To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause

The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement

De: Benjamin Nathans

Narrado por: Rich Miller

A gripping history of the Soviet dissident movement, which hastened the end of the USSR—and still provides a model of opposition in Putin’s Russia

Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was unexpectedly confronted by a dissident movement that captured the world’s imagination. Demanding that the Kremlin obey its own laws, an improbable band of Soviet citizens held unauthorized public gatherings, petitioned in support of arrested intellectuals, and circulated banned samizdat texts. Soviet authorities arrested dissidents, subjected them to bogus trials and vicious press campaigns, sentenced them to psychiatric hospitals and labor camps, sent them into exile—and transformed them into martyred heroes. Against all odds, the dissident movement undermined the Soviet system and unexpectedly hastened its collapse. Taking its title from a toast made at dissident gatherings, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause is a definitive history of a remarkable group of people who helped change the twentieth century.

Benjamin Nathans’s vivid narrative tells the dramatic story of the men and women who became dissidents—from Nobel laureates Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn to many others who are virtually unknown today. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, personal letters, interviews, and KGB interrogation records, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause reveals how dissidents decided to use Soviet law to contain the power of the Soviet state. This strategy, as one of them put it, was “simple to the point of genius: in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.”

An extraordinary account of the Soviet dissident movement, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause shows how dissidents spearheaded the struggle to break free of the USSR’s totalitarian past, a struggle that continues in Putin’s Russia—and that illuminates other struggles between hopelessness and perseverance today.

“A brilliant book about the success of a hopeless cause, the practicality of self-sacrifice, and the extraordinary transformation of a one-man campaign to follow fictitious laws into an international human rights movement. A remarkable achievement.”—Yuri Slezkine, author of The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution

©2024 Benjamin Nathans (P)2024 Recorded Books

Underwhelmed

I will start that the book is well written and that every word has been weighed and is perfect for the description of the content. Also I learned a lot about the judicial and extrajudicial reprisals against this minute group of people who were initially involved in standing up to the Soviet Govt and KGB in their own way of disseminating information which was a difficult process. However, the reprisals took a toll on them and they did not pursue their cause (which I did not fully understand) and there seems to be a gap in their activities until the collapse of the communist regime in Russia.
What is most surprising to me is that although the group fizzled and even the author notes that it may not have been the main impact factor in the ultimate downfall of the regime that some credit must be given to this group of individuals.
However, a lot of importance has been given to this group of individuals and has even been compared to the Civil Rights Movement in the US by the author. However, I feel that eventually the group did not seem to be as committed to the cause or even had an understanding as to what they wanted to see ultimately happen in the making of the fallout post USSR. Very few if any were involved despite the fact that they had opportunities to improve or shape Govt in the future but most of them left Russia to go to Israel or other countries. A very long book and the only reason I kept reading was to see if an important point would be revealed at some point…

good book, just know what your getting into

Very good book, just note however this book isn't about early soviet insurgents like the UPA or other white Army or Ukrianian insurgencies, neither is it really about the collapse of the Soviet union, its focused on the middle era of the Soviet union during Khrushchev and Brezhnev.

personally i wish roy menedeve was focused on more, he was mentioned a lot in passing but nothing more.