Description:

Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor Masha Lipman (Northwestern University) and Alan Charles Kors Professor of History Benjamin Nathans (University of Pennsylvania) will discuss Nathans' new Pulitzer Prize-winning book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement.

The book tells the story of dissent in the USSR from Stalin's death to the collapse of communism, exploring the idea and practice of rights and the rule of law in the setting of “mature socialism.” Rather than treat Soviet dissidents as avatars of Western liberalism, or take their invocation of rights and legal norms as natural, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause investigates how, as products themselves of the Soviet order, dissidents arrived at a conception of law and human personality so at odds with official norms. Understanding this process—how orthodoxies contain the seeds of their own heresies, and how dissidents promoted the containment of Soviet power from within—promises to illuminate the broader problem of how citizens of authoritarian societies conceive and act on options for political engagement.

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