Circle, Square, Network, Movement: Dissident Formations in Late Soviet Socialism

Please join us for the next in our Fall Lecture Series. Historian Benjamin Nathan's lecture "Circle, Square, Network, Movement: Dissident Formations in Late Soviet Socialism." Soviet dissidents fashioned the first movement for civil and human rights in a socialist country.  What forms could unofficial campaigns for social change take in the wake of Stalin’s death and the Soviet state’s retreat from totalitarian mass terror?  What can the history of the dissident movement teach us about social trust, networks, and civil society under second-generation socialism? This lecture will explore forms of sociability and social action in the Soviet dissident movement and place them in the larger context of global reform movements in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Speaker:

Benjamin Nathans, the Ronald S. Lauder Associate Professor of History at Penn, is currently finishing a book titled To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: A History of the Soviet Dissident Movement.  His most recent article, “Talking Fish: On Soviet Dissident Memoirs,” appears in the Sept. 2015 issue of the Journal of Modern History.  Nathans’ essays have been published in The Nation, the London Review of Books, and other venues.  His prize-winning book Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia has been translated into Russian and Hebrew.

This lecture is co-sponsored with the Department of History.

For more lecture details, please visit this link: http://www.creeca.wisc.edu/events/15october.html#nathans