“I still can’t quite believe it.”
That’s what Benjamin Nathans, the Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term Professor of History in Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences, told the Gazette nearly two weeks after winning the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction for his engrossing history of civil rights and pro-democracy activists in the USSR, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton University Press, 2024).
The Pulitzer committee described the book as “a prodigiously researched and revealing history of Soviet dissent, how it was repeatedly put down and came to life again, populated by a sprawling cast of courageous people dedicated to fighting for threatened freedoms and hard-earned rights.” The Gazette felt much the same way, running a lengthy Q&A with Nathans about the book earlier this year [“Arts,” Jan|Feb 2025].
Nathans is also the author of Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (University of California Press, 2002), which won the Koret Prize in Jewish History, the Vucinich Prize in Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies, and the Lincoln Prize in Russian History. A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, he has taught at Penn since 1998, leading courses on Russian, European, and Jewish history as well as the history of human rights.
—TP
