“To the Success of our Hopeless Cause” is a suitably paradoxical title for this fascinating journey into the perilous and puzzling world of Soviet dissidents. They were not fighting as would-be westerners, but as homo sovieticus. This meant they were not struggling for consumer capitalism or liberal democracy, but for better communism. And their strategy was also perpendicular to that of many western protest movments. At its core was not civil disobedience but a campaign for obedience. The USSR needed to obey the laws it had already set for itself on human rights and transparency. As a teenager I accidentally read Vladimir Bukovsky’s gruelling account of dissident life, twice. Its title, “To Build a Castle”, refers to the imaginary castles he built to endure long periods of solitary confinement. So the subject of this book felt earily familiar on one level, but it also forced me to accept the cause I had read about was that of a radically different world at the time. But the need to find ingenious ways for citizens to resist a regime which systematically breaks its own law is now no longer quite as alien. ■
