CHAPTER 2

Who Are the Dissidents?

Who Is a Dissident?—A Compendium of Definitions

While 1989 is seen as a caesura of groundbreaking importance for
Central Europeans, on the global scene it meant that prisoners of con-
science from this part of the world would nearly disappear from the
pages of Amnesty International bulletins. Opposition to authoritarianism
and dictatorial power continues worldwide, and the struggle of the “dis-
sidents” lives on. But what does “dissident” mean? This seems to be a
simple but also a very awkward question. Many understand the concept
but hardly ever consider a definition. Over the past eleven years, I posed
that question to a number of people and got a number of quite deviating
responses, unified by only one thing—an initial awkward pause.
Analyzing the meaning of the term “dissident” is difficult and involves
considering three different elements. These are: the historical roots of
this particular term (which vary in meaning from society to society), the
meanings, contexts, and connotations in which it was used by various
Western actors (subjects, who reinvented the term), and the meaning
and definitions that the “dissidents” themselves (objects) resisted, dis-
missed, or on the contrary wished to give to it.
The word “dissident” comes from the Latin dissidere—“to sit on the
side.” As the Polish poet Stanisław Barańczak pointed out, this suggests
being outside the mainstream, not necessarily in opposition to it, but devi-
ating from the norm, acting unusually, staying on the margin (Barańczak

© The Author(s) 2019 21

K. Szulecki, Dissidents in Communist Central Europe,
Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22613-8_2
22  K. SZULECKI

1982). The original meaning of the term “dissident,” drawing on medieval

Latin, was synonymous to “heretic” or “renegade” and described a reli-
gious or theological position (Szulecki 2011). If there is a faith, there are
those who follow it uncritically, and those who deviate or on the contrary
argue that the mainstream has deviated from the Scripture. It is in that
heretical religious sense that “dissident” first appeared in English in 1769.
It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when the word “dis-
sident” was used for the first time in the context of Eastern European
communism, but for sure, the origin is in the anglophone media’s cov-
erage of Soviet politics. Since about 1921, the word has been used in
American press to denote opposition to the mainstream Communist
Party.1 Frequent uses can be noted already in relation to the Soviet
Union of the 1930s, when expert commentators from the West wrote on
the intra-party opposition to Joseph Stalin’s rule. After the war, Albania
and Yugoslavia were depicted as “dissident” from Moscow. Some sec-
ondary sources point to the 1950s, after Stalin’s death, as the moment
when the “dissident” in its modern use gained some popularity: “The
term ‘dissident’ (in the sense that interests us) was coined in the West”—
says [Krzysztof] Pomian, “to describe the group of Soviet intellectuals
arguing soon after 1956 for the deepening of the on-going Thaw, reach-
ing further than the official Party line wanted to see it” (Złotnik 1985).
According to this thesis, the first “dissidents” are “revisionists.” Clearly,
the Soviet and later broadly speaking East European context is the first
one in which we observe the shift from the original religious meaning of
the word “dissident” and its deployment as a secular, political category.
To be able to understand the different reactions to the “dissident”
label, one needs to grasp the culturally dependent webs of meanings of
the term itself. In the remainder of this section, I present the different
and distinct definitions of the “dissident” in its secular and political sense
that were gathered through primary and secondary literature analysis, as
well as interviews with scholars writing on “dissidents” and the former
dissidents themselves.2 We cannot forget linguistic differences. In some
languages, the word “dissident” and its derivatives have taken root, while
in others they continued to sound artificial, as an alien transplant from
abroad. For instance, while the Poles were and are very hostile to it, not
easily letting go of the religious and Communist association, the Czechs
and Slovaks introduced the word into their domestic dictionaries. The
Czechoslovak émigré Jaroslav Suk, for example, described the “slang”
of Czechoslovakia’s most important opposition initiative—Charter 77—in
 2  WHO ARE THE DISSIDENTS?  23

