Benjamin Nathans > Quotes

“When we study how law functions in a given society, what should draw our keenest attention is the tension not between law and reality but between law in theory and law in practice.”
― Benjamin Nathans, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement

“The West’s adversarial political system, in which all manner of decisions were made by majority rule, was little more than a refined version of civil war, replacing one form of coercion (fighting) with another (voting).”
― Benjamin Nathans, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement

“The notion that successful reform can emerge exclusively from within the ruling elite belongs among Russia’s most enduring and self-perpetuating myths, shared by figures as diverse as Gorbachev and Putin. Reforms initiated from outside the elite, so the argument goes, are doomed to failure, mass violence, or both. Never mind that such reforms have often been stymied by the elite itself, fearful of losing its monopoly of power, or that numerous reforms initiated from above have failed miserably.”
― Benjamin Nathans

“The deeper drama was not between signers and non signers, but within each individual signer. Putting one’s name on an open petition marked ‘a step toward internal liberation—and for many that step was decisive. This or that particular signature might have no significance whatsoever for the country’s political situation, but for the signer himself, it could become a kind of catharsis.”
― Benjamin Nathans, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement

“The political apathy that KGB chairman Vladimir Semichastnyi feared was spreading across Soviet society in the 1960s was now treated as an asset by his successor, Vladimir Putin.”
― Benjamin Nathans, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement