To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause (Pulitzer Prize Winner) by Benjamin Nathans

To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause (Pulitzer Prize Winner) by Benjamin Nathans

WINNER OF THE 2025 PULITZER PRIZE

Winner of the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize • Shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize

A "riveting history" (Wall Street Journal) of the Soviet dissident movement, which hastened the end of the USSR and still provides a model of opposition in Putin’s Russia—and beyond

“A book about a past time that is very much a book for our time. . . . A story from which we all stand to learn as we face a new wave of authoritarianism.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was unexpectedly confronted by a dissident movement that captured the world’s imagination. Demanding that the Kremlin obey its own laws, an improbable band of Soviet citizens held unauthorized public gatherings, petitioned in support of arrested intellectuals, and circulated banned samizdat texts. Soviet authorities arrested dissidents, subjected them to bogus trials and vicious press campaigns, sentenced them to psychiatric hospitals and labor camps, sent them into exile—and transformed them into martyred heroes. Against all odds, the dissident movement undermined the Soviet system and hastened its collapse. Taking its title from a toast made at dissident gatherings, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause is a definitive history of a remarkable group of people who helped change the twentieth century.

Benjamin Nathans’s vivid narrative tells the dramatic story of the men and women who became dissidents—from Nobel laureates Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn to many others who are virtually unknown today. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, personal letters, interviews, and KGB interrogation records, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause reveals how dissidents decided to use Soviet law to contain the power of the Soviet state. This strategy, as one of them put it, was “simple to the point of genius: in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.”

An extraordinary account of the Soviet dissident movement, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause shows how dissidents spearheaded the struggle to break free of the USSR’s totalitarian past, a struggle that continues in Putin’s Russia—and that illuminates other struggles between hopelessness and perseverance today.

"Comprehensive and analytical, Benjamin Nathan’s To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause vivifies the Soviet intellectuals at the complex heart of the human-rights-oriented dissidence movement in the USSR. . . A meticulous history of a principled movement, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause addresses efforts to protect human rights within the context of the Soviet Union." * Foreword Reviews *
"Authoritative. . . . An essential addition to the cultural history of the late Soviet era." * Kirkus, starred review *

Benjamin Nathans won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction for To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton). He is also the author of Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia, which was won 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. A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement, Nathans is the Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780691117034
Title	To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
Author	Benjamin Nathans
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Princeton University Press
Year published	2024-08-13
Number of pages	816
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.