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

WINNER OF THE 2025 PULITZER PRIZE

Winner of the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize

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 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 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.

Benjamin Nathans won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction for To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton). He is also the author of Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia, which was won 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 Endowed Term Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.