This new book by Kacper Szulecki is an original and inspiring contribution to recent trends in research on dissidents in Communist Central and Eastern Europe.1 While continuing the emphasis put on transnational contacts between dissidents by authors such as Friederike Kind-Kovacs, Jessie Labov, or Paweł Sowiński2, Szulecki adds a unique perspective to this body of research. He is not primarily interested in the activities of real dissidents (although he describes some of them meticulously), nor in reconstruction of their life-worlds or in assessing their impact in bringing down Communism. Instead, he focuses on the representations of their activity and on the transnational figure he identifies as emerging from them.

Szulecki’s main thesis is that the figure of a dissident, based on the activity of some oppositionists during the Cold War, has become a new universal type of transnational actor appearing today in various places around the world. The author refers not only to contacts between dissidents from various states of the Soviet bloc, but most notably to the relationship between dissidents and the Western world. It is in the eyes of Western experts and journalists that the figure of a dissident has developed, but it has been actively embraced and strategically employed by the dissidents themselves.

The book does not cover dissidence in the entire Eastern Bloc. The title clearly indicates that he is interested in dissidents from Central Europe. Naturally, when dealing with this topic, it is impossible to ignore the dissidents from the Soviet Union. As Szulecki recognizes, they played a key role in the formation of the dissident figure. However, they constitute the background for his main considerations. Szulecki explains that despite the primacy of Russian dissidents (and representatives of other nations living in the USSR), they were too isolated from society and from contacts in the West to play a role in the creation of a dissident category similar to that built by dissidents from Central Europe. This may seem a debatable assumption, though, since one could point to the eminent role of those Soviet dissidents who emigrated permanently to the West, such as Aleksander Solzhenitsyn or Natasha Gorbaniewska.

Szulecki also deliberately omits representatives of this formation from Southeast Europe, which is due to the small scale of the dissident movement there. Amongst the Central European countries, Polish and Czechoslovakian dissidents clearly dominate his narrative. While he conducted archival research on dissidents from these two countries, information on Hungarian and East German dissidents is merely drawn from the literature. Although some historians might criticise Szulecki for a title claiming to speak of dissidents in the whole of Central Europe without the author having conducted archival research throughout the region, I maintain that such objections miss the central virtues of Szulecki’s inspiring synthetic approach. If it were necessary to conduct inquiries in all the languages of the region, this kind of work would never be created. Anyway, the source base used by Szulecki with regard to the Polish and Czechoslovakian cases is quite broad and diverse: he references memories, publications of samizdat and tamizdat and interviews he conducted. It seems that conducting archival research in the materials of the secret police was not essential to his approach to the topic and would not have contributed much to the interpretations he proposes.

Szulecki’s book has a mixed structure, both chronological and problematic. It begins with a theoretical chapter explaining the complexity of the concept of a dissident as well as different ways of understanding it. Szulecki then gives an overview of the involvement of the intelligentsia in communism in the initial post-war years, initiatives taken by revisionists inside the Communist Party, and the emergence of dissident movements in the 1970s. He then explains the feedback processes that developed between those actors in the West and people opposing communist rule in the East. In the course of this exchange, the figure of a dissident, based on a dozen or so emblematic figures (such as Václav Havel or Adam Michnik), came to denote all forms of opposition to communism. Meanwhile, according to Szulecki, the dissident had acquired certain inalienable features related to, inter alia, public activity in defence of human rights and recognition inside the country and in the West. In the final part of the book, Szulecki tries to sum up the key features of a model dissident and to show what happened to this figure after 1989.

For anyone familiar with the state of the art of dissidence research, the book does not bring many new facts. As the author clearly indicates, it has not even been written for that purpose. In contrast, it has great interpretative value. This is perhaps the most complete analysis of the complexity of the concept of a dissident so far. Szulecki goes deep into his sources, pointing to the original meaning of this word, referring to heretics and religious apostates. With remarkable precision, he indicates various ways of understanding dissidence in relation to the Cold War and later times. The figure of dissident could be related to rebellious former communists, people who expressed passive moral objection, oppositionists fighting for human rights, all people associated with the political opposition, and finally all nonconformists and rebels (not only against communism), or rebel intellectuals.

