To the success of our hopeless cause the many lives of the Soviet dissident movement

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Nathans, Benjamin (Author)
Format: Books Print Book
Language:English
Published: Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2024]
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Summary: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, from Nobel laureates Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn to many others who are virtually unknown today.
Physical Description:xiv, 797 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Bibliography:Includes bibliographical references (pages 655-769) and index.
ISBN:9780691117034
0691117039
Author Notes: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.