To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause

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**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, 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.

'[A] thoughtful, superbly researched and gracefully written study of the Russian dissident movement...When we Americans are ready for our own glasnost, Mr. Nathans's riveting history of those who returned to authenticity may inspire us to do the same.' Gary Saul Morson, Wall Street Journal

'In a society that had been stultified for decades by fear, [Soviet dissidents] somehow found the strength not to be afraid. To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause gives them their considerable due...An ambitious, elegant, and readable book about intrepid people and their persecutors...Engaging and entertaining.' Robert G.Kaiser, New York Review of Books

Book details and technical specifications

Format: Paperback / softback
ISBN13: 9780691255583
Published: September 2025

Number of pages: 816
Width: 156 mm
Height: 235 mm
Depth: not specified

Publisher: Princeton University Press