Project description
Rewriting Perestroika history
Perestroika is commonly known as the reform of the Soviet political and social structure by the upper echelon during the late 1980s. But the EU-funded PerefromBelow21 project aims to demonstrate that diverse groups played a key role in redefining Soviet life, history and future in the 80s and 90s, whether they were for or against the official policy. It will focus on women and other marginalised people as well as formal and informal international encounters that surfaced during that period. PerefromBelow21 will shed light on who was behind Perestroika and the narrative of the period, identifying them as members of emotional and affective communities.
Objective
The project ‘Perestroika from Below’ intends to research and write a new history of a well-known, yet under-researched, moment in Soviet history, countering the dominant perception of perestroika as primarily reforms from above. It wants to redirect the scholarly gaze towards the large number of Soviet citizens who participated in and sponsored the ambitious attempt to redefine Soviet life, history and future in the 1980s and 90s. This will include not only so-called liberal and democratic forces (labels are one of the many aspects of perestroika that needs revisiting), but also the numerous nationalist, religious and subcultural elements, who were products and producers of the process of restructuring, at times in alignment with, and at times contra, official policy. With the help of oral history interviews and other ego-documents as well as archival and published sources, the project aims to reconstruct individuals’ path into the perestroika experience and follow their trajectories into the 1990s, hence putting the era of reforms into a larger historical and biographical context. The project seeks to re-centre the Soviet provinces and their experiences of perestroika, especially events in the non-European periphery. It wants to foreground women and other marginalised participants and explore the impact of the many formal and informal international encounters that were suddenly possible in those years. In the process the project will address not only important questions about what made people ‘do’ Perestroika but also question the chronology of the era with its sudden beginning in 1987 and radical end in 1991. It aims to overcome the dominance of the ‘neoliberal’ trope dominating current analyses of this time of transformation. Rather, the project will analyse people’s motivations, thoughts and actions less in terms of political orientation, but more by identifying them as members of emotional and affective communities, who rallied around specific emotives.
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
14467 Potsdam
Germany