Benjamin Nathans News Today

Benjamin Nathans, To The Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement. The definitive book on its topic, consisting largely…

The UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy interviewed three historical observers to help provide important context and framing for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

UW CREECA lecture by University of Pennsylvania associate professor Benjamin Nathans, Room 206.

In the early 1980s, while living in exile in West Germany, the late dissident Soviet astrophysicist Kronid Lyubarsky participated in a survey for a magazine about life in the Soviet Union. One question asked what the most productive US policy towards the USSR would be. “Firm pressure” on the Soviet Union to initiate domestic changes, was Lyubarsky’s response, adding that the US would need “patience in following this line since it doesn’t lead to immediate success”. I thought of Ly...