Participants

Victoria Musvik¹; Juliane Fürst⁴; Julie Hemment⁵; Alina Parker³; Isaac Scarborough²; Kateryna Yeremieieva⁶;  ¹ University of Oxford, UK;  ² Leiden University, Netherlands;  ³ University of Massachusetts Amherst, United States;  ⁴ ZZF Potsdam, Germany;  ⁵ U of Massachusetts Amherst, United States;  ⁶ Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany

Discussion

Perestroika fascinated European and American scholars and became the subject of many a book in the late 1980s-1990s. But in thesubsequent years, it has dropped out of research mainstream, both in the Westand in many countries of the former socialist bloc.  With the ‘end of history’ seemingly came the end of perestroika: the transition and transformation of former communist states was now ‘over’ and there seemed little reason to return to the period.  In practice and lived experience, however, the legacy of this intense period of change, which was begun by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 in Moscow, but went many separate ways in different societies is ongoing, alive, and contested. Methodologically, the field of ‘perestroika studies’ is increasingly diverse, in several disciplines and academic traditions. Even the terminology that describes the period varies, with the choice often political: the ‘post-communist transformation’, ‘period of transition’, ‘new economic policy’, ‘political reforms’, et cetera. The aim of this round table is to bring together researchers from different disciplinary fields, all of whom are working to reevaluate the period of perestroika and its consequences. On the eve of its 40th anniversary, we will reflect on some new paths for thinking about perestroika. We invite anyone who is interested in the period, both those who are already working on the subject or are simply interested in “what happened to perestroika”.

1. Defining the era: chronological and geographical boundaries. 
2. A growing diversity of research approaches to perestroika: combining angles and looking simultaneously. What can collaborations bring to our knowledge of the period?
3. Going beyond the verbal and other conventional modes of cultural production: studying the visual, history of emotions, affect theory, trauma and memory studies etc.
4. The euphoria of freedom or catastroika? Unearthing the uncomfortable truths about the era.
5. Insider and outsider knowledge: a scholar as a witness, researcher’s subjectivity, generational gaps, and defamiliarising the well-known territory.
6. The left and the right: was perestroika a socialist endeavour and do our own contemporary political views and conflicts influence the ways that we look at it?
7. Providing an alternative. Can knowledge about the period of post-socialist transformation be useful for those who criticize neoliberal capitalism in the West?
8. New challenges. How can new reflection in the SEES area influence our knowledge of perestroika? Looking at the post-1985 transition after the 2022 Russian full-scale invasion into Ukraine: decolonising area studies.