which various opposition-related activities and objects were referred

to using the prefix disi- or dizi-, as in “disimateriál” or “dizinotes”
(“This moron keeps a disinotebook where he writes everything”). The
prefix was also a popular abbreviation for “dissident” (Suk 1981, 35–36).
The five distinct (and two related) definitions presented in the table
below cover the semantic field of the term “dissident” almost entirely
in its uses referring to political and cultural, but not religious incarna-
tions. The first understanding (1), closest to the original religious mean-
ing of “dissident,” was also the first one in its modern reinvention.
It is still persistent in Central European discourses, especially those of
the anti-communist right. As such, it is sometimes used to discredit as
“dissidents” that part of the opposition that was rooted in the Left—
either former Communist Party members or Marxist intellectuals, rooted
in Marxist revisionism. In this sense, it retroactively imposes the nega-
tive connotation of Communism on them, carrying implicit accusation
of treason. In a slightly more moderate version, it simply explains the
unease of some former oppositionists with the label that was used to
describe them. On yet rarer occasions, it is used as a positive element
of self-understanding, like in Adam Michnik’s collection of essays tell-
ingly entitled The Confessions of a Converted Dissident (Michnik 2003)—
consciously playing with three religiously charged words (Table 2.1).
The second definition comes from the actual philosophy of action and
self-conception of the Soviet dissident intellectuals in the late 1960s. For
many scholars, journalists, and oppositionists alike, Soviet rights activists,
whose trials in the 1960s were first in a series of similar political events,
remained a benchmark as the “original” dissidents. It is close to the con-
cept of internal migration, “giving testimony” of moral superiority as well
as what others still refer to as “performing with the body … politics of
the body, that is of one’s own life, of prison, truth, but with no real hopes
for bringing change”.3 It has deep moral underpinnings, which were best
expressed by Czechoslovak authors Václav Havel and Jan Patočka. Havel
once said that the dissident “is someone resembling Sisyphus, pushing his
stone uphill, despite the realization that the chances of reaching his goal
are almost nonexistent; he pushes simply because he has no other option
to live in accord with himself and at least in this way give his life a bit of
sense and discover a horizon of hope” (Michnik 2011, 20). This under-
standing of the “dissident” is also close to political martyrdom in the
mode of nonviolence, as well as the ancient Greek concept of parrhesia,
speaking the truth to power, despite the risk (Foucault 2000).
24  K. SZULECKI
Table 2.1  Definitions of the “dissident”
No. Meaning
1 A former Communist dissent-
ing from the Party’s line
2 A solitary moral oppositionist
2a A solitary actor/member of
a minority group, a non-con-
formist outsider
3 A person fighting for human
rights in an authoritarian
country
4 A general label encompass-
ing most political opposition
activity
5 A non-conformist, a rebel
5a A non-conformist intellectual
Implications and comments
Often a synonym for “Revisionist” or
“Reformist”
Close to the original religious meaning
Brought up by anti-Communist circles locally
In a pejorative sense, contrasted with
“oppositionist”
Implying passivity vs. oppositional activity
Sometimes implying a small minority, represent-
ing only themselves (see 2a)
Based on the example of Soviet “original
dissidents”
Resulting from a specific, negative interpretation
of definition 2, implying lack of contact with the
society at large and escapism
Focusing on the “abnormal” and “deviating”
trace in the Latin dissidere
Emphasis on open activity
Even if illegal, calling up a higher legal register
A “positive” twist to the term, source of meta-po-
litical recognition and universal empowerment of
the dissident “figure”
Often used this way in non-expert Western
publications
Overlooking nuances and differences between
different strands of dissent
Enabling a generalizable “dissident” label
Allows for broad generalizations and compari-
sons, especially with Latin America. A very broad
understanding, which leaves no analytical value to
the word
Suggests that dissidents appear in all social
systems and conditions, opposition against
Communism or authoritarianism being only one
of them
 2  WHO ARE THE DISSIDENTS?  25

