To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
by Benjamin Nathans
Summary
Beginning in the 1960s, an improbable network of Soviet citizens—lawyers, scientists, poets—demanded that the Kremlin obey its own laws, circulating banned samizdat texts and holding unauthorized public gatherings in a movement that survived repeated crackdowns. Nathans draws on diaries, memoirs, personal letters, and KGB interrogation records to reconstruct this resistance in granular human detail, showing how ordinary people chose, as one of them put it, 'to conduct themselves like free people' in an unfree country. The result is both an archival feat and an implicit meditation on the endurance of resistance.
Historical Context & Significance
Nathans, a University of Pennsylvania historian, spent over two decades on the research; the book's resonance with Putin-era Russia was widely noted, and the Pulitzer committee called it 'prodigiously researched.'