Penn’s Benjamin Nathans reflects on his work and Pulitzer Prize win

Benjamin Nathans logged on to the Pulitzer Prize live announcement feed in early May just in time to hear his name read as a finalist.

A split-second later, he heard his name read again, as the general nonfiction winner of one of the United States’ most prestigious arts-and-letters prizes.

“It came as a complete shock,” Nathans says. “I had no time to prepare myself.”

Nathans’ then-10-month-old history of the Soviet dissident movement instantly went from a critically acclaimed complex history to one of the most talked-about books of the year, receiving new praise, a European book tour, and rising sales.

“It almost feels like it came out all over again,” he says, calling the attention “intense.”

The book, “To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement” (Princeton University Press, 2024), is the latest installment in Nathans’ 40-year career as a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, modern Jewish history, and the history of human rights.

Nathans, the Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term Professor of History, has taught at Penn since 1998. “To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause” has its roots in his days teaching Soviet history at Indiana University in the late 1990s and reading the memoirs of former dissidents.

During the last 17 years, he dove deeply into the topic, traveling to five countries and digging into archives and private collections to assemble a broad array of sources for what would become his 800-plus-page Pulitzer-winning book.

The “movement” was puzzling to Western observers and difficult for journalists to interpret. It was largely leaderless and small, numbering perhaps around 1,000 people at its core. “This was a movement that was composed almost entirely of intellectuals and that had a huge impact on its shape and feel,” Nathans says. “These were people who lived in the world of ideas but wanted those ideas to matter in their lives and in the life of their country.”

Deep archival dive

His prior books include volumes on Jews in imperial Russia and a research guide to Russian Jewry using former Soviet archives; he also led the scholarly team that created the permanent exhibition on the history of Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union for the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, which opened in 2012.

For “To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause,” one primary source he tapped into was interrogation records kept by the former KGB, the feared security and intelligence bureau of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. “You get to hear dissidents talking in real time, as opposed to looking back on their lives years later, in memoirs or interviews,” Nathans says. Though he was not able to gain access to the main archives in Moscow, Nathans did find that many duplicate documents were sent to KGB branches in the former non-Russian republics that emerged from the USSR after its disintegration in 1991, particularly the former KGB archive in Lithuania. 

“As you can imagine, the KGB studied the dissident movement more closely and intensively than any other organization in the world because it was trying to destroy it,” he says. “It gave me a whole different perspective on the dissidents as people, a way of reading their memoirs that allowed me a certain intellectual independence.”

Nathans credits universities such as Penn with giving scholars the ability and flexibility to explore complicated topics in depth. “Penn gave me the freedom to pursue this very labor-intensive project that couldn't be done in just a couple of years,” he says. “I’m very grateful for that.”

Boldness and despair

Nathans originally conceived of the book as an approach to the bigger questions of how people living in authoritarian and non-democratic societies think about their political options and, in some cases, become politically engaged. Russia and the Soviet Union were but one example, he says, with similar situations in China, Iran, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and other countries.

One primary theme of the book centers on maintaining hope in the face of overwhelming odds. It’s what Nathans calls the “enigma” of the “characteristically Soviet, perhaps Russian, blend of boldness and despair and the dissidents’ ability to house both of those qualities in their minds and in their hearts, without letting it paralyze them.”

The dissidents, he says, shared a common quality. “They all, or almost all, expressed this sensibility that, if they didn’t act, if they didn’t do something, they couldn’t live with themselves,” Nathans says. “They had a very high-minded approach to social justice, to the rule of law, and to the idea that the Soviet state needed to be reformed, needed to be contained by its own legal system, instead of just ignoring it or constantly bending it.”

KGB’s ‘ventilation system’

Over the decades, the KGB compelled roughly half of the dissidents to leave the Soviet Union, not by overt force, Nathans explains, but by telling them they had a choice: Leave within a few days or be put in prison. Most opted for the former.

“So technically, they chose to leave, but I think everybody understands that they were forced by just impossible options,” Nathans says. “The KGB understood very well that this was an effective way to weaken the movement. The negative fallout of causing people to leave was miniscule compared to what happened when you put people on trial and word got out. Forced emigration was like a ventilation system, just getting the troublemakers out of your way.”

There are clear parallels to the contemporary era, Nathans says, when hundreds of thousands of Russians left their country after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. “It was a scaled-up version of what the late Soviet government had done,” he says, noting that Russian President Vladimir Putin spent his career in the Soviet KGB. “A huge proportion of what would have been a protest movement against the war is now living outside Russia and fears arrest if it returns.”

Living during transformative times

Nathans gained his first exposure to Russia and the former Soviet Union in 1984, when he took a 10-day trip to the country while studying in West Germany after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale. He later lived in the USSR for several years during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

One year, while doing research for his dissertation, was a particularly heady time: Nathans arrived in the Soviet Union in the fall of 1991 and left the newly minted Russian Federation in summer 1992.

“I was an eyewitness, in Leningrad and Moscow, to the kind of social transformation that I’d never seen before—so rapid, so dramatic, both the highs and the lows,” he says. “That made an impression, watching a superpower—one of the most heavily armed countries on the planet, second only to the United States—unravel with hardly a shot being fired.”

As the Soviet-Russian economy nosedived, Nathans saw despair and increased poverty; his friends all had to work two or three jobs. But he also saw people having free access to books, articles, and travel, “enjoying the kind of freedoms that I had grown up with and took for granted.”

Lessons for today

Reflecting more broadly on the lessons of the Soviet dissident movement, Nathans says the activists did their best to produce their own versions of both a free press and an independent legal system. They operated a de facto publishing system by creating and circulating samizdat, or hand-typed documents and books that were circulated in dissident circles and beyond. They also used the USSR’s largely pre-ordained political trials to publicize their arguments and get further attention for their cause.

“Even under conditions that by anybody’s definition were really quite dire, quite limited, not really very hopeful, they managed to accomplish something enormously significant,” Nathans says. “So, if they could have hope, then surely people who live in places that do have something resembling a free press and an independent judiciary should have hope, too.”