--- title: To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause Won the 2025 Pulitzer for General Nonfiction With the Soviet Dissidents Who Turned the Law Against the State description: Benjamin Nathans's history of the Soviet dissident movement won the 2025 Pulitzer for General Nonfiction. The historian, the book and its heroes. author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief) date: 2026-10-31T10:54:37.945Z updated: 2026-10-31T11:21:23.638Z canonical: https://thequantumoflight.com/article/to-the-success-of-our-hopeless-cause-pulitzer-2025 image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/pexels-1462226.webp categories: Author Journeys content_type: Profile region: Eastern Europe publication: The Quantum of Light schema_type: Article about: - type: Person name: Benjamin Nathans description: "Benjamin Nathans is the Alan Charles Kors Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. His book To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. His first book, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia, won the Koret Jewish Book Award." jobTitle: Historian and author sameAs: - https://www.pulitzer.org/node/benjamin-nathans --- You probably picture Soviet dissidents as a few famous names: Andrei Sakharov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, faces on the evening news in the 1970s. Benjamin Nathans's *To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement* gives you the whole crowd behind them. From the 1960s onwards, an unlikely band of Soviet citizens held unauthorised gatherings, signed petitions for arrested writers and passed banned texts from hand to hand. Their demand was simple: the state should obey its own laws. ### Book: To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause *The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement* By Benjamin Nathans Winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Benjamin Nathans tells the story of the Soviet citizens who, from the 1960s, demanded that the state obey its own laws. They signed petitions, attended trials and passed banned texts from hand to hand, and each crackdown only brought new dissidents forward. [Waterstones](https://www.waterstones.com/books/search/term/9780691255583) The book won the [2025 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction](https://www.pulitzer.org/node/benjamin-nathans). The Pulitzer board called it a prodigiously researched history of Soviet dissent, how the state crushed it again and again and how it kept coming back to life. Princeton University Press published it in 2024. It also won the Pushkin House Book Prize and reached the shortlist for the Cundill History Prize. ## A toast to a cause nobody expected to win The title comes from a toast the dissidents raised at their gatherings. They knew the odds. The authorities answered them with arrests, show trials, smear campaigns in the press, confinement in psychiatric hospitals, labour camps and exile. Each crackdown turned more of them into martyrs, and each new generation found a way to start again. Nathans follows the movement from the years after Stalin's death to the collapse of the Soviet Union. You meet Nobel laureates and people almost nobody remembers, and you see how a small number of determined citizens undermined a superpower and helped hasten its end. ## The strategy: behave like free people The dissidents' method was what made them dangerous. The Soviet constitution promised rights on paper, and the dissidents insisted on using them. One of them summed up the approach: 'in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.' They wrote open letters, attended trials, recorded the state's abuses and published them in samizdat, the typed and retyped underground press. Nathans built the story from diaries, memoirs, private letters, interviews and records of KGB interrogations. The result is a large cast, and the early chapters ask for your attention, but the book reads as a story of courage rather than a study of an ideology. Its final pages connect the story to Vladimir Putin's Russia, where the struggle continues. ## A historian raised in the house of a Nobel laureate Nathans is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. He was born in 1962 and grew up in Baltimore, the son of Daniel Nathans, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1978. He studied in Tübingen in West Germany, and he writes regularly for The New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. His first book, *Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia*, won the Koret Jewish Book Award. *To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause* was decades in the making. ![The gold Pulitzer Prize medal, showing Benjamin Franklin in profile with the words Honoris Causa.](https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/pulitzer-medal-obverse-svg.webp) *Photo: Medal design by Daniel Chester French. Illustration: Wikimedia Commons, CC0 public domain* ## Two finalists on the cost of telling the truth The 2025 shortlist held two other books about people who paid for speaking up. Rachel Nolan reached the final three with *Until I Find You*, on the children taken from their families and adopted abroad during Guatemala's civil war, and Rollo Romig made it with *I Am on the Hit List*, on the murder of the Indian journalist Gauri Lankesh. Recent winners of the prize include David Zucchino in 2021, Andrea Elliott in 2022, Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa in 2023 and Nathan Thrall in 2024. ## A year later the prize went to working families with no home The 2026 Pulitzer for General Nonfiction went to Brian Goldstone for *There Is No Place for Us*, his account of five working families in Atlanta who lose their homes. Rich Books Magazine opened its daily series on the 2026 winners with it: [There Is No Place for Us Won the 2026 Pulitzer for Reporting on Homeless Families Who Work Full Time](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/there-is-no-place-for-us-pulitzer-2026). Read the two winners back to back and you move from a vanished empire to one American city, and both books build their story from individual lives. ## What stays with you after the last chapter You finish the book with a toast in your head and a long list of names. Nathans leaves you with the sense that freedom is defended by ordinary people who refuse to pretend, and that the fight the dissidents began is not over. **Read it if** you want to understand Russia today, you love history told through courageous individuals, or you are drawn to stories of people who stand up to power with nothing but the law and their voices. ### Buy the book [To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause on Waterstones](https://www.waterstones.com/books/search/term/to+the+success+of+our+hopeless+cause) / [To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause on Barnes & Noble](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/to+the+success+of+our+hopeless+cause) ### Also in this piece Until I Find You on [Waterstones](https://www.waterstones.com/books/search/term/until+i+find+you+rachel+nolan) / [Barnes & Noble](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/until+i+find+you+rachel+nolan) I Am on the Hit List on [Waterstones](https://www.waterstones.com/books/search/term/i+am+on+the+hit+list) / [Barnes & Noble](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/i+am+on+the+hit+list) Beyond the Pale on [Waterstones](https://www.waterstones.com/books/search/term/beyond+the+pale+nathans) / [Barnes & Noble](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/beyond+the+pale+nathans) **About Benjamin Nathans** Historian and author Benjamin Nathans is the Alan Charles Kors Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. His book To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. His first book, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia, won the Koret Jewish Book Award. *Next in the series: James by Percival Everett, winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.*