Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Benjamin Nathans came to Colgate University on Thursday, Sept. 25 for a lecture on Soviet dissidents who collectively resisted authoritarianism through “radical civil obedience,” a strategy faculty say parallels current campus and national conversations about the decline of democratic institutions. Nathans, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, drew from his recent book “To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement,” which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.
The event was organized by Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies Stanislav Budnitsky, who invited Nathans, secured funding from across multiple campus institutions and prepared students with background readings to enhance their engagement with Nathan’s research, much of which was drawn from his work with formerly classified Soviet documents. Budnitsky emphasized the contemporary relevance of Nathans’ lecture for university communities facing broader social and political tensions.
“Conversations at Colgate reflect broader societal challenges, as communities everywhere grapple with a seeming decline in trust in democratic institutions. Globally, questions are being raised about whether these institutions can uphold their principles and maintain public confidence,” Budnitsky said. “In this context, Benjamin Nathans’s brilliantly conceived idea of civil obedience is especially insightful [as] a strategy by which Soviet dissidents insisted that the state uphold its own legal and constitutional promises.”
Nathans’s definition of the term “dissident” was expansive, including any Soviet citizen who was involved in underground publishing and distribution — a process called samizdat.
“I’ve talked about the area of who is a dissident to include everybody who participated in the networks of samizdat distribution, who were either creating samizdat or typing, multiplying, disseminating samizdat, or just consuming it, just reading it. There we’re talking about tens of thousands of people, and I feel rather confident about those numbers,” Nathans said.
At the core of Nathans’s lecture was the story of Soviet mathematician Alexander Esenin-Volpin, who became the intellectual architect of the Soviet dissident movement after discovering extensive civil liberties written into Soviet law that were routinely ignored in practice. This led to the first transparency demonstration in December 1965, where protesters demanded open trials for the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, while still strictly adhering to Soviet law. The demonstration — the first spontaneous act of political protest in the Soviet Union since World War II — marked the beginning of the Soviet human rights movement, according to Nathans.
Nathans focused on the movement’s commitment to radical civil obedience — an unconventional form of resistance — explaining that sometimes the most radical act is insisting that governments obey their own rules. Soviet dissidents weren’t trying to overthrow the government, Nathans argued, but rather attempting to create lasting change through entirely legal means.
“This government in [the Soviet Union] doesn’t take its own laws seriously. They’re just there as window dressing. If enough Soviet citizens took the law seriously and insisted collectively that the government obey its own laws, that would be the beginning of a great transformation … Radical civil obedience was about engaging in forms of protests that were already protected by the Soviet Constitution in an effort to pressure the Soviet government to do the same,” Nathans said. “The goal of the dissident movement was to make the Soviet Union a law-abiding system, to spread legal consciousness among the Soviet population.”
Nathans used several metaphors to help explain the concept of radical civil obedience to the audience, first contrasting it with the American Civil Rights Movement’s use of civil disobedience, in which activists in the Jim Crow South would deliberately violate laws of segregation. Radical civil obedience was its own form of containment theory, Nathans said, in which dissidents used the laws of the Soviet Union itself to contain the power of the state. He also used the metaphor of aikido, a modern Japanese form of martial art that emphasizes peaceful conflict resolution over beating an opponent.
“[Aikido] is all about using your opponent’s weight against him or her, so there’s not a lot of kicking and punching involved. It involves grabbing the opponent and leveraging their own weight to bring them down,” Nathans said. “That is, in a sense, what the Soviet dissidents were trying to do, but I want to emphasize they weren’t trying to topple the government.”
Budnitsky drew parallels between the Soviet dissidents’ strategy and current democratic participation, noting how the concept challenges traditional notions of resistance.
“Whereas civil disobedience often involves breaking laws on principle to expose injustice, civil obedience flips the logic. Soviet dissidents resisted by treating the state’s own rules as real and demanding they be enforced. The strategy of insisting that governments honor the laws and norms they themselves establish serves as a powerful reminder that loyalty to rules and procedures can be a genuine form of active democratic participation,” Budnitsky said.
The 1965 transparency demonstration sparked a chain reaction that grew the movement from a handful of protesters to hundreds of participants demanding government accountability. In his award-winning book, Nathans found that their collective dissent directly brought about the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
“It took many, many smaller, sometimes imperceptible events, trends and developments in order to enact that exit from a system that allegedly aggressively defeated, crushed opposing armies,” Nathans said. “I think we’ll really only understand the process of exiting totalitarianism if we see it as a long, drawn out process, with lots of zigs and zags. The people who I argue were the cutting edge, the spearhead of that process were the Soviet dissidents. They were the ones who — before anybody else — began to test the limits of what was sayable under that system.”
Budnitsky explained how Nathans’s research aligns with central themes in Russian and Eurasian Studies programming that resonate further with current campus discussions.
“Nathans’s landmark history of Soviet human rights activism dovetails with central conversations in [Russian and Eurasian Studies],” Budnitsky said. “We regularly explore the relationship between authoritarianism and resistance, asking how individuals and communities assert voice and dignity under repressive conditions.”
Senior Hunter Moss, who is a Russian and Eurasian Studies major, echoed Budnitsky on the relevance of Nathans’s lecture.
“For connecting to my Russian classes, I found very interesting the revolving door of culture, particularly the [samizdat] that made it out of the Soviet Union, past the ‘Iron Curtain’, and I use quotation marks, because Nathans showed it wasn’t as solid as it was supposed to be,” Moss said. “Art influences politics. It’s what the masses think.”
Beyond the historical insights, Budnitsky said he wanted Nathans’s work to help students see themselves as potential agents of change.
“Personally, I hope the lecture encouraged students to see that truth-telling is not just the work of celebrated dissidents but also something ordinary people can do in their own lives. Speaking truth to power does not always mean grand gestures. It can also mean insisting on accountability and refusing to look away,” Budnitsky said. “The example of Soviet dissent reminds us that courage and voice matter in every community, including our own.”
