An extraordinary account of the Soviet dissident movement, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement 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.

Professor and author Benjamin Nathans joins us for a talk about his book, which won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction this year.

About the Book

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: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement is a definitive history of a remarkable group of people who helped change the twentieth century.

About the Speaker

Benjamin Nathans is the Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches and writes about Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, modern European Jewish history, and the history of human rights. Nathans' most recent book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton University Press, 2024), 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.”

Awards and Recognition

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in General NonfictionShortlisted for the Pushkin House Russian Book PrizeShortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize, Lionel Gelber FoundationFinalist for the Literary Award, Athenaeum of PhiladelphiaA Stevereads History Book of the Year
Followed by a book signing and sale courtesy of Buffalo Street Books.

Host

Institute for European Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

Co-sponsors

Society for the Humanities

Department of History

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During the Cold War, the Smolensk Archive held the only collection of Communist Party documents available to Western scholars, becoming the foundation for generations of scholarship on Soviet history. Crucibles of Power returns to the Smolensk Region with fresh eyes and fresh sources. Prizewinning historian Michael David-Fox traces the experiences of Smolensk residents between the interwar years and the end of World War II, a period during which the city and region passed from Stalinist rule to Nazi occupation and back. The result is a revelatory examination of choice and power under dueling forms of murderous totalitarianism.

Author Michael David-Fox joins us for a talk about his book. Followed by a book signing.

About the Book

Exploring the life-and-death decisions of a fascinating cast of characters—from young women in the Communist Youth League to a defense lawyer during Stalin’s Great Terror who became Smolensk’s collaborationist mayor during the German occupation—David-Fox shows how deeply the Stalinist and Nazi regimes relied on the cooptation of average citizens motivated by greed and need, but always within the orbit of ideology. Challenging today’s Russian nationalist narrative of heroic WWII resistance, he finds that large numbers of Russians aided the Nazi occupation of Smolensk in order to protect themselves, secure their own self-interest, or pursue vendettas against a Soviet state they found no less corrupt or oppressive than its German foe.

At a time when much of the world is tilting away from liberal democracy and toward authoritarianism, Crucibles of Power masterfully unravels the threads of dictatorial rule. Smolensk emerges as a laboratory for understanding the mechanics of both outright coercion and subtler forms of power, as well as the enabling behavior of ordinary citizens acquiescing to extraordinary crimes.

About the Speaker

Michael David-Fox is the author or editor of fifteen books, including Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union and Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941. He is Director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies and Professor of History at Georgetown University.

Host

Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

Co-sponsors

Department of History
Jewish Studies Program

Please RSVP on Eventbrite.

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