On Sunday, August 16 at 3 pm Eastern, our guest for a Casual Conversation will be Benjamin Nathans, the Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. His university website entry may be found here: https://live-sas-www-history.pantheon.sas.upenn.edu/people/faculty/benjamin-nathans .
We will be discussing his book “To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The many lives of the Soviet dissident movement,” which received the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Pushkin House book prize in 2025. Professor Nathans will be the third Pulitzer winner we will be speaking with after Professor David Kertzer and independent scholar Jonathan Eig. The University of Pennsylvania will be the sixth Ivy League school represented by the professors we have hosted for a Casual Conversation. (Of course, we have had scholars from many other fine institutions, including Georgetown, MIT, University of Wisconsin, University of North Carolina, and University of British Columbia.)
This is truly a remarkable book. It upends the comfortable narratives that we in the West have built up over the decades to describe Soviet dissidents. To understand these men and women, Professor Nathans tells us, we first have to understand that they were Soviet citizens, born and bred in a very different environment than our own. Their intelligentsia were not our intelligentsia. And never were. Their political and social milieus were not ours. And never were. He reminds us that many generations passed between the Russian Revolution, the creation of the USSR, and the death of Stalin followed by the Khrushchev (not-so-) Secret Speech and the beginning of the Thaw.
Professor Nathans invites us into a different world, and he leads us to and in it with intelligence and purpose. The voyage he invites us to take with him is to a land as strange to our Western eyes as a trip to the Galapagos is to our human senses.
Perhaps you can get a sense of what Professor Nathans offers us by reading some of his description, written for “Times Literary Supplement,” of how he penetrated into the minds and memories of the dissidents:
“In the course of researching my book ‘To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The many lives of the Soviet dissident movement,’ I had the good fortune to meet a number of former dissidents, most of whom have since died. . . .
“My initial interviews with dissidents were often frustrating. . . . [M]any of these figures had already given interviews, sometimes dozens of them, to journalists in the West as well as in the former Soviet Union. Their answers to my questions often felt stale or rehearsed. By the time I got to them, moreover, the majority had already published autobiographies or were in the process of doing so. Their stories were set, if not in stone, then on the printed page. . . .
“[M]y jump-starter for interviewing dissidents jaded by overexposure to journalists [was by] showing up with historic texts they had written and asking them to help me interpret difficult passages. It was striking how often a simple ‘What did you mean when you wrote this?’ would trigger a flood of memory – where they were when they composed an essay that circulated in samizdat, in response to what events or arguments, with which readers in mind. Such episodes didn’t just save me from interpretive dead ends; they opened conversations.”
Those conversations created a book in which memory merges seamlessly with documents and in which we are every reminded of the strangeness of other worlds. Sometimes another world is a physical place like Soviet Russia, sometimes the mind and heart of another man or woman, and often, as here, a combination of both place and person.
If you want to join us for a discussion with a first-rate tour guide for these other worlds on Sunday, August 16 at 3 pm Eastern please let me know by this Friday, August 14 by emailing me at arthur.fergenson@ansalaw.com . I promise that you will not think of either the USSR or the Soviet dissidents in the same way again.
Arthur Fergenson