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 will be edited by Juliane Fürst, Bradley Gorski, Veronika Pehe, Kathleen Smith.
It aims to be a comprehensive overview of 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 careers to participate in this volume, which aims to turn perestroika research on its head by switching the perspective of investigation from Gorbachev and the political elites to the level of 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. For a long time, the policies of ›glasnost‹ and ›perestroika‹ have been synonymous with the name Gorbachev. The publication aims to understand ›perestroika‹ by looking at its implications for society. Millions of people were engaged with its underlying ideas enthusiastically (or with hostility) and interpreted them according to their own preferences. 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 perestroika‹ 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, 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 former 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.
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 a 500-word abstract and a one-page CV together with one 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. The deadline for the submission of abstracts is July 31, 2026.
The deadline for the submission of articles will be on December 31, 2026. The publication of the volume is expected for August 2027. Please note that the volume will be peer-reviewed by CEU Press and that publication cannot be guaranteed.
You can find the full CfP as a PDF file here.