Benjamin Nathans wins 2025 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction

Benjamin Nathans, Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term Professor of History, won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction for his book To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement. The narrative tells the story of the men and women who, beginning in the 1960s, demanded that the Kremlin obey its own laws.

In describing the reason for selecting Nathans’ book as this year’s winner, the committee called 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.” Nathans joins just six others from Penn who have earned Pulitzers, including, most recently, Tyshawn Sorey, Presidential Assistant Professor of Music, in 2024.
 
Prior to writing To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause, Nathans authored Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia, which won the Koret Prize in Jewish History, the Vucinich Prize in Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies, the Lincoln Prize in Russian History, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in History. He also co-edited of Culture Front: Representing Jews in Eastern Europe and From Europe’s East to the Middle East: Israel’s Russian and Polish Lineages.

Nathans has been at Penn since 1998, teaching and writing about Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, modern European Jewish history, and the history of human rights. He earned his PhD and master’s degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and his bachelor’s degree from Yale.