In its meticulous commitment to holding the Soviet Union accountable to its own laws and international treaties, A Chronicle of Current Events represented also a rebirth of civil society. It was a small community, and one that existed entirely on the onion-skin-thin pages of samizdat, the illegal, self-published writing of the dissidents, but this was where they could act as citizens, witnessing and reporting on violations of human and civil rights.

The Chronicle worked in a straightforward way. Issues were produced in Moscow and then passed from hand-to-hand. If someone had some piece of information to circulate, she could write it down on a slip of paper and pass it on to the person from whom she received her copy of the journal, who in turn would then keep it going along the chain. At the source were editors like Natalya Gorbanevskaya, the journal’s first “compiler,” as they preferred to call themselves. Eventually arrested by the state security agency, the K.G.B., in 1969, she was locked up in a psychiatric institution until 1972.

Over some 65 issues, from 1968 to 1983, the Chronicle became a catalog of abuses, noted in the most sparse, neutral tone possible. It was a painstaking effort to publish information that could never be obtained through the official Soviet media. Here, a citizen could read the details of closed political trials and the stories of what the Chronicle called “extrajudicial persecution,” understand what a K.G.B. search entailed, read secret documents meant only for those in power, learn about the constant religious and cultural persecution and get updates on political prisoners in the East.

This was self-consciously an attempt to create a valid and verifiable news source. The Chronicle demanded that its contributors be “careful and accurate” with any information they passed along and even ran regular corrections to previous items (pioneering a practice some Western media organizations only adopted years later). As the scholar of Soviet dissidence Peter Reddaway, writing in 1972, put it, “the Chronicle’s aim is openness, non-secretiveness, freedom of information and expression. All these notions are subsumed in the one Russian word, glasnost.”

This was in direct opposition to the diktat the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin had issued for newspapers, back in pre-revolutionary Russia in 1901. The press was to be “not only a collective propagandist and collective agitator, but also a collective organizer” — a tool, in other words, for shoring up the power of the state. For the compiler Alexeyeva, the Chronicle represented something very different and without precedent in the Soviet Union: “A source of honest information about the hidden layers of our society.”

The K.G.B. did not take kindly to this business, and Gorbanevskaya was only the first of many editors to be arrested and imprisoned. By the 1970s, though, this fact-based evidence-gathering had become the central modus operandi of the dissidents, especially among its most prominent figures like Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet physicist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. These were men and women who, in some cases, were professionally inclined toward facts — many of them were scientists, a vocation they adopted, even before they embraced dissidence, out of a conscious effort to move away from any field that could be distorted by Communist ideology.

In 1975, the Soviet Union, thinking it was outsmarting the West, signed on to the Helsinki Final Act. The pact offered international recognition of its territorial gains following World War II, but it also demanded adherence to international human rights norms. Moscow dissidents saw this as an opportunity: They could use this commitment against the apparatchiks, by claiming the right to publish every violation.