The fate of the anti-Soviet dissidents.

The Colonel has long been fascinated by the terrible events in the Soviet Union. That society, which went utterly mad and devoured its best people by the millions, is endlessly fascinating, especially for the lessons it teaches us about unchecked political power. Those who stood up to the men who ruled the U.S.S.R. were courageous and their struggle helped to educate Westerners to the realities of communist totalitarianism.

As this source relates, however, the fate of these brave people was not one where they were heaped with honors, provided with restitution for their sacrifices, or given roles to play in the government of the new Russia:

"Was it the fault of the dissidents that they didn't come to power?" she [Cathy Fitzpatrick, executive director, International League for Human Rights] asks. "No. They were up against terrible odds. The Russians dug up mass graves, millions of them -- a million Rwandas -- and they just put them back. They never did anything with them . . . . [Other countries did more than post-Soviet Russia.] But even more, perhaps, than the structural differences . . . was a human factor. "The difference is these people were mangled by the camps," she says, the way dissidents in other countries were not. "Physically and psychologically, the Soviet Union mangled them.

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"[Unlike the experience of dissidents in the U.S., the Soviet Union] society created a different persona. [It created] a person who was willing to go to jail, to be interrogated, to get beaten up. There are people here who did time, 30 days, 60 days. But nothing like five years labor, seven years exile."

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And there's another very good reason for [former dissidents now in the U.S.] not going back . . . . As Volpin said, people in Russia get killed. They get killed for saying too much or saying it to the wrong people or thinking too much, or they get killed randomly, for no reason at all. One by one, many of the people who have spoken truth to power have been killed. . . . . The mutant post-Soviet regime has realized that . . . business can be more efficiently handled if people are simply killed in the streets . . . . In the past 10 years, the only countries where more journalists have been murdered are Colombia and Algeria, both immersed in protracted civil wars. . . .. The violence in Russia has permeated every layer of its society. . . . It murders its poets and its prophets and its entrepreneurs. And it has ever been so: Russia has always been one of the dark places of the earth.

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. . . It seems a tawdry fate, for those who are here, to grow old in a country [the U.S.] where nothing seems to matter, when their great achievement, in the Soviet Union, was to declare that the way you conducted your public life did matter.

Go here if you wish to contribute to a fund for former dissidents living in poverty: the Gratitude Fund.

"Exiles on Main Street: Soviet Dissidents in the U.S. of A." By Keith Gessen, Johnson's Russia List # 4102, 2/11/00 (emphasis added).