To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause. The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement - A book launch
The Institute for Advanced Studies and the Blinken OSA Archivum cordially invite you to a book discussion in the company of its author:
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause. The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton University Press, 2024) by Benjamin Nathans
Benjamin Nathans observed a few years ago that someone who writes about “dissent” or oppositional movements ran the risk of seeming naïve or of being in the thrall of a romanticized version about the past where truth-seekers were heroically fighting a mendacious official culture. In his latest book he shows how the historian can still consider morally outstanding the type of anti-totalitarian activism the dissidents engaged in from the 1960s on, without considering them “distinct” from the surrounding political culture. Drawing on more than two decades of research into various archives comprising KGB files, personal unpublished diaries, samizdat texts, reports by Western human rights agencies, Nathans reconstructed a multifaceted phenomenon that undermined the Soviet system by holding it accountable to its own laws and principles, and by employing concepts taken from the Soviet pantheon. By analyzing this paradox, Nathans also helps us understand, in more general terms, how citizens under authoritarian rule can effectively organize themselves from within to contain powers in seemingly hopeless times.
Benjamin Nathans is Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term Associate Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania. He teaches and writes about Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, modern European Jewish history, and the history of human rights. He edited A Research Guide to Materials on the History of Russian Jewry (19th and Early 20th Centuries) in Selected Archives of the Former Soviet Union [in Russian] (Moscow, 1994) and is author of Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley, 2002). Along with Prof. Gabriella Safran (Stanford University), Nathans co-edited Culture Front: Representing Jews in Eastern Europe (Penn Press, 2008).
Participants:
Benjamin Nathans, University of Pennsylvania
Karl Hall, Department of Historical Studies, Central European University
Ioana Macrea-Toma, IAS CEU, Blinken OSA Archivum at Central European University
András Mink, Blinken OSA Archivum at Central European University
RSVP Agnes Bendik at
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