Historian Benjamin Nathans joins The Naked Pravda to discuss his new book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton University Press, August 2024). In the post-Stalin USSR, when the regime seemed eternal and there was little tradition of resistance to totalitarianism, citizens who came up against the arbitrary Soviet justice system had to invent their own strategies for effecting change. Nathans looks beyond the familiar stories of figures like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn to explore how the dissident movement coalesced, and what that history can tell us today.
Timestamps for this episode:
- (4:17) The Soviet justice system and dissident movement
- (8:34) Alexander Esenin-Volpin: an intellectual godfather
- (16:00) The evolution of Soviet dissidence
- (20:57) Social dynamics in the Soviet Union
- (27:59) The movement’s limited success
- (33:43) The collapse of the Soviet Union
- (45:08) Western media’s influence
- (50:04) Challenges in modern media coverage
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Hosted by Sam Breazeale, sound editing by Kevin Rothrock