Winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, Benjamin Nathans's To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement tells the story of dissent in the USSR from Stalin's death to the collapse of communism, exploring the idea and practice of rights and the rule of law in the setting of “mature socialism.” Rather than treat Soviet dissidents as avatars of Western liberalism, or take their invocation of rights and legal norms as natural, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause investigates how, as products themselves of the Soviet order, dissidents arrived at a conception of law and human personality so at odds with official norms. Understanding this process - how orthodoxies contain the seeds of their own heresies, and how dissidents promoted the containment of Soviet power from within - promises to illuminate the broader problem of how citizens of authoritarian societies conceive and act on options for political engagement.
Benjamin Nathans teaches and writes about Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, modern European Jewish history, and the history of human rights. He edited A Research Guide to Materials on the History of Russian Jewry (19th and Early 20th Centuries) in Selected Archives of the Former Soviet Union [in Russian] (Moscow, 1994) and is author of Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter With Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley, 2002), which won the Koret Prize in Jewish History, the Vucinich Prize in Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies, the Lincoln Prize in Russian History and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in History. Beyond the Pale has been translated into Russian (2007) and Hebrew (2013).
Nathans' most recent book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the 2025 Pushkin House Book Prize.
