Review by Aiden Hunt
While public dissent was unthinkable in Stalin’s Soviet Union, some citizens, inspired by civil rights movements of the 1960s and Khrushchev’s “thaw,” decided to fight for a change after his death. Historian and Professor Benjamin Nathans chronicles the roughly twenty-year history of this intelligentsia movement in To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause — titled after a common dissident toast. Relying on declassified Soviet archives and retained underground dissident literature, he relates a compelling tale of resistance in the face of state persecution.
Nathans carefully corrects dissident stereotypes from Cold War rhetoric. Though Western darlings like Sakharov and Solzenitzyn play their roles, most protagonists are not motivated by Western democratic ideals, but by promises of socialist reform in keeping with the 1936 “Stalin Constitution” and its latent — ultimately empty — guarantee of rights. They lacked the public attention of right movements in the democratic world, but the playbook for highlighting state hypocrisy was similar. Unfortunately, with no real mechanism to enact these types of reform, the state simply attacked its critics as anti-Soviet and the KGB decisively crushed the movement in the early 1980s.
While some readers might be intimidated by its 816 pages, a Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction serves as an added testament to the book’s quality. In this political moment, when so much feels out of control in America and the world, these stories of quixotic, principled dissents may be just what we need to weather it.
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans. Princeton University Press, August 2024.
Reviewer bio: Aiden Hunt is a writer, editor, and literary critic based in the Philadelphia, PA suburbs. He is the creator, editor, and publisher of the Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, and his reviews have appeared in Fugue, The Rumpus, Jacket2, and The Adroit Journal, among other venues.
