Benjamin Nathans at Harvard Book Store

Harvard Book Store presents Benjamin Nathans—author of Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia and frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books—to celebrate the release of his new book To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement. He will be joined in conversation by Yevgenia Albats—Russian investigative journalist and editor-in-chief and CEO of The New Times, a formerly Moscow-based, Russian-language, independent political weekly.

About To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause

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. 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.

Praise for To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause

"To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause offers refreshingly clear-eyed insights into the idiosyncratic world of those who fought for freedom behind the Iron Curtain. . . . [It] empathetically traces the stories of those who broke the rules by sticking to the law . . . with a host of original insights, shedding light on a remarkable cast of individuals who never succumbed to political apathy at a time when most did."---Katja Hoyer, Telegraph

"Authoritative. . . . An essential addition to the cultural history of the late Soviet era." -Kirkus, starred review

"An expertly conveyed history of the Soviet dissident movement and the individuals involved. For readers interested in the history of censorship, human rights, international law, or the Soviet Union. It’s one not to miss." -Library Journal, starred review

"Comprehensive and analytical, Benjamin Nathan’s To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause vivifies the Soviet intellectuals at the complex heart of the human-rights-oriented dissidence movement in the USSR. . . . A meticulous history of a principled movement, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause addresses efforts to protect human rights within the context of the Soviet Union." -Foreword Reviews

Masking Policy

Masks are encouraged but not required for this event.