The Polish opposition very often used the term “dissident” as a neg-
ative benchmark. Thus, the “dissident” was conceived as passive, while
the “opposition” should be active; the “dissidents” are solitary, often
elitist and intellectual outsiders, while the opposition needs to estab-
lish a dialogue with the society, mobilize it and lead it. “Every opposi-
tionist is a dissident, but not every dissident is an oppositionist”—said
the East German opposition veteran Wolfgang Templin, suggesting
that a “dissident” simply meant a non-conformist, but an oppositionist
was someone who not only thought but also acted against the regime.4
This is similar to the variant of this definition (2a) which bears traces of
the Communist propaganda that tried to discredit the “dissidents” and
diminish their role by alienating them. Such a strategy had the exact
opposite consequence and in fact enabled the “figure of the dissident”
to come to life. However, some former “dissidents” explained to me
that isolation and intellectual ghettoization were their greatest fear, and
they saw the “dissident” as a negative example of such complete detach-
ment.5 “We felt elitist, perhaps”—says Seweryn Blumsztajn, recalling the
early 1970s—“but we first of all felt very lonely.”6 That loneliness was
seen even as late as 1977, as the Soviet exile Vladimir Bukovsky testified:
“Before he departed from Paris to Poland, Michnik asked me in confi-
dential terms: ‘tell me, sincerely, how many dissidents are there really in
the USSR?’ – ‘Generally speaking: enough’ – I replied evasively. – ‘In
Poland only a handful, almost none’ – replied Adam sadly, and added –
‘everyone around, such conformists’” (Bukovsky 1984).
In reality, especially since the late 1970s, both the Czechoslovak and
Polish communities constructed their position in relation to the nega-
tive benchmark of the Soviet dissidents, whose courage, intellectual,
and moral richness was beyond doubt, but whose position in the society
was universally seen as that of a grain of a tiny community in an ocean
of ignorance (Romaszewski 1979). The Polish opposition leader Jacek
Kuroń, who looked to his Russian counterparts for inspiration, none-
theless suggested that probably the names and deeds of the Soviet dis-
sidents were better known in Poland than they were in Russia (Artykuł
nadesłany z kraju 1974). “The label ‘dissidents’”—wrote a younger
oppositionist in the 1980s—“was associated with the actions of the
Soviet fighters for human rights (to whom the label was first attached
and so the characteristics of their practice began to delimit the mean-
ing of the word) which – with all due respect – everyone tried to avoid”
(Złotnik 1985, 34).
26  K. SZULECKI

The third definition (3) carries an important positive trace, related

to the idea of human rights. The “dissidents” are seen as “human rights
activists.” That understanding becomes visible already in the late 1960s,
when dissent against Communism becomes associated with rights,
mostly in light of the Soviet writers trials (Nathans 2007, 2011; Metger
2013). The platform of communication constructed on the idea of
human rights, as the following chapters show, worked both domestically
and internationally, helping to transcend and blur political differences,
and finally to generate universal and meta-political support for those
oppositionists in Eastern Europe who were able to “talk the talk” of
human rights. This kind of activity requires and presupposes openness—
it is not a conspiracy, even if it is clandestine and requires underground
means (e.g., samizdat printing, contacts across borders, gathering fund-
ing) to function.
The fourth definition (4) nearly equates the “dissident” with “oppo-
sitionist” (in the Communist context). It is therefore used to describe
anyone opposing the regime—the motivations are not relevant, and nei-
ther are the person’s political and ideological views. The broad usage of
the term thus defined, combined with other associations and meanings
of the word, enabled the generalization of a figure of the dissident that
took place in the 1980s. The term in this understanding was used by
Western correspondents and journalists. It can still be found in Western
European media coverage of non-Western politics.
The last definition (5) casts the “dissident” in the relational position
of being against, resisting. Because it also equates all forms of resistance,
intellectual, moral, societal, and even military, it allows for compari-
sons (or at least drawing parallels) between such far-off figures as Václav
Havel, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Rudi Dutschke, and
Che Guevara. Such parallels, it has to be said, are rarely drawn. What is
important is that they are possible to think of and express. The original
religious meaning of the term was stripped off, leaving only the struc-
tural, dyadic relation of opposing.
The fifth definition has a variation (5a) which was used much more
often. When the cult of the dissidents was becoming more evident, some
among the Western radical intellectuals tried to use the popular term
for a reorientation (Judt 1988; Horvath 2007). Already in 1977, David
Cooper wrote “Dissidence – what a strong alibi! We are all ‘Dissidents’.
We do not need to do more than express our left-radical opinions
clearly” (Cooper 1978, 5). In fact, he continued, every madman is also a
 2  WHO ARE THE DISSIDENTS?  27

