evening talk fests cum historical consciousness-raising sessions that suddenly emerged in the mid-’50s, when the fear of informers subsided. In the kompanii , “old politizeki (political prisoners) would be shouting something at young philologists, middle-aged physicists would be locked in hot debates with young poets, and some people I had never met would be doing unrecognizable dance steps to someone’s scratched Glenn Miller record.”

One of the more eccentric characters who frequented the kompanii was Aleksandr Esenin-Volpin, son of the poet, Sergei Esenin, who had a crazy idea: What would happen if Soviet citizens acted on the assumption that they had rights? And what if trials, in accordance with the Soviet constitution, were held openly, under conditions of glasnost --a word that had been around long before even Esenin-Volpin?

In 1965, Alexeyeva’s friend, Yuli Daniel, and his friend, Andrei Sinyavsky, were arrested and charged with publishing stories abroad under pseudonyms. Their trial was the watershed event for the thaw generation. It was the signal from the new Brezhnev regime that the heady, if inconsistent, era of limited intellectual freedom under Khrushchev had come to an end, and it became the test case for Esenin-Volpin’s theories.

By now established professionals in their 40s or older, the kompanii intellectuals supported Sinyavsky and Daniel by trying to gain access to the courtroom, or by signing letters of protest. The defendants themselves broke tradition by denying their guilt. And in the crowds outside the courtroom, the intellectuals began to forge their first contacts with Western journalists. With a smuggled tape recorder, they compiled a transcript of the Kafkaesque trial and published it abroad.

In the camps, Sinyavsky and Daniel met other “politicals,” particularly from national minority movements, whose names and struggles had been unknown to the Muscovites. Political links grew out of a support network of prisoners’ wives, and the samizdat Chronicle of Current Events began to appear, publicizing political repressions all across the Soviet Union.

The regime took its revenge. One by one, those who had dared to sign protest petitions, the so-called podpisanty , were forced to make decisions: recant, desist, and keep their jobs, or move to open dissidence. The majority took the first route; among them are many of perestroika’s most active supporters, looking for one last chance to redeem themselves. By the time Czechoslovakia was invaded in August of 1968, only nine brave souls, including Larissa Bogoraz and Pavel Litvinov, dared to protest on Red Square.

What is new in the book are not the familiar stories of heroism but rather the texture of the lives behind them, the personal stories those in the movement were not willing--or able--to tell while they were still political actors and martyrs. The changes in the Soviet Union have given the Western reader a wave of inside accounts never before have imagined, from the autobiographies of Boris Yeltsin and Andrei Sakharov to Sergei Khrushchev’s memoir of his father.

All these books remind us that the Russian tradition of “frankness” falls far short of the sensational personal revelations that American readers of autobiography have come to expect; and Goldberg has gotten Alexeyeva to let her hair down only a little. While she is reasonably straightforward in recounting the breakup of her own first marriage, Bogoraz’s divorce from Daniel and marriage to Anatoly Marchenko, to take one example, are treated only in passing.

Without being intentionally feminist, Alexeyeva gives us new insight into the important role women played in the democratic movement, a movement that grew up in kitchens and around dining tables. Women may have suffered fewer prison terms, but they were the ones who retyped samizdat and the Chronicle, extending the social networks that produced the kompanii in the first place.

Alexeyeva often compares her generation to the Decembrists, that small band of aristocratic Russian officers who returned from Paris after the defeat of Napoleon, bringing Western democratic ideas. In 1825, they staged a brave but hopeless attempt at a coup on the Senate square in Saint Petersburg. Alexeyeva’s crowd, too, was an elite band of idealists trying to infect what they regarded as the inert Russian mass with liberal ideas.

They saw their underground journals as the equivalent of Alexander Herzen’s emigre magazine, the Bell. But the very same regime that celebrated Herzen and the Decembrists as its revolutionary forbears in the struggle against czarist tyranny was even harsher than the czar in repressing those forbears’ true descendants.

Though the dissident movement was all but destroyed by the early ‘80s, Alexeyeva convincingly argues its importance in making today’s reforms possible: “Westernizers, nonexistent at the time of my birth, have now become a formidable political force. Now, like the Decembrists a century before us, we have been given the reward of knowing that the country has responded to our cry for the rule of law.”

BOOK MARK: For an excerpt from “The Thaw Generation,” see Opinion section, Page 2.