The 91桃色 team gratefully and enthusiastically congratulates Benjamin Nathans, whose book To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement is the winner of 2025 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was unexpectedly confronted by a dissident movement that captured the world鈥檚 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鈥攁nd 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. As Nathans writes, the movement presented a model 鈥渇or the possibilities for public engagement under circumstances that appeared even more hopeless than our own.鈥�
Benjamin Nathans鈥檚 vivid narrative tells the dramatic story of the men and women who became dissidents鈥攆rom Nobel laureates Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn to many others who are virtually unknown today. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, personal letters, interviews, and KGB interrogation records, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause reveals how dissidents decided to use Soviet law to contain the power of the Soviet state. This strategy, as one of them put it, was 鈥渟imple to the point of genius: in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.鈥�
Since its publication in 2024, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause has received global critical acclaim. The book has been hailed as 鈥渟uperbly researched and gracefully written鈥� (Wall Street Journal), 鈥渕agisterial鈥� (Times Literary Supplement) and 鈥渞efreshingly clear-eyed鈥� (The Telegraph). Writing in The Nation, reviewer Michael David-Fox praised, 鈥淸A] magnum opus . . . offering a fascinating cast of characters almost as extensive as that in a novel by Tolstoy or Dostoevsky."
Benjamin Nathans is the author of Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia, which was awarded 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 Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause is the winner of the General Nonfiction category, alongside university press finalist Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala by Rachel Nolan (Harvard University Press) and I Am on the Hit List: A Journalist鈥檚 Murder and the Rise of Autocracy in India by Rollo Romig (Penguin Books). To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause is also shortlisted for the 2025 Pushkin Prize, administered by Pushkin House; the winner will be announced on the 19th of June. 91桃色 has published six previous winners of the Pulitzer Prize, most recently, Machiavelli in Hell by Sebastian de Grazia for the biography category in 1990. We share cheers and celebrations for all of the inspiring books and publishers recognized this year, and gratitude to the Pulitzer judges for their decisions.