Deadline: July 31, 2026
edited by Juliane Fürst, Bradley Gorski, Veronika Pehe, Kathleen Smith
We invite submissions of abstracts for a collective volume to be published by CEU Press under the title “The Long Perestroika from Below.” The volume will be open access and aims for publication in the summer of 2027. It wants to be a comprehensive overview over the historical research on Perestroika ‘from below’, meaning the experience of and activism in perestroika actions, which took place across Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and outside the centres of political power usually associated with the reforms and campaigns of the time. We encourage scholars at all stages of their career to participate in this volume, which aims to turn perestroika research on its head by switching the perspective of investigation from Gorbachev and political elites to society.
The Long Perestroika from Below intends to make an important intervention in the understanding and framing of the end of the socialist project and the early years of postsocialism. Successive generations of historians and political scientists have made Gorbachev’s name virtually synonymous with the policies of glasnost and perestroika and thus confined it to the years 1985 to 1991. Yet perestroika could never have developed its momentous impact had it not been for the fact that millions of people engaged with its underlying ideas enthusiastically (or with hostility) and interpreted them according to their own preferences. Perestroika could also not have developed its momentum had it not been for decades in which rudimentary and proto-reforms and changes had been debated and trialed in certain sections of society. The roots and repercussions of the reform period are located deep in late socialism and extend far into the 1990s and 2000s. We contest that the parameters of the ‘long’ differ widely across regions and milieux and need to be understood in a flexible manner.
Indeed, because perestroika is not understood here merely as a policy introduced by the Communist Party, but rather as a multifaceted social and cultural process, we invite contributions that extend this conception to Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries that experienced their own forms of late socialist social ferment, opening up, pluralisation and subsequent transformation into democratic and capitalist societies. While perestroika was not a term employed in all CEE countries, which developed their own vocabularies for transformation, transition, reform or simply change, we are interested in CEE-focused chapters that will meaningfully engage with the understanding of perestroika as laid out in this call, including how the term “long perestroika” (similarly to the “long transformation” paradigm now well-established in the history of CEE societies) may help us to think through alternative periodizations that overcome the still deeply entrenched divide of 1989.
One of our motivations for the project is to highlight voices which have been left out of the centralized canon. This includes perestroika activism in the Soviet republics, outside the capitals, in regions with ethnic minorities and inner-regional peripheries, members of the cultural underground, socially and economically marginalized communities, women, queer citizens and rural dwellers. Perestroika could happen far from the centre in a number of ways: geographically, culturally or ideologically. We have showcased many cases of perestroika from below in our three workshops in Prague in 2024 (Re-Constructing Perestroika), Washington DC (Processing Perestroika), and Kloster Seeon (Perestroika from Afar), but are excited to see where else and in what manner Perestroika was enacted from below.
We would like to introduce and popularize alternative vocabulary to describe the end of the Soviet Union and the early post-socialist years. We thus ask interested contributors to submit alongside a 500-word abstract and one-page CV a term/word/phrase that best describes the process they have been researching and writing about. We will use these terms to organize contributions into meaningful thematic clusters.
Please note that the volume will be peer-reviewed by CEU press and that publication cannot be guaranteed.
Submissions of abstracts and CV: 31 July 2026
Submission of articles (7000 words): 31 December 2026
Publication after peer review (expected): August 2027
Editors: Juliane Fürst, Bradley Gorski, Veronika Pehe, Kathleen Smith
Submit to: perestroika-cfp@zzf-potsdam.de