World Views | The Cold War playbook won’t help Alexey Navalny

Hal Brands, MDT/Bloomberg

Should the U.S. put the fate of dissidents at the core of its Russia policy? The question has become unavoidable. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government seems seton killing, slowly or quickly, jailed regime critic Alexey Navalny. U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has warned that there will be unspecified consequences if that occurs. That Navalny ended his hunger strike and his life isn’t in imminent danger — for now — doesn’t remove the underlying issue.
Today’s debate harkens back to the history of U.S. policy toward Soviet dissidents during the Cold War. The lesson is that support for the liberal opposition can be morally and strategically worthwhile, even though it surely won’t transform Putin’s regime any time soon.
The relevant Cold War history is often told as follows. During detente in the 1970s, U.S. officials unwisely tolerated the repression of Soviet dissidents in their quest for stability with Moscow. In the 1980’s, President Ronald Reagan reversed this craven orthodoxy by standing up for critics of the Soviet regime, thereby helping bring an evil empire crashing down from within.
Important pieces of this narrative are true, but the overall story is more complicated.
Here’s what is true. Reagan did make solidarity with dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov, then languishing in internal exile, a central pillar of his Cold War strategy. He publicly blasted the Soviets for jailing and harassing their domestic critics. He privately pressed Soviet leaders to release political prisoners and reform the Soviet legal system. He even met openly with Soviet dissidents on a trip to Moscow in 1988.
He did so because moral clarity was a tool of political warfare. Highlighting the political and ethical bankruptcy of the Soviets was a way of pressuring that regime domestically and isolating it diplomatically. Reagan also believed, correctly, that political reform would eventually make the Soviet Union a less authoritarian and less threatening enemy.
In the end, the policy worked brilliantly. Soviet dissidents were inspired by what they called “Reaganite readings” — speeches in which Reagan castigated Moscow for its sins. (The president even announced “Andrei Sakharov Day” from the White House Rose Garden in 1983.) Kremlin leaders admitted, privately, that Reagan’s “especially strong anti-Soviet agitation” was energizing domestic critics and delegitimizing the Soviet Union abroad.
In the late 1980s, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev realized that the regime could not repair its relations with the West until it changed its approach to political liberties and human rights. Support for dissidents was part of an ideological offensive that brought excruciating strain on a totalitarian state.
Yet this isn’t the whole story. For one thing, Reagan wasn’t the first U.S. leader to focus on Soviet repression. Congressional human-rights advocates such as Democratic Senator Henry Jackson had started doing so in the 1970s, and President Jimmy Carter had infuriated Soviet leaders by pressing them, face to face, on the well-being of particular dissidents.
America’s European allies had also begun focusing attention on Eastern Bloc human-rights violations during the 1970s, through the Helsinki Accords, and often helped the Reagan administration push multilaterally on this issue during the 1980s.
More important, none of that advocacy — by Carter, Reagan or the Europeans — meaningfully improved political conditions in the Soviet Union through the mid-1980s.
Soviet leaders, like most authoritarians, knew that relaxing repression of dissidents was a dangerous game, because it could set off growing resistance to an unpopular government. They felt so threatened by Carter’s and Reagan’s ideological warfare that they responded by squeezing dissent and dissenters even harder.
“The leadership is convinced that the Reagan administration is out to bring their system down and will give no quarter,” one Soviet commentator explained in 1983. “Therefore they have no choice but to hunker down and fight back.”
What changed in the late 1980s? The Politburo chose a leader, Gorbachev, who actually cared about international legitimacy — in part because Reagan had so successfully denied it to the Kremlin — and who was willing to gamble that a bit more political freedom would rejuvenate a dying system. (He lost that bet, spectacularly.)
[Abridged]