WINNER OF THE 2025 PULITZER PRIZE Winner of the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize •
Shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize A "riveting history" ( Wall Street Journal ) of
the Soviet dissident movement which hastened the end of the USSR and still provides a model of
opposition in Putin’s Russia—and beyond “A book about a past time that is very much a book for
our time. . . . A story from which we all stand to learn as we face a new wave of
authoritarianism.”— Los Angeles Review of Books Beginning in the 1960s the Soviet Union was
unexpectedly confronted by a dissident movement that captured the world’s 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—and transformed them into martyred heroes. Against all odds the dissident 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. Benjamin Nathans’s vivid
narrative tells the dramatic story of the men and women who became dissidents—from 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 “simple to the
point of genius: in an unfree country they began to conduct themselves like free people.” An
extraordinary account of the Soviet dissident movement To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause
shows how dissidents spearheaded the struggle to break free of the USSR’s totalitarian past a
struggle that continues in Putin’s Russia—and that illuminates other struggles between
hopelessness and perseverance today.
