To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: Benjamin Nathans on the Soviet Dissident Movement

Historian Benjamin Nathans will join us at the Wende Museum to discuss his forthcoming book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement. Nathans’s vivid narrative brings to life the stories of renowned figures like Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, as well as lesser-known defenders of civil and human rights. Drawing from a wealth of diaries, personal letters, and transcripts of KGB interrogations, his extraordinary account reveals how dissidents used Soviet law to challenge state power, a strategy that remains relevant in the face of contemporary struggles in Putin’s Russia and beyond.

About the Author:
Benjamin Nathans is the author and editor of five books, among them Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (which was awarded the Koret Jewish Book Award, the Vucinich Book Prize, and the Lincoln Book Prize, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in History) as well as the forthcoming To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (release date: August 13, 2024). A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, Nathans is the Alan Charles Kors Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches courses on Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, modern European Jewish history, and the history of human rights.