Read by Rich Miller

A gripping history of the Soviet dissident movement, which hastened the end of the USSR-and still providesa model of opposition in Putin's RussiaBeginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was unexpectedly confronted by a dissident movement that capturedthe world's imagination. Demanding that the Kremlin obey its own laws, an improbable band of Sovietcitizens held unauthorized public gatherings, petitioned in support of arrested intellectuals, and circulatedbanned samizdat texts. Soviet authorities arrested dissidents, subjected them to bogus trials and vicious presscampaigns, sentenced them to psychiatric hospitals and labor camps, sent them into exile-and transformedthem into martyred heroes. Against all odds, the dissident movement undermined the Soviet system andunexpectedly hastened its collapse. Taking its title from a toast made at dissident gatherings, To the Success ofOur Hopeless Cause is a definitive history of a remarkable group of people who helped change the twentiethcentury.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 virtuallyunknown today. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, personal letters, interviews, and KGB interrogation records, Tothe Success of Our Hopeless Cause reveals how dissidents decided to use Soviet law to contain the power ofthe 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 showshow dissidents spearheaded the struggle to break free of the USSR's totalitarian past, a struggle that continuesin Putin's Russia-and that illuminates other struggles between hopelessness and perseverance today

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