Cella Virgilio

A Torino giovedì 29 maggio alle 16:30 presso la sala convegni della Fondazione Luigi Einaudi (via principe Amedeo 34) si tiene la presentazione del volume To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause. The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton University Press 2024) di Benjamin Nathans. In collaborazione con il dipartimento di Studi storici dell’Università di Torino la Fondazione Luigi Einaudi in occasione del ciclo di incontri Il libro del giovedì ospita i nostri Simone Bellezza, Giulia De Florio e Alberto Masoero. L’incontro prevede la presentazione del volume To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause dello storico americano Benjamin Nathans, vincitore del premio Pulitzer 2025, dedicato alla storia del movimento della dissidenza sovietica. È possibile seguire l’incontro in presenza e on line sul canale YouTube della Fondazione Luigi Einaudi: Benvenuti sul canale della Fondazione Einaudi. Per maggiori informazioni: “To the success of our hopeless cause. The many lives of the Soviet dissident movement” di Benjamin Nathans | 29 maggio 2025, ore 16.30 – Fondazione Luigi Einaudi. Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was unexpectedly confronted by a dissident movement that captured the world’s imagination. Demanding that the Kremlin obey its own laws, an improbable band of Soviet citizens held unauthorized public gatherings, petitioned in support of arrested intellectuals, and circulated banned samizdat texts. Soviet authorities arrested dissidents, subjected them to bogus trials and vicious press campaigns, sentenced them to psychiatric hospitals and labor camps, sent them into exile – and transformed them into martyred heroes. Against all odds, the dissident movement undermined the Soviet system and hastened its collapse. Taking its title from a toast made at dissident gatherings, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause is a definitive history of a remarkable group of people who helped change the twentieth century. Benjamin Nathans’s vivid narrative tells the dramatic story of the men and women who became dissidents – from Nobel laureates Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn to many others who are virtually unknown today. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, personal letters, interviews, and KGB interrogation records, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause reveals how dissidents decided to use Soviet law to contain the power of the Soviet state. This strategy, as one of them put it, was “simple to the point of genius: in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.” An extraordinary account of the Soviet dissident movement, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause shows how dissidents spearheaded the struggle to break free of the USSR’s totalitarian past, a struggle that continues in Putin’s Russia – and that illuminates other struggles between hopelessness and perseverance today.