The Dissident Library

Ort: online via Zoom

Organisiert von Olga Rosenblum

ZfL-Projekt(e): Sowjetisches Dissidententum und Öffentlichkeit

The next seminar of The Dissident Library will be devoted to a discussion of the long-awaited, newly published, and immediately bestselling history of the Soviet dissident movement by Ben Nathans, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement.

We will discuss Chapter 7, “The Dissident Repertoire,” which explores how rights-defenders formed a movement of a new type, distinct from the patterns of the pre-revolutionary social movement to which they frequently compared themselves. How did Soviet dissidents understand their options for public engagement, and what forms of contention did they favor or reject? By 1968, the movement was divided between advocates of spontaneous, conscience-driven action on the one hand, and those who favored conscious organization and а formal division of labor on the other. Should the movement have leaders? Or should it function as a “conductorless orchestra”? Could it move beyond the “strong ties” of intimate friendship that bound the original rights-defenders to each other, in order to harness the “strength of weak ties” across wider portions of Soviet society? Chapter 7 culminates in a central paradox: in contrast to their grand strategy of pushing the Soviet state to observe its own laws, Soviet dissidents resisted formal laws of any kind within their own movement.

• Benjamin Nathans: To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement. Princeton University Press 2024

Languages of the discussion: Russian with simultaneous translation into English.

To join the seminar please register here. Please register in advance so that we can send you the text of the chapter we will discuss.

The event is part of The Dissident Library, a series of online seminars discussing scientific publications on the Soviet dissident movement directed and organized by Olga Rosenblum.