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

"Winner"

"Lastly of the general nonfiction book prizes, we have the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction, awarded to an American author. This year, it went to a book about the Soviet dissident movement, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause by Benjamin Nathans , a historian at the University of Pennsylvania. As Russian political scientist Gulnaz Sharafutdinova explained it to me, “This book is a very important, groundbreaking study of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, not as a group of people with values that were pro-Western or liberal, but as a group of people who grew up as second-generation Soviet citizens and within that Soviet system, found the space and impulse to question the foundations of how that system worked in their time. They came up with very original strategies for confronting the issues they were not happy about…They came from a belief in the system they lived in, and used a legalist approach to keep the Soviet leaders true to their word.” Communist systems tend to the legalistic, and one can’t help but wonder whether Chinese dissidents are taking note of this book and the methods used to confront the Soviet system. Lastly, a shout-out to all the book prizes aimed at the general public that aim to improve our understanding of specialist subjects, including business, politics, philosophy, foreign affairs, sports, and science. I’m so grateful to you for trying to separate the wheat from the chaff and reliable information from successful marketing. Here’s a list of some of those award-winning books, starting with The Thinking Machine , which won the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award and is all about the computer chips that are changing our world and what a single person with a big appetite for risk and a relentless focus can achieve: Buy now Listen now The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip by Stephen Witt 🏆 Winner of the 2025 Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award Read expert recommendations The Best Business Books of 2025: the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award Andrew Hill , Journalist 🏆 Winner of the 2025 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize Read expert recommendations The Best Popular Science Books of 2025: The Royal Society Book Prize Sandra Knapp , Biologist 🏆 Winner of the 2025 Royal Institute of Philosophy Book Prize Read expert recommendations The Best Philosophy Books of 2024 Nigel Warburton , Philosopher 🏆 Winner of the 2025 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Read expert recommendations The Best Sports Books of 2025 Alyson Rudd , Journalist 🏆 Winner of the 2025 Arthur Ross Award for “an outstanding contribution to the understanding of foreign policy or international relations” Read expert recommendations The Best Politics Books of 2024: The Orwell Prize for Political Writing 🏆 Winner of the 2025 Orwell Prize for Political Writing Read expert recommendations The Best Politics Books of 2025: The Orwell Prize for Political Writing The judges of the 2025 Orwell Prize for Political Writing , 🏆 Winner of the 2025 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award Read expert recommendations The Best Travel Books of 2025 Tom Parfitt , Journalist Other award-winning books of 2025 lists: fiction | biographies | memoirs | history (still to come) December 27, 2025. Updated: February 4, 2026 Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected] Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you've enjoyed this interview, please support us by donating a small amount ."

"This book is a very important, groundbreaking study of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union, not as a group of people with values that were pro-Western or liberal, but as a group of people who grew up as second-generation Soviet citizens and within that Soviet system, found the space and impulse to question the foundations of how that system worked in their time. They came up with very original strategies for confronting the issues they were not happy about. So it’s about this homegrown civil rights movement. They didn’t rely on John Locke or the ideas of the founding fathers in the United States or the Glorious Revolution in the UK, and the ideological foundations of Western liberalism. They came from a belief in the system they lived in, and used a legalist approach to keep the Soviet leaders true to their word, the norms stated in the Soviet constitution, in the Soviet laws, etc. So if the constitution said that the government works for the people, and the people are part of decision-making, then they would put that up as a slogan and say, ‘Let’s make this true.’ And they would point out the places where it was not true. The movement itself emerged in response to the trial of two writers, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, setting off a chain reaction that turned into this Soviet dissident movement. They had written satirical stories that didn’t criticize the Soviet regime directly, but the KGB decided to put them on trial for anti-Soviet propaganda. During these trials, information was very tightly controlled. People who supported the writers tried to advocate for transparency, saying, ‘Look at our constitution, look at our laws. People have the right to know what is happening and what they’re being tried for.’ But any type of transparency was viewed as dangerous for the system. That strategy of holding the Soviet government accountable to the words that were inscribed in the Soviet laws and constitution was an important innovation that these Soviet citizens, who became known as dissidents, developed. The book is based on meticulous archival work. Nathans enables a very different appreciation for the Soviet Union as an alternative system that existed in juxtaposition to the capitalist West. Things were developing from inside, but there was also interaction. The Soviet leaders cared about what the West thought of them and the USSR, what the media were saying about the Soviet regime and its relationships with its people. Any poking of the holes in the facade that the Soviet regime was trying to keep up vis-à-vis their domestic audience was taken in a very sensitive way by the regime. So this group of dissidents came up with original ideas for how to confront the regime, but also engaged with the West, and the West helped them to put pressure on the Soviet government. But they were not Western. That’s a very important point in this book. Frequently, dissidents were presented not necessarily as Western spies, but as not really belonging to Soviet society. What Nathans shows is that these were people who had been brought up, educated, and raised within the Soviet system. Some of them were mathematicians or highly educated individuals, often with a technical education. What distinguished them from the rest of the people in the Soviet Union was that in their family histories, they often had parents or grandparents who were either repressed, went to a gulag, or had other highly traumatic personal stories in their relationship with the Soviet regime. So there were some elements in their personal identity that brought them to the place where they found themselves, where they questioned how the system operated and tried to find ways to change it, to criticize it, and to use whatever ideological and infrastructural means that they had to try to bring change. Exactly. It was the same in the Soviet Union. On paper, the rights that the citizens had looked very good, and that’s what they tried to use. They said, ‘Look what is written here. Let’s be true to this.’ What’s very interesting is that Nathans recounts the conversations. He brings up in minute detail exchanges between some of these individuals, sometimes with the authorities in the KGB, and sometimes in schools. Sometimes there were reprimands for the positions taken by teachers, for example, and there was a back and forth. You see how the words that these dissidents uttered and the arguments they brought took the other side by surprise. There was nothing the authorities could answer because what they were saying was true according to the law. In those situations, the other side had to not exactly give up on formal legal issues, but basically say that politics trumps formality, and sometimes even that politics trumps the law. This is the big issue: does politics trump the law? That was Lenin’s thinking: politics trumps any other logic and reasoning. The dissidents who had studied Lenin and Marx were pretty disappointed in Lenin. Nathans brings such incredible detail to the stories of how these individuals became who they were, how, through studying Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Marx and Engels, they took on themselves this mantle of interpreting what was supposed to be. In a way, these individuals showed incredible civic responsibility for the fate of their country. They studied the foundational texts and, based on those, came to a certain appreciation, in the 1960s, of what was wrong in their country and how it should be changed. We sometimes talk about homo Sovieticus , the type of new Soviet individual expected to sacrifice themselves and dedicate their life to their motherland. This is what you have with these individuals. That’s what they did. That’s one of the interesting paradoxes that Nathans’s book allows the reader to unpack: they were the flesh and blood emerging from within the Soviet system. It is very readable. All the books that we have chosen for our shortlist are superbly written. In the first two, you have the personal stories of journalists integrated into the writing. In this book, you also have parts that are literally conversational, capturing dialogues and interrogations that took place on Lubyanka between the KGB agents and these dissidents. This is not jargony, heavily theoretical stuff. These are very accessible stories that help you understand what was happening."