To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause
The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
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Narrated by:
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Rich Miller
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By:
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Benjamin Nathans
About this listen
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 Russia
Beginning 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.
“A brilliant book about the success of a hopeless cause, the practicality of self-sacrifice, and the extraordinary transformation of a one-man campaign to follow fictitious laws into an international human rights movement. A remarkable achievement.”—Yuri Slezkine, author of The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution
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Story
A Century of Tomorrows offers an illuminating account of how the world was transformed by the science (or is it?) of futurecasting. Beneath the chaos of competing tomorrows, Adamson reveals a hidden order: six key themes that have structured visions of what’s next. Helping him to tell this story are remarkable characters, including self-proclaimed futurologists such as Buckminster Fuller and Stewart Brand, as well as an eclectic array of other visionaries who have influenced our thinking about the world ahead.
By: Glenn Adamson
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Out
- How Brexit Got Done and the Tories Were Undone
- By: Tim Shipman
- Narrated by: Leighton Pugh
- Length: 42 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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How did Boris Johnson supersede Theresa May to become Britain's Prime Minister? How did he pursue his promise to Get Brexit Done amidst multiple Brexit secretaries, repeated coup attempts and reshuffles, and an extraordinarily terse relationship with Brussels? What really happened in Downing Street – from the political choices to the party place settings – as the pandemic took the world in its grip? Out follows from May's resignation through to the tussles over the final Brexit deal, the government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and our shortest serving PM ever.
By: Tim Shipman
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America, América
- A New History of the New World
- By: Greg Grandin
- Length: 17 hrs
- Unabridged
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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, the first comprehensive history of the Western Hemisphere, a sweeping five-century narrative of North and South America that redefines our understanding of both.
By: Greg Grandin
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Forged in War
- A military history of Russia from its beginnings to today
- By: Mark Galeotti
- Narrated by: Simon Shepherd
- Length: 15 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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The national identity has been forged in the furnace of war. From the medieval kingdom of Rus battling against a Scandinavian princes and Mongol emperors, to its own empire-building conflicts in 19th-century Asia, to the formative wars of the 20th century which saw Russia pitch from Tsarist empire to communist state and defender against Nazism, all these conflicts stained the lands of Russia red with blood. A weak post-Cold War Russia then turned to Putin, who created a new mood for martial triumphalism which led directly to the Ukrainian war.
By: Mark Galeotti
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Iron Curtain
- The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956
- By: Anne Applebaum
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 26 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete.
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Important story, imperfectly executed
- By jackifus on 12-08-12
By: Anne Applebaum