Description
ISBN: 9780691255583
Format: Trade paperback (US)
Year: 2026
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Description:
**Winner, Pulitzer Prize 2025**
**Winner, Pushkin House Russian Book Prize 2025**
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 unauthorised 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 labour 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, in