In the last decades before the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, courageous dissidents within the country worked tirelessly to expose the tyranny and weakness of the Soviet state. Their work, first published in underground texts known as samizdat and then often republished in the West, alerted fellow citizens and the rest of the world to the human rights abuses and economic failures of the communist regime. It is not an exaggeration to say that this work helped set the stage for the collapse of the regime.

Today these men and women are largely forgotten, both in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere. The Dissidents brings them and their work to life for contemporary readers.

Peter Reddaway spent decades studying the Soviet Union and came to know these dissidents and their work, publicizing their writings in the West and helping some of them to escape the Soviet Union and settle abroad. In this memoir he tells their stories and also captures the human costs of the repression that marked the Soviet state: the forced labor camps, the internal exile, the censorship, the use and abuse of psychiatry to label those who found fault with the Soviet system mentally ill.

Reddaway's book also places the work of the dissidents within the context of the secretive politics inside the Kremlin, where a tiny elite competed for power-even as the Soviet system was crumbling around them.