The true, disarming strength

Thucydides said: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” The Greek historian has returned to the spotlight in 2026; Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney quoted him in the form just read out on 20 January at the Davos Forum. A few months later, in May, Chinese President Xi Jinping quoted him; speaking in the presence of his American counterpart, Donald Trump, he referred to the so-called ‘Thucydides’ trap’ and warned against the destructive use of force, which is highly likely to occur where dominant powers fail to reach an understanding with emerging powers.

Nothing new: those in power have always had this habit of viewing the world solely through the prism of the power over which they believe themselves to be absolute arbiters; it seems that even Stalin, at Yalta, asked how many divisions the Pope had.

Everything would therefore seem to be determined by force; were it not for the fact that Mark Carney, in the very speech from which we began, also cited – as an alternative model to this power of force – an essay entitled "Il potere dei senza potere" by the Czech dissident Václav Havel, who later became the first president of a free Czechoslovakia.

It should not be overlooked that Havel, leader of the Czechoslovak dissident movement and a frequent visitor to Prague’s prisons, after these troubled early years as a social outcast, became president without a hitch, so much so that people spoke at the time of a ‘Velvet Revolution’. And then, as president of a united Czechoslovakia – despite being opposed to the country’s division – he managed to witness, once again without a hitch, the birth of the Czech Republic and Slovakia: a ‘velvet’ divorce, once more.

Without wishing to repeat the quip attributed to Pius XII, who, upon the death of the Soviet dictator, is said to have remarked to a close friend: “Now Stalin will see how many divisions we have up there!”, one cannot help but be struck by this contradiction between one world, in which the very renunciation of power and the use of force has produced peaceful and tangible results, and another world, in which force claims to be omnipotent and then, instead of bringing about peace within twenty-four hours, not only fails to mitigate existing wars, but actually intensifies them, leaving states that it claimed it could raze to the ground capable of bringing the global economy to a standstill.

And it is all the more striking, then, that, at least initially, even the dissolution of the Soviet Union took place, once again without a shot being fired, in a country that had been scarred by a revolution, a civil war and then the gulag, and which had ultimately found itself with an opposition movement – what would hastily be termed ‘dissidence’ – which had not led to violent confrontation (as had happened in many cases in the democratic West, involving the Red Brigades, the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei, ETA, the IRA, the Red Army Faction, Action Directe, etc.), but had instead made an explicit and programmatic choice to reject it.

This, in fact, had been from the outset the defining characteristic of the Programme of the democratic movement of the Soviet Union, in which, as early as 1970 – but at the culmination of a long period of preparation – the choice of non-violence had been laid down unequivocally, a choice dictated not by chance or tactical considerations but by reasons of principle; ‘Violence begets violence’, Solzhenitsyn would later point out, highlighting instead the defining characteristic of the Soviet system: ‘The infamy of the methods is perpetuated and multiplied in the infamy of the results. The infamous result is the lie. We must refuse to participate personally in the lie’.

Whilst emphasising a clear break with the old party logic, which called for the sacrifice of personal freedom in the name of ‘the cause’, Solzhenitsyn also went to the very heart of the movement that was taking shape in those years: the choice was not dictated solely by the pressure of circumstances and by the fact that a seemingly omnipotent regime, accustomed to the use of boundless violence, would not hesitate for a moment to crush any armed uprising in a bloodbath; rather, it was a clear and explicit choice for truth over ideological falsehood, which Solzhenitsyn himself regarded as the very core of the totalitarian system. ‘The imagination and spiritual powers of Shakespeare’s villains were limited to a dozen or so corpses: because they lacked ideology’, he would have said in his seminal work on the Gulag Archipelago, denouncing the murderous logic typical of the system with its ceaseless production of enemies to be eliminated: from Lenin’s ‘objective enemies’ to Stalin’s ‘enemies of the people’, to today’s ‘foreign agents’. ‘What would you do without “enemies”? Without ‘enemies’ you could not even go on living, because hatred has become your sterile atmosphere. But in this way the sense of humanity—one and indivisible—is lost, and its ruin is hastened”, Solzhenitsyn had also written on 12 November 1969, in a letter to the Secretariat of the Writers’ Union, which had just expelled him.

