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.
