HUMSS-Colloquium with Benjamin Nathans
Prof. Dr. Benjamin Nathans
History, University of Pensylvania
Recorded on May 4, 2020
This talk explores the idea and practice of rights and the rule of law in an unlikely setting: late Soviet socialism. It offers a framework for understanding how Soviet dissidents, themselves products of Soviet civilization, created the Cold War’s “other” civil rights movement. Understanding this process - how orthodoxies contain the seeds of their own heresies - promises to shed light on a movement whose goal was to promote the containment of the Soviet state from within.
