Benjamin Nathans, the Alan Charles Kors Term Associate Professor of History in the School of Arts & Sciences, has received two awards for his 2024 book To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement. Awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, the book recently received two additional honors from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES).

One award is the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, which ASEEES announces annually with support from the Stanford University Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. The honor recognizes “the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences published in English in the United States” in the past year. 

ASEEES also awarded Dr. Nathans the Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History, which is sponsored by the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. That prize goes to “an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe, or Eurasia in the field of history” in the past year. 

Both awards will be presented at the ASEEES Annual Convention in November.