WINNER OF THE 2025 PULITZER PRIZE Winner of the Pushkin House Russian Book 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.