This stance, however, was not his alone, nor was it merely the expression of a movement that had by then fully matured and was characterised by a wholly distinctive, pacifist and explicitly religious outlook: it was the manifestation of a shared consciousness, which had developed over time and which united the Christian Solzhenitsyn with the secular Sakharov, the future Nobel Peace Prize laureate, but who had previously been the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb. Paradoxically, it was the physicist Sakharov himself who, in a pamphlet written in early 1968 and immediately circulated clandestinely, warned that the arms race could lead to nuclear catastrophe; in his essay, entitled "Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom", Sakharov argued that change in Soviet society and in the world could not be achieved through violence, but only through dialogue, reason and in a climate characterised by what at the time probably seemed a word of little significance or revolutionary import: glasnost – transparency, sincerity, openness, and the overcoming of censorship.

We now know that this phrase later became one of the slogans that guided Gorbachev in the non-violent transition towards something that, in 1968, seemed an impossible dream: the democratisation of the Soviet Union. In fact, at the time it really was an unattainable dream: just a few months later, in August 1968, the USSR would put an end to the Prague Spring’s dream of socialism with a human face; and so, probably, no one paid particular attention to that very word which, at least in part, would later help to change the world, but which at the time remained, understandably, unnoticed, underestimated, forgotten and, in Prague, even trampled underfoot.

Yet not only was that word present in Sakharov’s document, but it had in fact already been used three years earlier, on 5 December 1965, to describe the first free protest rally organised in Russia since the late 1920s, the so-called ‘Glasnost Meeting’, the ‘Meeting of Glasnost’.

That day was not like any other: 5 December was the anniversary of the Constitution of the USSR and had been specifically chosen to speak out in defence of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel’, two writers who, a few months earlier, had been arrested and accused of having literary works deemed anti-Soviet published abroad under a pseudonym; the choice of that date had therefore been made to assert the need for the Soviet state to respect its own laws, thereby reaffirming the centrality of law and justice over the use of violence: all that was required (so to speak, because under those circumstances it was no small matter) was to appear before a court and demand respect for the Constitution and transparency regarding what was happening at the trial: one of the slogans seen on the posters prepared for the occasion read precisely: ‘We demand glasnost on the Sinjavskij-Daniel’ case’.

Where a power devoid of any democratic accountability reigned, information was discovered as a weapon of genuine legitimacy, through the clandestine creation and dissemination of exposés, essays and documents intended to tear away the veil of censorship, using transparency to force those in power to put an end to their abuses. This was what was emerging as samizdat, the clandestine self-publishing movement of the Soviet Union; devised to enable the free publication of material in a country where nothing could be published without state authorisation, samizdat was instead becoming a normal practice of civil society, so much so that just a few years later, in October 1968, the ‘Chronicle of Current Events’ was launched, a typewritten bulletin which, for several years, would inform the world of civil rights violations in the Soviet Union, without commentary, but merely recording the facts objectively and thus marking a decisive turning point in the system’s exercise of power: from that moment on, no violation of the law could hope to go unnoticed, which was enough to trigger a relentless hunt for the authors of the ‘Chronicle’ and their collaborators (informants and readers), as indeed happened, albeit without great success, because publication of the bulletin was only definitively halted fourteen years later, at the end of 1982.

Moreover, a persecution no less severe and protracted had already begun to afflict Aleksandr Esenin-Vol’pin, the organiser of the 1965 event who, at the time, was still known solely as a mathematician. The son of the poet Esenin – who had taken his own life in 1930 after falling out of favour with the regime – he had already been persecuted as a madman, and would be subjected to such treatment repeatedly once more, as part of the repressive use of psychiatry; yet he was neither a madman (today there is a mathematical theorem named after him), nor a poetic dreamer espousing a purely theoretical position of principle; rather, his initiative represented a precise course of action that rejected the use of subversive acts and ushered in an era of non-violent struggle, seemingly destined for inevitable defeat, but which would ultimately prove, like samizdat, to be incredibly effective and ‘contagious’.

