A Nation Must Think Before it Acts
To The Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
A nation must think before it acts.
To The Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
September 10, 2024 | 3:00 pm to 4:00 pm
About the Event
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 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.
In September's People, Politics, and Prose, host Ron Granieri welcomes Benjamin Nathans to discuss his book, To The Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
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If you have any questions or concerns, please contact our events coordinator, Christine Datesman at cdatesman@fpri.org
Speakers
Benjamin Nathans - Benjamin Nathans is the author and editor of five books, including not only To the Success of our Hopeless Cause and 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). 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.
Ronald J. Granieri - Dr. Ronald J. Granieri is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI). He also hosts People, Politics, and Prose, a monthly event series at FPRI.
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