Organised by UEA School of History in conjunction with the journal Socialist History.
Venue: School of History, University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ.

The collapse of the USSR and the Eastern bloc in the wake of Gorbachev's perestroika seemed to show that communism was essentially unreformable. It could be preserved, dismantled, or overthrown, but it could not be reconstructed as a viable alternative to capitalism, free from the defects of its Leninist-Stalinist prototype.

Prior to 1989-91, however, reform communism was a live political issue in many countries. At different times in countries as diverse as Yugoslavia, the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Western Europe, Japan, and China, the leaderships of communist parties themselves sought to change direction, re-evaluate their own past, correct mistakes and so on with the aim of cleansing, strengthening and improving communism, rather than undermining or dismantling it. In countries ruled by communist parties this process usually involved political relaxation and an easing of repression, and was often accompanied by an upsurge of intellectual and cultural ferment.

Dear colleagues,

You have been asked to participate in this brief survey because you are interested in, have written on, and/or published on forms of resistance and dissent (e.g. samizdat tamizdat and official and/or grey zone opposition) during the communist era in Central/Eastern Europe.

I will be using the results to write “state of the research in the field” piece for East European Politics and Societies, as part of an upcoming special issue on dissent, edited by Paul Blokker and Robert Brier. My plan is to write an article that assesses what scholars currently think about research on forms of resistance and dissent. I will also be examining scholarly literature published since 1989-1991.

I’m particularly interested in your views on what the current “state of the art” is.

If you agree to participate, I will most happily share electronically all of the results, and credit your participation (or not, if you wish to remain anonymous). As well, I plan to submit the entire collection of responses to Olga Zaslavskaya at the Samizdat Archive of the Open Society Archives in Budapest, as well as the International Samizdat [Research] Association (ISRA).