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

Описание: Join Professor Benjamin Nathans for a conversation with Martin Bright about his book, "To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement", winner of the Pushkin House Book Prize 2025.

Drawing on more than two decades of research, Nathans’ timely and vivid narrative tells the story of dissent in the USSR from Stalin’s death to the collapse of Communism, and how a small cohort of Soviet men and women spearheaded the struggle to exit the USSR’s totalitarian past – offering potential models of resistance for today.

Throughout the discussion Benjamin Nathans uncovers the “many lives” of the dissident movement, remembered and forgotten, and explores the movement through a deeper perspective: not merely their political legacy, but what we can learn from them about perseverance, the practice of rights, and the possibilities for public engagement in authoritarian societies.

Timecodes:

0:00 Introduction of Benjamin Nathans and Martin Bright
2:25 Martin Bright introduces Benjamin Nathans’s new book Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
4:32 The concepts of a dissident and a dissident movement explained
9:50 Why is the term “movement” applicable to description of dissident activity
14:58 The significance of the Sinyavsky–Daniel trial of 1966 for the emergence and development of the dissident movement in the USSR; the role of KGB
23:10 Law-based dissent and the idea of conducting oneself as a free person
29:02 The Red Square demonstration of 1968: what happened and why the protesters are not widely remembered?
42:20 Why so many dissidents were physicists?
47:15 The complete crush of the dissident movement by KGB in 1992

Audience Q&A
54:20 Using KGB archival documents for research purposes: were there any difficulties to access them and are they a trustworthy source?
1:04:04 The “near death” points of the dissident movement
1:09:15 How did Gorbachev use the dissident legacy during Glansost and what did he discard?
1:15:40 The romanticisation of the Soviet dissidents in the Western world.
1:18:04 How the Russian idiosyncrasy of the story told by Benjamin Nathans in his book is related to the broader trends at the time?
1:21:06 Was poetry writing a part of the dissident movement in the USSR?

1:23:29 What lessons can we learn from the Soviet dissidents and how can we relate them to the present day political situation in the United States