Benjamin Nathans

Interview by Roger Howe June 2025 (Plymouth)

Professor Benjamin Nathans, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause, discusses the sweep of Russian and Soviet history from the “participatory dictatorship” of Stalin’s time through Khrushchev’s botched reforms and the ‘stagnation period’ under Leonid Brezhnev, the time of chaos and relative freedom that followed through to the renewed chill of Vladimir Putin.

His ensemble cast of characters are the despair of the ‘realist’: the powerful routed by the weak and unworldly. Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Amalrik. Those who buckled and those who stubbornly held out. They weave in and out of the story of the Soviet dissidents.

“The People and the Party are One!” proclaimed the Soviet Communist regime, while those who protested in Moscow against the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 held up banners with the slogan, “For your freedom and ours!”

In this interview Professor Nathans comments on his research in the Memorial Society in Moscow (since suppressed), and elsewhere, his meetings with the surviving dissidents such as Pavel Litvinov with insightful sidelights on the politics of Pennsylvania and indeed the United States as a whole.

Author of 'To the Success of our Hopeless Cause'

The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement

Benjamin Nathans is interviewed by Roger Howe 

Recorder and produces by

Fresh Air Studios Ltd Plymouth