"A gripping history of the Soviet dissident movement, which hastened the end of the USSR-and still provides a model of opposition in Putin's RussiaBeginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was unexpectedly confronted by a dissident movement that captured the world's imagination. Demand...

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Bibliographische Detailangaben

1. Verfasser:	Nathans, Benjamin (VerfasserIn)
Format:	Elektronisch E-Book
Sprache:	English
Veröffentlicht:	Princeton ; Oxford Princeton University Press [2024]
Schlagworte:	Dissenters / Soviet Union / History Soviet Union / Politics and government / 1945-1991 Social movements / Soviet Union Dissidents / URSS / Histoire URSS / Politique et gouvernement / 1945-1991 Mouvements sociaux / URSS. HISTORY / Russia / General POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Ideologies / Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
Online-Zugang:	DE-188 Volltext
Zusammenfassung:	"A gripping history of the Soviet dissident movement, which hastened the end of the USSR-and still provides a model of opposition in Putin's RussiaBeginning 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 unexpectedly 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"-- "In the 1960s, the Soviet Union found itself unexpectedly challenged from within by a cohort of dissidents who eventually achieved global fame. Their struggle for the rule of law and human rights made them instant heroes in the West, where they appeared as democracy's surrogate soldiers behind the iron curtain. But, as historian Benjamin Nathans argues, theirs was a homegrown phenomenon; activists built the anti-totalitarian movement on fundamental concepts from within the communist pantheon. And their goal was not to topple the Soviet state (a feat they could scarcely imagine) but to exercise a kind of containment of Soviet power from within. Still, the movement was in many ways improbable: a half-century after Lenin launched the world's first socialist society, and a generation after Stalin liquidated millions of "enemies of the people," there was not supposed to be any internal opposition left. What kind of people became dissidents, and how were they able to invent new techniques of social activism, eventually forming the socialist world's first civil and human rights movement? To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause-a title borrowed from the dissidents' favorite toast, pronounced with glasses raised in countless apartments across the USSR's eleven time-zones-tells the story of the people and the ideas that made the movement. Weaving together KGB interrogation and surveillance records with diaries, letters, and an extraordinary number of memoirs, Nathans explains how a movement grew from a chain reaction of individual acts of resistance. He explains its origins in the counterintuitive idea of "civil obedience"-the conviction that human rights could be achieved if only the Soviet regime followed its own constitution and that citizens had to act as if the constitution was the law of the land in the absence of compliance within the governing class.
Beschreibung:	1 Online-Ressource (xiv, 797 Seiten)
ISBN:	9780691255576
DOI:	10.1515/9780691255576