When Did Reforms End? Change or Perpetuity after Socialism

Workshop within the SAW Project "Legacies of Communism? Post-Communist Europe from Stagnation to Reform, between Autocracy and Revolution"

Organised at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History, Potsdam
The workshop will be held in English.

The workshop “When Did Reforms End? Change or Perpetuity after Socialism” will present research from the international research network "Legacies of Communism?".
Additionally, young scholars will be invited and encouraged to present and publish original research on the era of reform, transition and restoration. Geographically the workshop will focus on post-socialist Eastern Europe as well as the post-Soviet realm.

Generously supported by the Leibniz Association, the research network “Legacies of Communism?“ with partners in six countries is hosted by the ZZF in Potsdam. It focuses on historical research of the political and social development of Eastern Europe and the former USSR from late socialism to post-communism. The project explores changes and continuities of political and social elites in post-communist countries across the 1989/1991 divide. It aims to better understand and interpret the rise of authoritarian rule in post- communist societies. In order to approach the legacies of communist rule, senior and junior fellows working from Ukraine, Estonia, Georgia, Poland and Hungary will contribute to the endeavor with their own projects.

Russia’s aggression against Ukraine forces us to re-asses our perspectives on three post-communist decades. Clearly, history was more open than most expected in the 1990s. There were paths to democracy, paths to autocracy as well as paths to dictatorship and even outright state terror. As historians, we need to re-evaluate the period from the 1980s to 2000s in order to better understand our present.

PROGRAMME

Thursday 15 September

10.00 – 10.15
Juliane Fürst / Jan C. Behrends
Welcome by Organisers

10.15 – 11.45
Sofia Dyak (Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, Ukraine)
Heritage Infrastructures on the Ground: Rethinking Late Socialist Developments and Post-Socialist Legacies in Recent War Escalation Context
Corinna Kuhr-Korolev (ZZF Potsdam)
Networks of Russian Museum Professionals from Late Socialism to the Putin-Era

Comments: Ksenia Krimer (Berlin)

11.45 – 12.00 |  Coffee break

12.00 – 13.30
Maren Francke (ZZF Potsdam)
Networks of Hungarian University Students in Property Restitution Conflicts
Semion Goldin (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Becoming Jews: The Story of Leningrad/Petersburg Jewish University in the 1980s1990s

Comments: Irina Gordeeva (ZZF Potsdam)

13.30 – 14.30 | Lunch break

14.30 – 16.00
Dobrochna Kałwa (University of Warsaw, Poland)
Perplexing Legacy? Debates on Women’s Emancipation and Gender Equality in Post1989 Poland
Alexa von Winning (Universität von Tübingen)
Becoming Capitalist: Popular Psychology and the “Cotransformation” of the Post-Soviet People

Comments: Alexandra Talaver (FU Berlin)

16.00 – 16.15 | Coffee break

16.15 – 17.45  ZOOM
Ia Eradze (Ilia State University, Georgia)
The Making of the National Bank of Georgia in the 1990s: Conceptualizing Change and Historical Legacies
Nataliia Otrishchenko (Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, Ukraine)
Redefined Autonomy of Urban Planning Professionals during 1990s: Case of Lviv

Comments: Giorgi Maisuradze (Ilia State University, Georgia)

Friday 16 September

10.00 – 11.30
Balázs Apor (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)
Post-sovietisation: Historical Legacies and the Rising Cult of the Leader in Orban’s Hungary
Anton Liavitski (CEU, Budapest) ZOOM
How Lukashenka Created Authoritarian State in Belarus

Comments: Iryna Ramanava (Universität Gießen)  

11.30 – 11.45 | Coffee break

11.45 – 13.15
Karsten Brüggemann (Tallinn University, Estonia)
The Legacy of Soviet Internationalism and the “Singing Revolution” in the Baltics SSRs
Natalya Domina (Europa-Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt a.O.)
Surviving the 1990s: Borders, Frontiers, and Homelessness in Serhii Zhadan’s “Voroshylovhrad” (2010)

Comments: Katharina Kucher (IOS Regensburg)

13.15 – 14.30 | Lunch break

14.30 – 16.00
Kateryna Chernii (ZZF Potsdam)
Ukrainian Football Clubs during the Post-communist Transformation. Paths of Oligarchization.
Jan C. Behrens (ZZF Potsdam)
Afgancy as Elites in 1990s Russia

Comments: Evgen Zinger (ZZF Potsdam)

16.00 – 16.30
Debate »New Perspectives on a Period of Change«
with Sofia Dyak, Juliane Fürst, Anna Ivanova (Berlin), Zaal Andronikashvili (Berlin, to be confirmed), Jan Behrends