Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on November 13, 2025 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for the conference Perestroika and After. Organized by Yana Skorobogatov.
Nearly four decades have passed since Mikhail Gorbachev, in his capacity as leader of the Soviet government, unleashed a series of reforms, Perestroika, that ended with the collapse of the USSR. Since the onset of Perestroika itself, the study of the Soviet late 1980s and the post-Soviet 90s has been dominated in large part by social scientists: political scientists (erstwhile Sovietologists among them), economists, anthropologists, and sociologists. Historians have been much more reluctant to treat the 1985-1999 years as a historical era “ready” for or capable of rigorous historical study. Only recently have historians begun to probe the late Soviet 80s and post-Soviet 90s using traditional historical methods like original source analysis and oral history.
“Perestroika and After” seeks to uncover the legacy of Perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union on scholars (area studies experts and non-area studies experts alike) of and scholarship on the region. It will bring together political scientists and economists who experienced the consequences of Gorbachev’s reforms and the collapse of the Soviet Union’s aftermath personally, either as researchers or advisers working in the Soviet and post-Soviet Union, or from their vantage point as leaders and affiliates of Columbia’s Russian Institute (today’s Harriman Institute) and Harvard University’s Russian Research Center (today’s Davis Center). It will also bring together historians writing new histories of the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet Union centered on the second half of the 1980s and the 1990s. Through a series of panel roundtables and paper presentations, these scholars will come together to discuss how Perestroika’s unfolding changed how they thought and wrote about the region, how it impacted their sense of their intellectual mandate as area-studies experts or non-experts alike, and how to research, theorize, and write about Perestroika, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the post-1990s as history.
Confirmed workshop participants include Linda J. Cook (Brown University), Courtney Doucette (SUNY Oswego), Sheila Fitzpatrick (University of Chicago/University of Sydney), Juliane Fürst (Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam), Emily Hoge (Clemson University), Anne O’Donnell (New York University), Robert Legvold (Columbia University), Alexis Peri (Boston University), Erik R. Scott (University of Kansas), Jane Taubman (Amherst College), William Taubman (Amherst College), Katrina vanden Heuvel (The Nation), Gene Zubovich (SUNY Buffalo), and others.
Conference Program
Day One: Friday, November 14, 2025: 107 Uris (Calder Lounge)
10:45am: Welcome Remarks
Yana Skorobogatov (Columbia University)
11:00am – 12:30pm | Panel I: Perestroika Observed
Moderator: Yana Skorobogatov (Columbia University)
- Linda J. Cook (Brown University)
- Robert Legvold (Columbia University)
- William Taubman (Amherst College)
- Jane Taubman (Amherst College)
- Katrina vanden Heuvel (The Nation)
1:45 – 3:30pm | Panel II: Twilight Experiments: Reinventing Self and Society at the End of the USSR
Discussant: Yana Skorobogatov (Columbia University)
- Courtney Doucette (SUNY Oswego)
- Juliane Fürst (Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam)
- Emily Hoge (Clemson University)
- Anne O’Donnell (New York University)
4:00pm | Workshop Keynote Address
- Sheila Fitzpatrick (University of Chicago/University of Sydney)
Day Two: Saturday, November 15, 2025: 1512 International Affairs Building
10:30am | Panel III: Faith, Fame, and Foreign Capital: Rebuilding Society in the Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Worlds
Discussant: Courtney Doucette (SUNY Oswego)
- Alexis Peri (Boston University)
- Erik R. Scott (University of Kansas)
- Gene Zubovich (SUNY Buffalo)
