Join Tom Firestone for a fascinating conversation with Benjamin Nathans, Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Tom and Professor Nathans discuss his Pulitzer Prize winning book, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement and cover a number of interesting topics, including:
- The concept of “civil obedience” and how a dictatorship’s own laws can be used to combat it
- Why did “Respect the Soviet Constitution” become a slogan for some Soviet dissidents
- What KGB files reveal about KGB interrogation techniques and the role of the KGB in the Soviet Union
- The dilemmas faced by international NGOs in supporting human rights movements in dictatorships