dissident, everyone who opposes the system, not only the “brave people
in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe” but also those who live in the
“capitalist Mega-Gulag” (Cooper 1978, 32). Julia Kristeva also tried to
extend the meaning of the term to cover all non-conformist intellectu-
als (Kristeva 1977). That was also the line of the radical periodical Tel
Quel in its special issue on the “dissidents” and “dissidence” (Hourmant
1996). The focus was only on the relation of opposition and not on the
context (i.e., consequences for dissidents in authoritarian and totalitarian
societies as compared to the “dissidents” in democracies). A similar move
is made in the emerging literature on “dissent,” which casts it as a polit-
ical category transcending the blurry division between authoritarian and
liberal political systems (Dorfman 2016a).
In contemporary writing, the following passage illustrates that con-
ceptual inflation: “An alternative figure to the intellectual of statecraft
is the dissident intellectual – the critically minded intellectual who is
less interested in obtaining and exercising power than in challenging
the prevailing ‘truths’ of geopolitics and the structures of power, polit-
ical economy and militarism they justify” (Ó Tuathail 1998, 10). This
unifying and eclectic approach is also found in Roland Bleiker’s book
(Bleiker 2009), where in one chapter he describes the artistic dissent of
the East German Prenzlauer Berg circle, refers to Solzhenitsyn, Havel,
and Michnik, while in another chapter presents Paul Celan’s poetry as
“political resistance” and “dissent” (Bleiker 2009, 97). This shows the
extent to which the concept is flexible and extendable. On the other
hand, Bleiker gives clear hints as to the way he defines it, for example
proposing a “dissident/collaborator” juxtaposition (Bleiker 2009, 116),
using the term “conventional dissidents” in contrast to the “linguistic
dissent” of the Prenzlauer Berg group. He also writes that “dissent has
too often been understood only in romantic terms, as heroic rebellions
against authority, exemplified by demonstrating masses, striking workers
and brick-throwing students. Dissent, however, is a far more daily and
far more intricate phenomenon” (Bleiker 2009, 118). This approach
carries the risk of overstretching the concepts of “dissent” and a “dis-
sident” leads almost to the point where any activity which is not fully
in line with the will of the regime becomes dissident. As such, it comes
close to the historical revisionism of some Central European historians,
trying to prove the thesis that Communist states saw mass dissent and
practically everyone was “against” the system, and so practically everyone
was an oppositionist. “You stole a brick, you were a dissident”—jokingly
28  K. SZULECKI

remarked Havel in the 1990s. The political goal of this sort of writing is
to diminish the role of the actual “dissidents,” that is, opposition activ-
ists, and we will return to this in the conclusion.

The Vocabulary of Resistance: Dissent, Dissidence,

and Dissidentism?

Dissent
That arguable overstretching of the meaning of the word “dissident”
requires another conceptual discussion, this time, defining three words
sharing the same semantic stem, and nearly synonymous, but neverthe-
less distinct. For the sake of clarity, in this section, I delineate three simi-
lar concepts which occur throughout the book, from the most general to
the most specific.
Dissent, by far the broadest category, is about saying “no,” as Ben
Dorfman, the editor of a recent volume dedicated to dissent, put it. In
his view, it is “a moment; an act” (Dorfman 2016b, 11). Barbara Falk
traces the Latin root of the word, which interestingly is not the same as
that of the dissident, in dissentere, to differ in sentiment. For her, dissent
implies “both the possibility and the opportunity to engage with and crit-
icize the status quo – literally, to ‘speak truth to power’” (Falk 2016, 24).
However, speaking truth to power is much more than saying no to power,
and Falk does not reflect on that. Her definition implies that dissenters are
in the right, while “the powers that be” are necessarily in the wrong. Such
a static attachment to truth has been characteristic for much of Central
European opposition under Communism and functioned well in the
black-and-white world of authoritarianism, state monopoly on informa-
tion, and censorship. It does, however, make dissent beyond authoritarian
contexts more problematic (Szulecki 2018). What it underlines though is
that labeling a political act “dissent” and the actor “dissenter” or “dissi-
dent” is morally charged and a sign of approval (Falk 2016, 30).
Although Falk suggests that dissent is a category narrower than resist-
ance, and that is because dissent has to be purposeful and in some way
public, there “is no clear-cut line” between them. It is therefore no
surprise that she is able to categorize a variety of political practices in
many geographical and historical contexts as part of the broad idea of
dissent, suggesting that, like the dissident category, it has religious roots
 2  WHO ARE THE DISSIDENTS?  29

