Benjamin Nathans: To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause

The Ivy is thrilled to welcome 2025 Pulitzer Prize winner Benjamin Nathans to celebrate his prizewinning book: To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement! Raised in Mt. Washington, Nathans is a truly hyper-local hometown hero. His research and storytelling connects us to a moment in time that feels both far away and highly contemporary: the book presents 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.

If you're interested in highly readable, highly researched histories that contain a reflection of the past and a reframing of the present, this book is for you. We hope you will join us!

Order TO THE SUCCESS OF OUR HOPELESS CAUSE here

Benjamin Nathans won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction for To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton). He is also the author of Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia, which won 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 Endowed Term Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.

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