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Guest lecture by Dr. Tatsiana Astrouskaya

A Conflict of Dissents, Dissent as a Conflict: the Legitimization of Dissident Cultures in Post-Soviet Belarus

The Study Programme Historical Sociology FHS UK is pleased to invite you to the guest lecture “A Conflict of Dissents, Dissent as a Conflict: the Legitimization of Dissident Cultures in Post-Soviet Belarus” which will be delivered by Dr. Tatsiana Astrouskaya, Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe, Germany.

The lecture is part of the lecture series Historical Sociology Confrontations of the Historical Sociology Study Programme, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University.

The lecture will take place via ZOOM 17.00 - 19.00, Tuesday, November 3.

Annotation:

In contrast to the most East and Central European countries, post-war Belarusian history had been predominantly shaped by the images of consent, successful socialism building, and the lack of dissent. The democratization of the late 1980s and the subsequent breakup of the Soviet Union generated the intellectual attempts to reconsider the Soviet history, making room for alternative cultures and discontent. The opposition to the Soviet in Soviet society attracted broader public attention, and the dissident past had been employed to construct a new, post-socialist contemporaneity.

In this presentation, I am going to dwell on the legitimization of dissent in post-Soviet Belarus in the 1990s and early 2000s, and its positioning towards the other dissident cultures, and, in particular, Russian. Simultaneously with the anti-colonial distancing from the legacy of the Russian culture, including that of the Russian dissident intelligentsia, these attempts had often stumbled upon the conceptual framework created by the latter, denying and simultaneously reproducing it. I am asking, how Belarusian intellectuals dealt with this conflict of dissent cultures and which alternative models were used to dissolve this contradiction?

Tatsiana Astrouskaya is a Research Associate at the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe, Institute of the Leibniz Association and a fellow in the LOEWE Research Cluster “Regions of Conflict in Eastern Europe.” She is the author of Cultural Dissent in Soviet Belarus: Intelligentsia, Samizdat and Nonconformist Discourses (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2019). From 2018 on, she has been working on the postdoctoral project on Jewish refuseniks in Soviet Belarus. Her research interests include the history of East European Jewry, Dissent and Samizdat, East Europen Intellectuals, Memory Politics and Digital History.