87 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 R. M. Cucciolla (ed.), Dimensions and Challenges of Russian Liberalism, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05784-8_5 Chapter 5 Human Rights Defenders Within Soviet Politics Benjamin Nathans Abstract In the wake of recent debates about “Soviet subjectivity”, the dissidents known as “rights defenders” (pravozashchitniki) would appear to be among the few remaining candidates for the role of liberals in Soviet history. Their version of lib- eralism, however, can be understood only when situated in the specifcities of the late Soviet setting. Rather than regarding liberal ideas as an import product, this chapter suggests that rights defenders developed an indigenous version of liberalism that creatively deployed Soviet constitutional norms – themselves a reworking of Western rights discourse – while remaining wholly detached from such traditional liberal values as private property and market relations. In the relentlessly politicized circumstances of Soviet life, the dissidents’ most radically liberal gesture was to insist on the non-political nature of their work. Keywords Human rights · Liberalism · Soviet · Dissidents · Constitution About a decade and a half ago, a fruitful debate erupted over what the historian Anna Krylova called “the tenacious liberal subject” in the feld of Soviet history. 1 The main point of contention was whether the alleged tenacity was to be found among Soviet citizens or rather among Western historians who portrayed those 1 For some key moments in the debate, see Jochen Hellbeck and Igal Halfn, “Rethinking the Stalinist Subject: Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain and the State of Soviet Historical Studies”, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 44, no. 3, 1996, pp. 456–463; Anna Krylova, “The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies”, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 1, 2000, pp. 119–146; Eric Naiman, “On Soviet Subjects and the Scholars Who Make Them”, Russian Review 60, no. 3, July 2001, pp.: 307–315; Alexander Etkind, “Soviet Subjectivity: Torture for the Sake of Salvation?”, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 1, 2005, pp. 171–186; Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Andrew Zimmerman, “Foucault in Berkeley and Magnitogorsk: Totalitarianism and the Limits of Liberal Critique”, Contemporary European History 23, May 2014, pp. 225–236. B. Nathans (*) University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA e-mail: bnathans@history.upenn.edu