Mary Page talks with Benjamin Nathans, the Alan Charles Kors Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Nathans teaches and writes about Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, modern European Jewish history, and the history of human rights at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author and editor of a number of books on Russian history, the history of Russian Jewry and human rights. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and an occasional commentator on current Russian affairs. His current book project, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement, tells the story of dissent in the USSR from Stalin’s death to the collapse of communism. The video can be seen in full on YouTube or below [a short extract from the interview on the current attacks on the Memorial civil society organisation is also available here].