traceable back to the emergence of toleration (Falk 2016, 25–26). Those

different occurrences of people saying “no” are, in her view, not unre-
lated, but can be seen as links in a long chain, an evolution, a “long durée
history of dissent” (Falk 2016, 31). The broad sweeps of her conceptu-
alization leave little space for political conflict that could not be classified
as dissent in one way or another. Simply put, it does not seem to matter
for the naysayers to what kind of regime they object: “dissidents and dis-
senters are concerned amateurs that take risks beyond the daily ebb and
flow of life, regardless of the type of government they support, oppose,
or wish to change” (Falk 2016, 44).
This all-encompassing idea of dissent does not tell us what is unique
about it, but it does help social movement studies build bridges
between regions and historical eras to argue that in fact all dissent is
one (Jørgensen 2015). Falk does not even have a problem incorporat-
ing judicial dissent in her story alongside the core, which is contentious
politics. The reason for this is simple: The word dissent can take it all. A
major problem here is that its English meaning is almost impossible to
directly translate into other languages. As such, the entire literature on
dissent from the point of view of a non-native English speaker creates
an artificial wedge driven somewhere between resistance and protest, a
catch-all term which potentially describes most contentious politics and
acts of disagreement. As Ralph Young’s book title aptly notices, this is
An American Idea (Young 2015), though surely saying no to authoritar-
ian power is not (Collins and Skover 2013).
This confusion appears to be completely unnoticed from within.
Furthermore, imprecise translations help the proponents of dissent col-
onize areas which were hitherto untouched by its uniformizing steam-
roller. Most importantly for East European dissidents, Paul Wilson’s
canonical translation of Havel’s essay Power of the Powerless begins
with the paraphrase of The Communist Manifesto: “A specter is haunt-
ing Eastern Europe: the specter of what in the West is called ‘dissent.’”
In the original, Havel uses the word disidentství, which is an extremely
clunky neologism best translated as “dissidentism,” following Agnieszka
Holland’s Polish translation from 1978—dysydentyzm. This first sentence
already tunes the reader to Havel’s ironic distance to the dissident figure,
a distance completely absent in the English version. Interestingly, the
2018 edition of Havel’s essay is preceded by many of Wilson’s linguistic
comments on his original translation in hindsight but does not take note
of this quite important intervention.
30  K. SZULECKI

Bolton (2012) on the other hand refers to dissent in a contingent

manner, nesting it as a particular set of practices, a philosophy, and a
mind-set which emerged within a particular milieu at a specific point in
time.7 Finally, other authors use dissent interchangeably with dissidence
to describe a form of politics specific to the Eastern Bloc opposition
(Brier 2013; Joppke 1995).
When dissent is used in the remainder of this book, and it is used
quite often because in the Central European context it is the preferred
generic term for what oppositionists did, it is understood as the “public
and deliberate manifestation of political disagreement” (Brier 2013, 17).
The public nature of dissent is key, and as Falk notes elsewhere, what
makes resistance (the still broad set of all conscious or unintentional
practices of defiance) political is precisely that it is public. But there is a
caveat here. For public manifestations to make something political, the
very border between public and non-public has to be politicized. Only in
contexts where freedom of expression is challenged can public resistance
automatically become political. Furthermore, what distinguishes dissent
from protest, which is also a public and deliberate manifestation of polit-
ical disagreement, is that dissent is a kind of political action which is per-
formed in the name of common good, or some broader, universalizing
framework. This picks up where Falk stopped—if dissent is something
unique, it is because dissenters aspire to being right, not just to being
against.

Dissidence
This book tells the history of dissidence in Central Europe and uses that
history as the basis for analyzing the transnational dimension of dissi-
dence, which is dissidentism. Dissidence refers to “a new form of politics
that began to emerge in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the
late 1960s” (Brier 2013, 11). Following Havel, Robert Brier suggests
that it began with individual acts of defiance. But defiance is politically
meaningless, as is public demonstration of disagreement, if there are no
constraints on it and no pushback from the structures of power. In other
words, defiance becomes a dissident act when there is a sanction.
To understand how difficult societal change under Communism was,
let us for a moment imagine that we are civil society activists in the east-
ern part of Europe of the 2010s, and we want to take on corruption
among political elites, like Romanians did in 2018. It is not an easy
 2  WHO ARE THE DISSIDENTS?  31

