2025 Recipient

Benjamin Nathans

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

Established in 1983, the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, sponsored by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at Stanford University, is awarded annually for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences published in English in the United States 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)  

Benjamin Nathans’s To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause is a feat of meticulous, creative scholarship and compelling historical narrative. Nathans avoids both triumphalist and tragic framings for late Soviet dissent, offering instead a complex and densely interwoven account assembled from archival sources, memoirs, samizdat, and much more. Soviet dissent gained its initial purchase, Nathans shows, through the unlikely insistence that the Soviet Union follow its own laws, and it snowballed—along unexpected, contingent, and tumultuous paths—into a broad rights-based movement with international connections. The book is masterful in its depiction of dissidents’ many contradictions. Although the movement was fired by broadly humanistic values, for instance, it mirrored divisions in Soviet society, compromising dissidents’ appeal beyond the metropolitan intelligentsia circles. Nonetheless, the dissidents’ legacies live on, as their bravery inspires a new generation of victims of political repression. A seemingly hopeless cause, but perhaps ultimately not unsuccessful. This book’s significance goes beyond history: it is of immense value to political scientists and political sociologists studying the dynamics of dissenting movements in post-communist Russia and beyond. It is also gripping and elegantly written. To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause offers the definitive account of the Soviet dissident movement to date and a shining example of what long-term, patiently researched, finely crafted historical scholarship can offer.  

Winner: Masha Salazkina

Honorable Mention: Agnieszka Pasieka

Prize Committee: Douglas Rogers (chair), Sibelan Forrester, Tomila Lankina, and Willard Sunderland