Penn Professor Benjamin Nathans wins Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction
His 2024 book 'To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause' is a study of dissent in the USSR, from Stalin's death to the fall of communism.
University of Pennsylvania history professor Benjamin Nathans is 2025’s Pulitzer Prize winner for general nonfiction. His latest work, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, has won Nathans $15,000 and the prize that’s awarded to “a distinguished and appropriately documented book of nonfiction by an American author.”
Nathans is the Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term Professor of History at Penn, and teaches Imperial Russian and Soviet history, along with modern Jewish history and history of human rights.
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause, published last year by Princeton University Press, is a study of dissent in the USSR, starting from Stalin’s death to the collapse of communism. “It explores the idea and practice of rights and the rule of law in the setting of ‘mature socialism,’” according to UPenn.
The Pulitzer citation calls it “a prodigiously researched and revealing history of Soviet dissent, how it was repeatedly put down and came to life again, populated by a sprawling cast of courageous people dedicated to fighting for threatened freedoms and hard-earned rights.”
A Yale and University of California at Berkeley alum, Nathans joined UPenn as an assistant professor of history in 1998, after having taught history and Jewish Studies at Indiana University. He has taught across the world including stints at École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris and University College London.
His 2002 book, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter With Late Imperial Russia, received the Koret Prize in Jewish History, the Lincoln Prize in Russian History, and the Vucinich Prize in Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies.
Nathans is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. He’s also a sought-after commentator on current Russian affairs.
Finalists for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction were Rollo Romig’s I Am on the Hit List: A Journalist’s Murder and the Rise of Autocracy in India and Rachel Nolan’s Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala.