To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
By Benjamin Nathans
Beginning in the 1960s, an improbable band of Soviet citizens stunned the Kremlin by demanding it obey its own laws. They held unauthorized public gatherings, petitioned for arrested intellectuals, and circulated banned samizdat texts. Authorities responded with arrests, psychiatric hospitals and labor camps—and transformed the dissidents into martyred heroes. Against all odds, their 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.
Drawing on diaries, personal letters, interviews, and KGB interrogation records, Benjamin Nathans tells the dramatic stories of figures from Nobel laureates Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn to many who are virtually unknown today. Their strategy, as one dissident put it, was "simple to the point of genius: in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people." A definitive history of a movement that helped undermine the Soviet system, this Pulitzer Prize–winning account illuminates struggles between hopelessness and perseverance that continue today.
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We are proud to partner with the Loudoun County Public Library who makes available multiple copies of this book for checkout at the Rust Library.