Immediately following the launch of "La Cronaca", in fact, alongside the proliferation of underground publications, another demonstration took place alongside the one held three years earlier and others that had taken place in the meantime: on 25 August 1968, eight ‘desperate’ individuals went to Red Square to protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia that had taken place four days earlier; for a few moments they managed to display a few placards, one of which read: ‘For your freedom and ours’. But just as in December three years earlier, it was, apparently, truly a cause for the desperate: they changed nothing; on the contrary, they paid for their act with prison sentences of varying lengths and the end of their careers. From a purely immediate and external point of view, it was a futile gesture, crowned with failure, as initially seemed to be the case for all previous actions and for those of many years to come. Moreover, this was the atmosphere of those years: amongst the dissidents, one of the most common toasts was ‘to the success of our hopeless cause’; and this, according to Sakharov, was their task: ‘to propose an ideal in an utterly desperate situation’.

What followed was a surprising demonstration of what the power of the powerless can mean when it is exercised in earnest: that feat by eight desperate men is still remembered today as an act that restored the honour and dignity of a nation of two hundred million people, so that those eight, as President Havel put it, became, ‘for the citizens of Czechoslovakia, the conscience of the Soviet Union’.

It was a philosophy based on certain firm principles: 1) the radical rejection of any ideological stance or movement; 2) absolute respect for the law; 3) the explicit and unconditional affirmation of non-violence; and 4) the emphasis on the primary role of personal responsibility, regardless of any immediate benefit or success, but as the defining characteristic of a free and unyielding person.

That was how it had been, even before Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and Esenin-Vol’pin, because this whole story had begun much earlier, for example when, after the 1957 World Festival of Youth in Moscow, a few young people began to gather around the statue of Mayakovsky in the square of the same name; they simply wanted to read poems, by the classics and by some of their then-unknown comrades, who later became famous, such as the Nobel Prize-winning poet Brodsky. The Party turned a blind eye whilst the wave of enthusiasm generated by the festival and the unveiling of the statue lasted; once that was over, everyone was called to order, with meetings permitted only if organised by official bodies. The young people did not give up and, since they were unable to read their own work, from at least 1961 onwards they began to compile the first underground poetry magazines, inspired by a slogan that was powerful in its ability to encapsulate in just a few words what it meant for a free man to take responsibility for himself: ‘If not me, and now, then who and when?’

The usual repressive measures followed, until, in September 1965, the events involving the other two writers already mentioned – Sinjavskij and Daniel’ – unfolded, leading to the story we are now familiar with; yet this too had begun much earlier, in a chain of events that speaks volumes about the persistence and continual re-emergence, under different circumstances, of an identical desire for freedom.

This latest story actually began between 1950 and 1951, when a group of young people who had long remained unknown to everyone began meeting to read poetry; things did not go well for them either – in fact, they fared even worse: Stalin was still in power, and the affair ended with several 25-year sentences and three death sentences, which were carried out (!). Before I learnt of it from the archives compiled by Memorial (the organisation founded, amongst others, by Sakharov, to preserve the memory of the repressions in the Soviet Union and later in Russia, and now shut down by Putin), I had learnt of it from one of my students who had written his thesis on the subject and had met one of the young women from that time, Susanna Pecuro, who remained so full of life that, in her old age, she became a volunteer for Memorial. My student had asked her what had made her do it, knowing what they risked under Stalin; her reply had been ‘disarming’: ‘We were friends, we loved poetry – how could we not share what we loved?’

Many years later, we would have called them dissidents: a rather simplistic term – I used to say – so much so that they themselves used another, ‘differently thinking’, but even that does not really capture the idea: they did not merely think differently, they lived differently and, by living differently, as one of them, Andrej Amal’rik, put it, they had done the simplest thing: ‘in an unfree country, to behave like free people’.

And so a large part of that world had changed, without violence, through some other force.

Following the peaceful demonstrations, with thousands of lit candles, which in early October 1989 culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall, Horst Sindermann, President of the People’s Chamber of the GDR, said shortly before his death on 20 April 1990: “We were driven out by the people, not by a counter-revolution… We were prepared for anything, but not for candles and prayers’, or for poetry.

What happened afterwards and is happening today is another story, but it still follows the same principle: the difficult and non-delegable exercise of that very freedom, as that ‘class dissident’, Aleksey Navalny, put it: ‘Without morally just but desperate actions, there can be no victorious actions’.