Perestroika from Below: Participation, Subjectivities, and Emotional Communities across ‘the End of History’, 1980-2000

Introduction

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.

Research Focus

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.

Methodology

With the help of oral history interviews and other ego-documents, as well as archival and published sources, the project aims to reconstruct individuals' paths into the perestroika experience and follow their trajectories into the 1990s. Hence, it will put the era of reforms into a larger historical and biographical context.

Geographic Focus

The project seeks to re-centre the Soviet provinces and their experiences of perestroika, especially events in the non-European periphery.

Marginalized Voices

It wants to foreground women and other marginalized participants and explore the impact of the many formal and informal international encounters that were suddenly possible in those years.

Key Questions

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.

Analytical Approach

It aims to overcome the dominance of the neoliberal trope dominating current analyses of this time of transformation. Rather, the project will analyze 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.