The Department of History is pleased to invite you to its Departmental Research Seminar
with Juliane Fürst on
Trauma, pride and beauty: towards an emotional history of Perestroika from below
Abstract: Perestroika is usually associated with reforms from above and especially with the name of Mikhail Gorbachev. Yet Perestroika would not have ushered in the rapid changes that took place between 1987 and 1991, if not so many sections of Soviet society responded to the call with a plethora of actions, re-actions and re-definitions, contributing to the colourful tapestry that made up Soviet life in its final hours. Rather than engaging in the endless debate about the inevitability of collapse, looking at subjective experiences of people with and during Perestroika allows the historian to recover the agency of the Soviet people both individually and collectively, while at the same time situating Perestroika within a longer durée, stretching from late socialism into the years of democratic and capitalist transformation. It permits to grasp Perestroika less as a set of legislative practices and political initiatives but more as an atmosphere or sensory experience, whose defining characteristic is best described in emotional or affective terms.
This paper is an early attempt to lay out an ‘emotional history’ of Perestroika, meaning a history that takes emotions, their discourse and their practice as the starting point for understanding what this period of rapid change meant for ordinary citizens and how it became both incubator as well as product of their actions and feeling. It will look at three different emotional experiences from three very different methodological angles. Trauma was a new term entering Soviet vocabulary together with a new freedom to define it. Western and Soviet psychologists entered an unprecedented joint conversation to give meaning to this new concept, which allowed them to re-interpret the past. Pride is rarely mentioned as an emotional trope of the time, but the case study of a photographer’s collective in Kyiv demonstrates that it was a major motivation for sustained action and society-building. Finally, beauty is analyzed as an emotive, which promised happiness yet resulted in a very mixed legacy of both emancipation and humiliation.
Bio: Juliane Fürst is head of the department ‘Communism and Society’ at the Centre of Contemporary History at Potsdam, lecturer at the Humboldt University in Berlin and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol. She has published a monograph on the Soviet hippie movement titled Flowers through Concrete: Explorations in the Soviet Hippieland (OUP, 2021) and is the author of Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Late Socialism and, among others, the editor of Dropping Out of Socialism: Alternative Spheres in the Soviet Bloc (Lexington, 2016) and The Cambridge History of Communism Vol. III (2017). She is currently the Principal Investigator of the project ‘Perestroika from below: Participation, Biography and Emotional Communities 1980-1999’, which is funded by an ERC Advanced Grant.
The Zoom link will be sent upon request. Please contact Margaretha Boockmann: boockmannm@ceu.edu