“Perestroika: The Last Attempt to Create the New Soviet Person, 1985-1991”
narrates the final chapter in the history of Soviet socialist humanism. It reconstructs the imaginary horizons of reformers who saw Perestroika as a response to a pervasive moral crisis, signaled by alienation in the workplace and ennui in society at large. Gorbachev set out to address the crisis (he called it “stagnation”) by transforming the Soviet population, turning each lethargic person into an actively engaged citizen. In this way, reformers followed in the footsteps of their predecessors, attempting once and for all to create the new Soviet person. This study brings the discussion of Soviet subjectivities and Soviet humanism to the study of the late Soviet period by showing how central the vision of socialist man was to the design of Perestroika and by delving into the consequences, intended as well as unintended, of the push for reform.
In a turn away from existing literature on the Gorbachev era, this manuscript examines the evolution of high politics in tandem with popular engagement of reform, insisting that the two are inextricably entangled. Previously untapped archives of public letters—a document that became a symbol of reform—permit a close look at the mechanisms of popular engagement and subjectivization. During Perestroika, citizens used the letter not only to make demands on the state, but to wrestle with their own moral worth in Soviet society. Read in the context of the institutional, social, and political forces that produced the public letter and shaped its meaning, these sources show that Soviet citizens under Gorbachev were not defined primarily by apathy or opposition to the state but were acutely attuned to Soviet politics and actively engaged in a shared effort to improve the workings of the socialist project.
The methodology employed here resists teleological readings of the period, recreates the open-ended historical horizons of the reform project, and takes into view the mostly Soviet and Russian precedents that informed the architects of reform. In so doing, this manuscript challenges studies of Perestroika that view reform as the start of a transition towards liberal capitalism. It raises new questions about the causes of the collapse in 1991 and the politics and popular experience of the post-Soviet 1990s. This study also speaks to research on democratic development at the end of the Cold War, offering a reminder of the multiple models that guided global political change in the pivotal last decades of the twentieth century.
During her stay at the ZZF Potsdam Courtney Doucette researches in Dep I: Communism and Society.
Courtney Doucette is Assistant Professor at Oswego State University of New York (USA)
More about her researches