The most important contribution of the book is that it attributes a key function for the creation and functioning of the figure of a dissident to the relationship with the Western world. Dissidents were real, but they also existed in a slightly different way in the eyes of the West. Szulecki writes that the figure was rooted in reality, but partially detached from it, and he observes these tensions with particular attention. He emphasizes how important Western recognition was for their activity. It was thanks to this that they became real actors of politics, whose views were taken into account by the rulers.

Also of particular interest are Szulecki’s reflections on the subtle differences between apparently meaningful concepts such as dissent (denoting various types of opposition), dissidence (a certain kind of politics in a dictatorship) and dissidentism (encompassing precisely the dynamic relationship between the activities of dissidents and the Western world).

In the last chapter of his book, Szulecki goes beyond the 1989 turning point, devoting his attention to the anti-dissident backlash that took place especially in Poland and Hungary during the 1990s. He points to generational conflict and the heated disputes over lustration as factors for this development, but he also looks for its sources in the language used by the dissidents themselves. As he argues, the use of the concept of totalitarianism by Adam Michnik, amongst others, blurred the specificity of dissident activity with the imputed attitudes of the entire society. According to Szulecki, when former dissidents described the communist state as totalitarian, they entitled all people to feel like victims and opponents, which in turn questioned the uniqueness of the dissidents’ experiences. This interpretation should be discussed further. When writing about totalitarianism, dissidents in Central and Eastern Europe clearly pointed to the differences between the model they dealt with directly and Stalinism. It is also worth noting that a very similar backlash affected dissidents from the former Soviet Union, although the Communist regime had undoubtedly been closer to the totalitarian model there, rendering the uniqueness of dissidents’ experiences hardly questionable. Finally, Szulecki abstracts a bit from the fact that the anti-dissident backlash is intrinsically connected to a conflict between dissidents, since among the critics of the most famous figures (like Adam Michnik) there were also dissidents (like for example Zbigniew Romaszewski or Antoni Macierewicz).

Kacper Szulecki’s book is an extremely inspiring and thought-provoking read. It can be considered one of the most important books ever published on various forms of opposition to communism. Moreover, it also provides important impulses for understanding political conflicts in the modern, interconnected world and the movements currently fighting against dictatorships.

Notes:
1 Recent research on dissidents includes Jonathan Bolton, Worlds of Dissent. Charter 77, The Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism, Cambridge, Mass. 2012; Gregor Feindt, Auf der Suche nach politischer Gemeinschaft. Oppositionelles Denken zur Nation im ostmitteleuropäischen Samizdat 1976–1992, Berlin 2016; Tatsiana Astrouskaya, Cultural Dissent in Soviet Belarus (1968–1988). Intelligentsia, Samizdat and Nonconformist Discourses, Wiesbaden 2019 (reviewed for H-Soz-Kult by Jonathan Raspe, 23.9.2020, https://www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/reb-29846); Andrzej Friszke, Czas KORu. Jacek Kuroń i geneza Solidarności [The time of KOR. Jacek Kuroń and the emergence of Solidarity], Kraków 2011; and the Czech encyclopaedia of literary samizdat by Michal Přibáň et al., Český literární samizdat 1948–1989. Edice, časopisy, sborníky [Czech literary samizdat 1948–1989. Editions, journals, collected volumes], Praha 2018. International research interest is also evidenced by two ongoing international cooperation projects, namely COURAGE. Cultural Opposition: Understanding the Cultural Heritage of Dissent in the Former Socialist Countries (http://cultural-opposition.eu/) and NEP4DISSENT. New Exploratory Phase in Research on East European Cultures of Dissent (https://nep4dissent.eu/).
2 Friederike Kind-Kovács, Written Here, Published There. How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain, Budapest 2014; Jessie Labov, Transatlantic Central Europe. Contesting Geography and Redefining Culture Beyond the Nation, Budapest 2019; or Paweł Sowiński, Tajna dyplomacja. Książki emigracyjne w drodze do kraju 1956–1989 [Secret diplomacy. Emigré books on their way into the country 1956–1989], Warszawa 2016.