Not only does Gilion host the European Reading Challenge and TBR 25 in 25 Challenge on her Rose City Reader blog but also Book Beginnings on Friday. While I’m no stranger to her European Reading Challenge, a few years ago I decided to finally participate in Book Beginnings on Friday. After taking last week off I’ve returned with another post.

For Book Beginnings on Friday Gilion asks us to simply “share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week, or just a book that caught your fancy and you want to highlight.”

MY BOOK BEGINNING

In memoirs by participants in the Soviet dissident movement, an obscure name usually appears near the beginning of the story. No one claims that Alexander Volpin founded the movement. In good Soviet collectivist style, the movement had no founder, and, in any case, an eccentric mathematician known to walk the streets of Moscow in his house slippers would have been an unlikely candidate for that role.

Last week I featured John le Carré’s 2008 espionage novel A Most Wanted Man. Before that it was Laurence Bergreen’s 2003 Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe. This week it’s Benjamin Nathans’s 2025 Pulitzer Prize winner To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement.

Unlike some of the books I’ve featured of late I purchased this only a few months ago. After originally spotting it in the new books section at my rural public library I opted instead to buy a copy for my Kindle figuring it’s the kind of book I’d rather own and read at a leisurely pace. After hearing David Frum praise the book on his podcast a few days later I knew I’d made the right purchase. As some of you might remember I’m hoping to read this in 2026 along with Hedrick Smith’s 1976 best-seller The Russians and Moshe Lewin’s 2005 The Soviet Century. Who knows, maybe I’ll cap it all off with Catherine Belton’s 2020 Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West.

Here’s what Amazon has to say about To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause.

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 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.”