To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause (Pulitzer Prize Winner): The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement

Synopsis

WINNER OF THE 2025 PULITZER PRIZEA "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 BooksBeginning 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 unexpectedly 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.

Copyright:

2024

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

Book Size:

816 Pages

ISBN-13:

9780691255576

Related ISBNs:

9780691117034, 9780691255583

Publisher:

Princeton University Press

Date of Addition:

05/07/25

Copyrighted By:

Benjamin Nathans

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

History, Nonfiction, Social Studies, Politics and Government

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.