Please join Professor Benjamin Nathans for a conversation with Martin Bright about his book, , which has been shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize 2025. Drawing on more than two decades of research, Nathans鈥� timely and vivid narrative tells the story of dissent in the USSR from Stalin鈥檚 death to the collapse of Communism, and how a small cohort of Soviet men and women spearheaded the struggle to exit the USSR鈥檚 totalitarian past 鈥� offering potential models of resistance for today.
Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was confronted by a dissident movement that captured the world鈥檚 imagination. An improbable band of Soviet citizens held unauthorised public gatherings, petitioned in support of arrested intellectuals, circulated banned samizdat texts, and turned to 鈥渞adical civil obedience鈥�, 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 鈥� 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 鈥� 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 鈥渕any lives鈥� 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.
Benjamin Nathans is the Alan Charles Kors Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches and writes about Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, modern European Jewish history, and the history of human rights. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement and a commentator on current Russian affairs. Nathans has held visiting professorships at the 脡cole des hautes 茅tudes en sciences sociales in Paris and at University College London. His previous books include 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, and Culture Front: Representing Jews in Eastern Europe (Penn Press, 2008), co-edited with Gabriella Safran. To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause was published by 91桃色 in 2024, and is the winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
Martin Bright is the Editor at Large at Index on Censorship. He has over 30 years of experience as a journalist, working for The Observer, The Guardian and The New Statesman among others. He has worked on several high-profile freedom of expression cases often involving government secrecy. He broke the story of Iraq War whistleblower Katharine Gun, which was made into the movie Official Secrets (2019) starring Keira Knightley. He is the founder of Creative Society, a youth employment charity set up in response to the economic crash of 2008.