季風人文講壇第97期：Benjamin Nathans

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

with Benjamin Nathans & Joseph Torigian

January 31, 2026｜In English 

Half a century ago, the Soviet Union found itself unexpectedly challenged by a group of Soviet citizens who achieved global fame in the longest battle of the Cold War—the battle of ideas. The struggle of Soviet dissidents for the rule of law and human rights made them instant heroes in the West as they pursued the goal of containment of Soviet power from within. Rather than see dissidents as surrogate soldiers of democracy and liberalism beyond the iron curtain, historian Benjamin Nathans begins with the idea that dissidents were Soviet people. How do orthodoxies generate their own heresies? How do people and societies emerge from totalitarian forms of rule? Soviet dissidents did something, as one of them put it, “simple to the point of genius: in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.” This was the dissident story inside the drama of Soviet history, and not surprisingly, it turned out to be anything but simple.

About the Speakers 

Benjamin Nathans is the Alan Charles Kors Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a leading historian of modern Russia and the Soviet Union. His most recent book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, received the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, among other honors. Nathans is also the author of the award-winning Beyond the Pale and a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and other major publications.

Moderator: Joseph Torigian is an associate professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington, DC, and a Center Associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. Torigian studies the politics of authoritarian regimes with a specific focus on elite power struggles, civil-military relations, and grand strategy. He uses primary sources, rare books, and interviews to provide new accounts of historical milestones in two nations of crucial geopolitical importance: China and Russia.