Please join Professor Benjamin Nathans for a conversation with Martin Bright about his book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, which has been shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize 2025. Drawing on more than two decades of research, Nathans’ timely and vivid narrative tells the story of dissent in the USSR from Stalin’s death to the collapse of Communism, and how a small cohort of Soviet men and women spearheaded the struggle to exit the USSR’s totalitarian past – offering potential models of resistance for today.

Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was confronted by a dissident movement that captured the world’s imagination. An improbable band of Soviet citizens held unauthorised public gatherings, petitioned in support of arrested intellectuals, circulated banned samizdat texts, and turned to “radical civil obedience”, demanding that the Kremlin obey its own laws. They had diverse political and intellectual aims and approaches to freedom, from Moscow-centric rights-defenders to activists protesting Russification and advocating for national or religious autonomy.

In response, the Soviet authorities targeted dissidents and their families, subjected them to bogus trials and vicious press campaigns, banished them to psychiatric hospitals, labor camps or exile – and transformed them into martyred heroes.

The dissidents had a lasting impact, sowing the seeds of a new public discourse and influencing the next generation of politicians, including Gorbachev. But the majority were forgotten – both in Russia (following a short-lived contribution to post-Soviet political pluralism) and in the West, which focused only on a handful of dissenters and narratives which aligned with Western liberalism.

Nathans uncovers their “many lives” and explores the dissident movement through a deeper perspective: not merely their political legacy, but what we can learn from them about perseverance, the practice of rights, and the possibilities for public engagement in authoritarian societies.

You can read our interview with Benjamin Nathans here.