Description:

Join us for a discussion with Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies Maria Lipman (Northwestern University) and Alan Charles Kors Professor of History Benjamin Nathans (University of Pennsylvania) on Professor Nathans' new Pulitzer Prize-winning book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement.

Lunch will be served at 12:15 p.m.

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.

Cosponsored by Northwestern University's  Department of History and  Chabraja Center for Historical Studies.

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Please note that 720 University Place is not an ADA-accessible space. Increasing physical access to buildings and facilities is a goal of the University, but not all buildings and venues have been updated.