Benjamin Nathans’s recent monograph To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause (2024) employs the term “moral stumbling block” to describe moments that confront a dissident with a moral choice—a dilemma between what is easy and what is right—often propelling them toward specific forms of resistance to the Soviet regime.

Drawing on interviews with founders and participants of diverse Russian educational and research institutions in exile, this paper shows how varied these moral stumbling blocks have been for them as well. Drawing on materials from the Russian Academia in Exile project, I examine how various moral challenges—personal, professional, and institutional—interact and serve as stumbling blocks for scholars making consequential choices. Particular attention is paid to accounts of infringements of academic freedom—above all, censorship—and to the genesis of projects explicitly designed to circumvent censorship.

The conclusion proposes a preliminary typology of moral stumbling blocks and examines their connections to current human rights violations and academic freedom issues in Russia.