Workshop of the SAW-research network "Legacies of Communism. Post-Communist Europe from Stagnation to Reform, between Autocracy and Revolution"
The workshop will focus on post-socialist Eastern Europe as well as the post-Soviet realm. In our discussions we will re-think the notion of a long lasting reform-era and ask how, when, why and to what avail the new beginnings of the 1980s ended in particular countries. Additionally, the conference will present research from the international research network. Young scholars will be invited and encouraged to present and publish original research on the era of reform, transition and restoration.
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.