Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PerefromBelow21 (Perestroika from Below: Participation, Subjectivities, and Emotional Communities across ‘the End of History’, 1980-2000)
Reporting period: 2022-08-01 to 2025-01-31
The project Perestroika from below is based on a simple but radical re-thinking of Gorbachev's reform period. Rather than looking from the vantage point of the Soviet Politburo and international leaders, we pay attention to the people who 'made' and 'unmade' Perestroika: ordinary Soviet citizens who engaged in the debates and actions of this very intense time. Our aim is to overhaul the image of this pivotal period of change by reversing our assumptions about agency. Perestroika and the subsequent 1990s were the crucial years in which current identities were formed and historical memories created. It was during Perestroika that the agenda of topics which still engages Eastern Europe was set: democracy, independence, nationalism, environmentalism, language politics, interpretations of the past, freedom of the press, minority rights, cultural liberties and much more. The main objective of our project is to increase the empirical knowledge of the Perestroika years and provide new and thought-provoking interpretative models. We situate Perestroika in a longue durée, highlighting the fact that it is best understood in a continuum of Soviet and post-Soviet history. As such perestroika, as initiated and enacted from below, is crucial for understanding the dynamics and long-term trajectories of the period. We are using archival documents, oral history, personal papers, material, visual and audio sources to create a dense net of testimony about the period and open up new data sets for future researchers. In all our work we pay particular attention to individual agency, subjectivity and emotional experiences, centering people not policies.
Since the beginning of the project in August 2022 we have assembled our project team, recruiting two doctoral students in addition to the named postdoctoral team members. In addition to starting our individual research projects, we have been very successful in creating a vivid communication space in which both project team members and outside guests are able to explore and discuss new approaches to the study of perestroika. We have set up a long-term collaboration with a related research project, which is looking at the perestroika years in Eastern Europe run by Victoria Pehe at the Institute of Contemporary History, and with an interdisciplinary initiative for integrating literary and historical studies on Perestroika run by Kelly Smith and Bradley Gorsky at Georgetown University. We decided to organize a series of three workshops together, highlighting different and new aspects of how to understand the reforms from the viewpoint of individual people rather than politics. The first of these workshops – Re-defining Peresytroika - took place in Prague in March 2024 and was very successful as a space to learn and exchange, especially because it covered many ‘peripheral’ sites of Perestroika and indeed questioned if the term ‘periphery’ is indeed appropriate for events that often lead to significant structural and mental changes.
We have also run a seminary series in conjunction with the Eastern European Institute and Robert Kindler at the Free University, to which we invited scholars working in our field and in particular on topics of interest to our PhD students. The project has gathered much interest all around the world and has established itself at the forefront of current discussion about perestroika.
Our primary focus has, however, been on our field research and the collection of hitherto neglected or underused sources with regards to Perestroika. We have carried out fieldwork in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, USA, Israel, Great Britain and Germany. In our holidays and by individual choice, we have also consulted archives and other sources in Ukraine. We have assembled much new knowledge about Perestroika, not least because we have specifically sought out topics that have so far escaped scholarly attention or have not been brought in connection with Perestroika. As such we have also broadened the scholarly attention of the term ‘Perestroika’.
We have explored a variety of new angles of investigation. With the war in Ukraine, theories of decolonization have entered the Soviet field. We have incorporated this new paradigm, which has been a useful lens through which to connect perestroika with the rise of national independence movements and which has added yet another dimension to the processes of transformation. Yet, we are very aware of the tension in this interpretative model, since we have also been struck by the similarities that governed the Perestroika actions from below in places all across the Soviet Union which are geographically and culturally very far from each other and yet were bound by similar concerns. War, repression and authoritarian policies towards scholarly work in many post-Soviet states have hampered our efforts to reach many archives, yet have forced us to explore more hidden or unknown depositories of sources, not least those that are located in the West. Overall, despite the multiple challenges of accessing sources, all project members have made significant inroads into exploring entirely new avenues of thinking and talking about perestroika.
We have also run a seminary series in conjunction with the Eastern European Institute and Robert Kindler at the Free University, to which we invited scholars working in our field and in particular on topics of interest to our PhD students. The project has gathered much interest all around the world and has established itself at the forefront of current discussion about perestroika.
Our primary focus has, however, been on our field research and the collection of hitherto neglected or underused sources with regards to Perestroika. We have carried out fieldwork in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, USA, Israel, Great Britain and Germany. In our holidays and by individual choice, we have also consulted archives and other sources in Ukraine. We have assembled much new knowledge about Perestroika, not least because we have specifically sought out topics that have so far escaped scholarly attention or have not been brought in connection with Perestroika. As such we have also broadened the scholarly attention of the term ‘Perestroika’.
We have explored a variety of new angles of investigation. With the war in Ukraine, theories of decolonization have entered the Soviet field. We have incorporated this new paradigm, which has been a useful lens through which to connect perestroika with the rise of national independence movements and which has added yet another dimension to the processes of transformation. Yet, we are very aware of the tension in this interpretative model, since we have also been struck by the similarities that governed the Perestroika actions from below in places all across the Soviet Union which are geographically and culturally very far from each other and yet were bound by similar concerns. War, repression and authoritarian policies towards scholarly work in many post-Soviet states have hampered our efforts to reach many archives, yet have forced us to explore more hidden or unknown depositories of sources, not least those that are located in the West. Overall, despite the multiple challenges of accessing sources, all project members have made significant inroads into exploring entirely new avenues of thinking and talking about perestroika.
The project’s proposal to investigate Perestroika from below has by itself broken beyond how Perestroika is normally assessed. Our assumption that a strong concentration of scholars with good resources could make a decisive intervention to the field has proven to be right. Perestroika from below has become one of the big topics in the field, and the period has re-entered both scholarly as well as public consciousness in ways how it has not been true for thirty years. We would contend that since the beginning of the project we have made a number of more specific interventions which are path-breaking. First, with projects such as Corinna Kuhr-Korolev’s comparative study of museum policies and personnel, which takes in museums in Uzbekistan, Estonia, Latvia and Russia demonstrates that in our modern times of KI translation help, it is possible to work across the entire Soviet space and write history that is genuinely Soviet and yet not focused on Moscow. Our PhD student Abigail Scripka represents the new generation of researchers who come to Soviet history not by virtue of being Russianists but specialists in Central Asia. Her PhD dissertation will truly turn around the common notions of periphery and center. Finally, the PI’s exploration of Perestroika through the vocabulary of the history of emotions is merging two separate narratives of Perestroika: the emotional first-hand first-hand account of people who lived through the period and the scholarly treatment, which noted these emotions mostly only in passing.
As we enter the third year of the project our most difficult challenge remains the war in Ukraine, not only because it prevents us from accessing sources, but because its emotional and intellectual fall-out is significant, especially among our colleagues who are from Ukraine. We also have team members who have been displaced as Russian political emigrees and are working together with émigré scholars from Belarus. While current events are placing a burden on the project, we also feel that by providing a scholarly haven, the project has fulfilled a scholarly function that was not previewed but is of utmost importance.
As we enter the third year of the project our most difficult challenge remains the war in Ukraine, not only because it prevents us from accessing sources, but because its emotional and intellectual fall-out is significant, especially among our colleagues who are from Ukraine. We also have team members who have been displaced as Russian political emigrees and are working together with émigré scholars from Belarus. While current events are placing a burden on the project, we also feel that by providing a scholarly haven, the project has fulfilled a scholarly function that was not previewed but is of utmost importance.