task—organizing street demonstrations, gathering information, spread-

ing the word, writing up texts, drawing banners, monitoring legisla-
tion, making sure the media publish our message, and watching out for
more or less direct political pressures to let it go. Now let us imagine
that we want to do the same thing, but taking to the streets is likely to
result with the demonstrators severely beaten up and locked up for at
least forty-eight hours, and possibly fired once they return from jail. That
attempts at gathering information quickly end up with an unmarked car
following you around, and the file where you kept the gathered data dis-
appearing from your locker, which is followed by a visit from two frown-
ing gentlemen asking if your child at the kindergarten should really grow
up as a half-orphan. That spreading the word requires watching out for
people who might very quickly report you to the police, eager to charge
you with a criminal offense—related, or not, to your actual activity. That
contacting foreign media is equated with espionage and state treason
and punished accordingly. This gets more and more difficult, narrowing
down the circle of potential corruption fighters. And let us not forget
that Communism was not only about corruption. The bottom line, how-
ever, is that sanction and repression turn dissent into dissidence.
Repression against dissidence is disproportionate to the threat that it
poses (Brier 2013, 16), but that was the logical consequence of a system
which could not tolerate any open defiance. Though “polite and mod-
erate in tone,” unlike rebellion or armed resistance, anti-utopian and
initially limited to a narrow elite, dissidence “contains the seeds of rev-
olutionary transformation – the regime cannot abide by the demand for
plurality and difference” unless it ceases to be what it is (Joppke 1995,
16–17). An important paradox of post-totalitarian Communism was that
it still actively sought for challengers and was eager to publicize dissident
activities to justify its own practices of stabilization—at the same time,
those very oppositionists were indeed contributing to the system’s grad-
ual derailing (Szulecki 2015, 112).
Repressions were not “an exceptional and unfortunate postponement
of dissident activity, an epiphenomenon or temporary abeyance” (Bolton
2012, 32). It was constitutive for dissidence not only in the deeply practi-
cal sense that Bolton analyzes—conditioning the ways in which dissidents
would live their lives and how they would practice their dissent—but also
symbolically, because repression gave dissidence its meaning and moral
power. Sanction turns dissent from a civic reflex into an act of civil cour-
age characterized by the Greek term parrhesia, meaning the conscious
32  K. SZULECKI

act of “speaking the truth to power” at the risk of grave consequences

(Foucault 2000).
The more drastic the gap between the actual “polite and moderate
tone” of an act of dissent and the brutality of repression, the greater the
appeal of dissidence. This means that by definition dissidence is based
on nonviolent methods, and that it values legality—or at least remains
cautious of pretexts for criminalization. Legal dissent in authoritar-
ian contexts is rarely possible, because dissent is banned—de jure or de
facto—and so the sanction is inevitable but useful as long as it can be
easily demonstrated that it violates some more fundamental feeling of
justice. According to Lyudmila Alexeyeva, dissidence “starts from the
very beginning,” grounded in a basic “social instinct.” Francis Fukuyama
in his famous essay on the end of history, epitomizing the triumphalist
narrative of the Cold War’s end, similarly suggested that East European
dissent was the result of a moral imperative to defend one’s thymos—a
Platonic mechanism describing humanity’s drive toward dignity through-
out history (Fukuyama 1992). Dignity is the “social instinct,” and the
ultimate benchmark in dissidence, that is why human rights emphasiz-
ing and building on individual dignity became its language. But for dis-
sidence to amplify the moral power resulting from the combination of
open, legal, nonviolent dissent met with disproportionate repression,
there is the need for an audience, a “world stage” where dissidence can
be staged. If dissent is indeed an act—and usually a speech act—then
understanding the role of the audience is vital for grasping the political
dynamics of East European dissidence.

Dissidentism
If the former two terms needed definitions only for the sake of clarity
and perhaps a dose of academic pedantry, dissidentism is a conceptual
innovation which requires justification. Building on Havel’s observation
in the Power of the Powerless, I propose that we take his idea of disident-
ství seriously and move it from the realm of action to that of analysis.
What Havel finds itchy in that “spectre haunting Eastern Europe” is not
the actual practice of dissidence—which he usually refers to as “oppo-
sition” in the essay—but the peculiar dynamics that occur on the tan-
gent point between those practices in the East and their representations
and interpretations in the West. He particularly picks out the “dissident”
as a peculiar figure, which this book will trace and analyze. Dissidentism
 2  WHO ARE THE DISSIDENTS?  33

