2025 Recipient

Benjamin Nathans

To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement

The Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History, established in 2009 and sponsored by the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe, or Eurasia in the field of history in the previous calendar year. 

Winner: Benjamin Nathans, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton University Press, 2024) 

In To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause, Benjamin Nathans offers a sweeping and prodigiously researched history of Soviet dissent from the 1960s through the late Soviet era. Drawing on personal narratives, court records, and underground publications, he traces how ordinary citizens, including writers, scientists, and poets, emerged as moral actors determined to hold the Soviet regime accountable to the very principles and laws it claimed to uphold. Narrated with elegance and nuance, the book immerses readers in the rich world of dissident activity, from kitchen-table conversations and samizdat to open letters and public demonstrations, all unfolding within a political system widely seen as unchangeable. Rather than framing human rights as Western imports, Nathans shows how these ideals were forged from the ground up under oppressive regimes, often at great personal cost. The book reveals the potential of individuals to confront seemingly unbreakable dictatorships and, against all odds, bring about change. Remarkably, the lessons of the dissident movement remain relevant in today’s Russia and beyond. 

Winner: Simon Morrison

Honorable Mention: Jeffrey S. Hardy

Prize Committee: Stephen Norris (chair), Małgorzata Fidelis, and Eren Tasar