By Jade Schram
On Thursday, October 16, 2025, the Havighurst Center for East European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies hosted Dr. Benjamin Nathans, Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and recipient of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Nathans joined Havighurst Center Director Stephen Norris for a conversation about his prize-winning book, ‘To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause’: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement.
The dissident movement, as Nathans explained, spread across the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death in 1953. Dissidents held unauthorized public gatherings, demanded that the Soviet state uphold its own laws, and participated in the creation and dissemination of Samizdat [self-publishing]. They insisted that their actions were apolitical and legal: the chief samizdat publication of the dissident movement, The Chronicle of Current Events stated that it was “in no sense an illegal publication” on every issue.
“To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause” was a toast dissidents made when they gathered around kitchen tables. When asked whether or not the dissidents ultimately succeeded, Nathans first explained that previous scholars have provided three answers. Some argue that dissidents were freedom fighters who liberated society from a dictatorial system and therefore deserve to be a part of the history that emancipated the Soviet Union. A second position, one largely confined within Russia, maintains that the dissidents contributed to the downfall of a great system. A third holds that the dissidents gained a lot of press in the 1970s but ultimately did not contribute much to the 1991 collapse of the Soviet system.
Nathans offered a broader interpretation that moved beyond the exclusive focus on the Soviet collapse. The dissidents’ goal, as he explained, was to turn the Soviet Union into a law-abiding country that followed its own constitution. They failed to accomplish this goal but succeeded in creating new networks and new ways of criticizing the USSR’s leadership that the leadership struggled to contain.
Samizdat proved central to this relative success. Dissidents used typewriters and carbon paper to report on unjust trials and to copy forbidden texts. Once typed and using the carbon paper to produce copies, dissidents would share these texts with others, who would repeat the same process. As Nathans recounted, samizdat spread information far and wide, reaching all the regions of the USSR. Some samizdat materials made their way outside of the USSR, where Radio Liberty and the Voice of America would then broadcast the information back into the Soviet Union, reaching tens of millions of Soviet citizens.
Paradoxically, Nathans concluded, the Soviet Union became less law-abiding throughout the 1970s as the state ratcheted up its attempts to deal with the dissidents. The KGB created a special Fifth Directorate tasked with suppressing the movement and which resorted to extrajudicial forms of punishment. The Fifth Directorate, whose employees in Leningrad included a young Vladimir Putin, worked to infiltrate dissident gatherings, arrest prominent dissenters, and force others into involuntary exile. Their techniques, however, led to an unintended consequence: using heavy-handed, illegal methods to respond to dissident demands that the Soviet state adhere to its own laws drained legitimacy from the Soviet system. The dissident movement and the KGB’s actions hollowed out the system from within, accelerating the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in the years to come. The trials of dissidents reported on through samizdat and the violent response of the KGB to the movement, Nathans concluded, “were disastrous for the KGB and the regime.” “They turned nobodies – truly obscure writers and scientists who had the daring to sign open letters –into martyrs.” Their fame and the threat they posed to the state made the cause anything but hopeless.