The Long Perestroika from Below: Centering the Peripheries
Workshop, 1-3 June 2026, Kloster Seeon, Bavaria
Call for Papers
Perestroika has found much renewed attention in the last few years after a period of relative silence and disinterest. This is to no small extent due to the fact that the years of reform in the 1980s and 1990s seem to hold the key to much what is happening in our contemporary world: postimperial wars, political polarization, social stratification and economic inequalities. And yet the look back to the years of reform and transformation remains strangely fixed around the same powerful actors and the same sites of power. The stranglehold of high politics in the historical research of perestroika has started to give way to studies focusing on a variety of actors outside the echelons of power, but the geographical focus has remained on Russia’s big cities with a few notable exceptions. After two previous workshops in Prague and Washington DC dedicated to new vocabularies for studying Perestroika and to the cultural processes and production of the period, we devote this last meeting to the endeavour of centering the peripheries central and asking questions about experiences of Perestroika that privilege the subjective, the individual, the marginalized, the hidden and the unrecognized.
We invite proposals for papers that look at ›the long Perestroika‹ – a period stretching from late socialism to the end of the Yeltsin period – from a viewpoint of people living, working and acting outside the centres of power. This may include actors of local power, the social and cultural underground, socially marginalized groups, ethnic minorities, and other historical agents who have been neglected in the dominant narratives of and about Perestroika. We encourage submissions of proposals relating to the post-Soviet as well as the Eastern and Central European space, understood not only as a periphery to the Soviet centre of power, but also as a region that underwent its own local iterations of Perestroika and subsequent transformations, with its own dynamics of centralization and peripheralization.
The workshop will be funded by the ERC grant »Perestroika from Below«. We are able to cover all costs incurred by our participants, including travel, visa, accommodation and meals. The workshop will take place in the former Benedictine cloister Seeon in upper Bavaria, which was once home to some of the surviving members of the Romanov dynasty after the revolution. It is now a conference centre run by the Bavarian state and situated in the spectacular landscape of the Chiemgau.
Selected papers will be invited to contribute to the anthology Perestroika from Below (planned for publication in 2027), which will assemble submissions from all three workshops conducted by our consortium plus invited contributors. The volume has tentatively been accepted by CEU Press and aims to become the comprehensive showcase of current research on Perestroika as viewed from below.
Please submit a proposal of no more than 300-400 words and a short CV (one page) to Margarita Pavlova (margarita [dot] pavlova [at] zzf-potsdam [dot] de (margarita[dot]pavlova[at]zzf-potsdam[dot]de)) by 15 December 2025. Successful applicants will be notified by 31 December 2025.
For further questions please contact Juliane Fürst (fuerst [at] zzf-potsdam [dot] de (fuerst[at]zzf-potsdam[dot]de) ).
Juliane Fürst, CEU/ZZF Potsdam
Bradley Gorski, Georgetown University
Corinna Kuhr-Korolev, ZZF Potsdam
Veronika Pehe, Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences
Kelly Smith, Georgetown University
The project »Perestroika from Below: Participation, Subjectivities, and Emotional Communities across ›the End of History‹, 1980–2000« is supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 101054550, project acronym PerefromBelow21).
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.