The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement with Benjamin Nathans and Maria Lipman
Watch our recent Buffett Conversation 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.
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.
This event was co-sponsored by Northwestern University's Department of History and Chabraja Center for Historical Studies.
Watch the recording
About the speakers
Benjamin Nathans is the Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches and writes on Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union, modern European Jewish history, and the history of human rights. He has spent more than four decades exploring how societies navigate authoritarianism, dissent, and the struggle for rights. Nathans’s most recent book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for its prodigiously researched account of Soviet dissent and its broader implications for understanding freedom and resistance. A frequent contributor to publications such as The New York Review of Books, he has also helped shape public history initiatives, including the Museum of Jewish History in Moscow.
Maria Lipman is the Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor in International Studies at Northwestern University. Lipman is a political analyst and commentator whose work focuses on state‑society relations, media, and the politics of history in Russia. From 2003 to 2014, she was an associate at the Carnegie Moscow Center, where she edited the journal Pro et Contra. She is a frequent commentator in international broadcast media and has written extensively on Russian affairs for both Russian and U.S. outlets, including The Washington Post (2001–2011) and The New Yorker online (2012–2017). Lipman taught courses on contemporary Russia at Indiana University and Grinnell College from 2017–2019.