then is dissidence which encounters the “dissident” figure—dissidence

in a transnational context and under Western gaze. A “court of world
opinion” outside the domestic box is necessary for the moral superiority
of dissidence over the authoritarian regime to be fully spread out. Adam
Michnik argued that international attention turned individual defiance
into political activism (Brier 2013, 29). Havel—an artist and a thinker
with a sense for existing and emerging social phenomena and the capa-
bility of giving them a name—noticed the artificiality of the “dissident”
category: “the term ‘dissident’ was … chosen by Western journalists and
is now generally accepted as the label for a phenomenon peculiar to the
post-totalitarian system” (Havel 1985, 57). He tried to reconstruct the
meaning of the term based on its usage, pointing, among other things,
to transnational recognition. When “the West shines its spotlight … on
a few isolated examples of protests and elevates them with the exalted
names ‘dissident’ and ‘dissent’,” it is, according to Bolton, in dialogue
with Havel, “an example of Western journalists invoking a phenome-
non that does not really exist, and thereby summoning it into existence”
(Bolton 2018, 260).
Interestingly though, Western journalists never cease to shine their
spotlight on the darkness of the outside world. In November 2018, the
title of an op-ed in The Guardian suggested that “A new wave of dis-
sidents in the east can turn back Europe’s populist tide” (Nougayrède
2018). The “dissidents” were in fact various kinds of protesters taking
to the streets from Poland to Romania, on a variety of issues. Eugeniusz
Smolar explained:

Journalists care for the clarity of their message, but also have to take
into account the space on the page that they have. The word ‘dissident’
was supposed to fix everything; they saw no problem in that. For us it
was a problem, because we wanted to cut our links with the Party, with
Marxism, with that whole tradition … but to get to the people in the West
in an abbreviated manner, we were not fighting against that.8

Jiří Gruntorád, leading the archive of Czechoslovak samizdat, Libri

Prohibiti, explained along similar lines:

My friend Martin Jirous [leader of the underground band The Plastic

People of the Universe] who has been a dissident par excellence since the
1970s, always says ‘I’m no dissident’ … so nobody is a dissident, but jour-
nalists that have to be brief coined this term.9
34  K. SZULECKI

The dissident figure functions as a heuristic, a mental shortcut which

allows packing maximum meaning in minimal word count. However,
words matter, and the dynamic nominalist outlook I adopt here sug-
gests, as did Bolton, that calling someone a “dissident” does not leave
the object unchanged. My goal is to establish dissidentism as an actual
analytical category (see Chapter 10), which requires a better theorization
of the figure of the dissident, as well as the looping effect of the dissident
label (Hacking 2002). But in order to do this, we need to first trace the
history of dissidence and the gradual emergence of the conditions under
which the dissident figure could be constructed.

Notes
1. This is suggested by Julia Metger who wrote her dissertation on the
Western German correspondents and the media coverage of the Soviet
activists’ trials (Metger 2016).
2. By “primary sources,” I mean samizdat and tamizdat articles, reflecting
on the term “dissident” and describing the opposition activities in Eastern
Europe as well as Western media articles and interviews. “Secondary
sources” refer to scholarship touching upon the topic of Eastern European
opposition.
3. Interview with E. Smolar, Warsaw, 30 March 2010.
4. Telephone interview with W. Templin, Berlin/Oslo, 27 February 2019.
5. Interview with M. Chojecki, Warsaw, 4 August 2010.
6. S. Blumsztajn at a meeting promoting A. Friszke’s book Anatomia buntu,
24 March 2010, Warsaw.
7. The Czech language has adopted disent directly from English, though
Havel does not use the word in his essay yet. In any case, disent is not
a translation of dissent, but rather Czech for dissidence. It appears that
Bolton is rather bringing disent back to English with the meaning of what
I call dissidence, rather than tapping into the “dissent studies” use. He also
picked up on the mis-translation of disidentství as well as the (ab)use of
quotation marks in Havel’s essay, seeing it too as a sign of ironic distancing
and “sheepishness in using the term” (Bolton 2018, 261).
8. Interview with E. Smolar, Warsaw, 30 March 2010.
9. Interview with J. Gruntorád, Prague, 11 May 2010.
 2  WHO ARE THE DISSIDENTS?  35

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