When Stalin lived, his government paid little attention to the nation’s guarantees of constitutional rights and used terror, imprisonment, and torture to curb dissent. When Stalin died in 1953, the regime was less inclined to kill its opponents. In this deeply researched history, Nathans, author of Beyond the Pale, introduces bohemian intellectual Alexander Volpin, son of the poet Sergei Esenin, who, inspired by Rosa Parks and other civil rights activists, “sought to apply modal logic to two humanistic fields he considered most susceptible to ‘exact methods’: jurisprudence and ethics.” In doing so, he demanded that Soviet officials obey the constitution and not Communist Party dictates. He was also an exasperating opponent: When one interrogator grilled him in the early 1960s about a supposedly secret organization—secret because it was unknown to the KGB—Volpin replied that he had not been aware of the KGB officer’s existence, either, “but that has not led me to conclude that you exist secretly.” Other dissidents resisted the Soviet regime on legalistic grounds. Some were committed Leninists; many, such as Brodsky and Solzhenitsyn, argued for freedom of conscience and expression. While the dissidents never coalesced into a movement, many published samizdat literature, books and manifestos painstakingly typed out and circulated secretly, including practical manuals on how to hold up to police interrogation. (One brave dissident, Sergei Kovalev, replied to each of his interrogator’s dozens of questions, “I refuse to answer.”) Nathans closes his authoritative study by suggesting that the post-Stalin Soviet Union was a paradise of free expression compared to Putin’s present-day “feral state, where political opponents and those branded as traitors are as likely to be poisoned or assassinated as tried in a court of law.”