To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement

media release: 2026 Petrovich Lecture by Benjamin Nathans

Thursday, April 16, 2026

4 p.m. with reception to follow

Room 121, Pyle Center, 702 Langdon Street

Half a century ago, the Soviet Union found itself unexpectedly challenged by a group of Soviet citizens who achieved global fame in the longest battle of the Cold War—the battle of ideas. The struggle of Soviet dissidents for the rule of law and human rights made them instant heroes in the West as they pursued the goal of containment of Soviet power from within. Rather than see dissidents as surrogate soldiers of democracy and liberalism beyond the iron curtain, historian Benjamin Nathans begins with the idea that dissidents were Soviet people. How do orthodoxies generate their own heresies? How do people and societies emerge from totalitarian forms of rule? Soviet dissidents did something, as one of them put it, “simple to the point of genius: in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.” 

Benjamin Nathans is the Alan Charles Kors Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction and the Pushkin House (London) Book Prize, among other awards. He contributes regularly to the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and other periodicals.

This lecture will discuss the Soviet disident movement. Half a century ago, the Soviet Union found itself unexpectedly challenged by a group of Soviet citizens who achieved global fame in the longest battle of the Cold War—the battle of ideas. The struggle of Soviet dissidents for the rule of law and human rights made them instant heroes in the West as they pursued the goal of containment of Soviet power from within. Rather than see dissidents as surrogate soldiers of democracy and liberalism beyond the iron curtain, historian Benjamin Nathans begins with the idea that dissidents were Soviet people.

This lecture is sponsored by the Alice D. Mortenson/Petrovich Distinguished Chair of Russian History.