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Andrew Wood, The dissidents: a memoir of working with the resistance in Russia, 1960–1990, International Affairs, Volume 96, Issue 4, July 2020, Pages 1107–1109, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiaa123
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Peter Reddaway's recently published memoir is timely. One cannot read it without thinking of its implications for Russia today, and for our relationship with both Russia's present rulers and its peoples. Reddaway was quick to make Russian friends, even during his first trip to the USSR as a Cambridge undergraduate in 1960, let alone during his time at Moscow University from 1963 to 1964. He came then to understand that neither the Soviet system nor Marxist-Leninist doctrine had a long-term grip on the Soviet population, and might last no more than 30 more years.
Reddaway's preoccupation, over the years between his expulsion from the Soviet Union in April 1964 and his return 24 years later, was to study and interact with the changing mindset of educated Soviet citizens as the Brezhnev years went stagnantly by, then as Andropov reinvigorated discipline, and eventually when Gorbachev took over to look, in vain, for a way to revive and humanize the Leninist inheritance. Another way of putting it would be to say that Reddaway's memoir describes the evolution of the groundwork necessary for the development of an eventual civic society that, had it lasted in the Soviet Union, might have enabled that federation, or the succeeding parts of it now forming Russia, to have established secure nation-states whose governments were held answerable to their citizens.
