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Podcast: ChinaTalk
Episode: Dissent from Moscow to Beijing
Description: To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement — the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Professor Ben Nathans — is perhaps the sharpest, richest, and funniest account of the Soviet dissident movement ever written. Today, we’ll interview Nathans alongside the legendary Ian Johnson, whose recent book Sparks explores the Chinese dissident ecosystem.
We discuss…
The central enigma of the Soviet dissident movement — their boldness in the face of hopeless odds,
How cybernetics, Wittgenstein, and one absent-minded professor shaped the intellectual backbone of post-Stalinist dissent,
Why the Soviet Union was such fertile ground for...