Development of the Human Rights Movement in Contemporary Russia (1991-2022)
The project seeks to examine the determinants of the Russian human rights movement’s development from the early 1990s to the early 2020. In pursuit of this question, I will examine how human rights defenders acted in public, how effective this activism was, what specifically they managed to change in the political system and in people’s lives, how significant the impact of external factors was, including political and financial support from abroad and (re-)actions by the authorities. Furthermore, I seek to explore the identities of the human rights defenders, their motivations, worldviews, and the extent to which their skills aligned with the challenges whey confronted. Finally, in response to the contemporary public inquiry, I aim to elucidate whether the war of aggressions against Ukraine unleashed by Putin and his associates can be attributed to a failure of the human rights movement. Employing historical and anthropological methodologies, my aim is to craft a comprehensive historical investigation of the Russian human rights movement during the post-Soviet era.
Andrey Suslov is involved in Department I: Communism and Society during his stay as a PostDoc-Stipendiat at the ZZF Potsdam.
Andrey Suslov was a professor of Modern Russian History department in Perm State Humanitarian Pedagogical University and taught Russian History of XX and XXI centuries, History of Political Repression in the USSR, Human Rights, etc. His first thesis (kandidatskaya dissertation) was on internal and external party struggle in the Ural region in 1919-1927. The theme of his second (doctor’s) thesis was Spetskontingent in Perm Region, 1929-1953. In the 2010s, one of the significant topics of his research was the history of collectivization and dekulakization in the Urals. In addition, he was a board member of the Perm Memorial Society for more than thirty years and directed the NGO Center for Civic Education and Human Rights for more than twenty years. In 2022 he left Russia. Currently, his topic is the History of the Human Rights Movement in Contemporary Russia.
Vita (pdf)
Publication list (pdf)