The writer Jeanette Winterson once described books as “agents of freedom,” and that image of a book’s power has come to provide some moments of reprieve in the last few weeks as Putin has sent his troops into Ukraine. If Putin’s tactics have resembled those of Hitler, using a Russian-speaking enclave of Ukraine as a pretext for a land grab, his playbook at home is classic Stalin, shutting down what little remains of Russia’s independent media, expunging words such as assault, invasion, or war from the nation’s lexicon, stifling dissent. For those of us who remember the Cold War, news this week that the BBC was circumnavigating digital censorship by re-establishing short wave radio frequency for Ukraine and Russia felt like a slip in time. But through darkest periods in Soviet and Russian history writers and artists have borne witness, from Osip Mandelstam and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to Pussy Riot. This war will get its own version of The Gulag Archipelago, its own Maus.
The great Czech dissident-turned-statesman Vaclav Havel underwood that dissidents had the role thrust on them whether they wanted it or not. “You do not become a ‘dissident’ just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career,’ he wrote in The Power of the Powerless. “You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.” Right now, as we sit here, wringing our hands, helpless, a generation of dissident writers is being formed, both in Ukraine and in Russia. Their work will outlive the architect of this disaster.
Below, a list of ten books by dissident and/or persecuted writers that have been chosen for One Grand Books by figures ranging from the journalist and writer Masha Gessen to the actor Rose McGowan and the human rights lawyer Ahilan Arulanantham.