2025 Alfred E. Golz Lecture-To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement

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.

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