They Chose Freedom (Russian: Они выбирали свободу, romanized: Oni vybirali svobodu) is a four-part TV documentary on the history of political dissent in the USSR from the 1950s to the 1990s.

[1] The documentary tells the story of the Soviet dissident movement from its emergence in the late 1950s with the weekly public Mayakovsky Square poetry readings in Moscow.

The final episode is dedicated to the period after 1991; in it former dissidents discuss why the emergence of democracy in Russia proved to be short-lived, and how it was possible that a former KGB officer, Vladimir Putin, was elected to the Russian presidency.

The film's participants are Vladimir Bukovsky, Elena Bonner, Sergei Kovalev, Alexander Yessenin-Volpin, Anatoly Sharansky, Yuri Fyodorovich Orlov, Alexander Podrabinek, Eduard Kuznetsov, Pavel Litvinov, Naum Korzhavin, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Viktor Fainberg and Vladimir Dremlyuga.

According to director Vladimir Kara-Murza, the principal goal of his documentary was to show that even a small group of citizens that is prepared to defend dignity and freedom is eventually able to prevail over a totalitarian dictatorship.