Margarita Pavlova
 |
Margarita Pavlova
Otto-Behaghel-Str. 10, D-35394 Gießen, Haus D
|
Forschungsschwerpunkte
- Späte Sowjetunion, Schwerpunkt Perestroika in Russland
- Alternative Kultur(en) und Bewegungen
- Denkmal- und Naturpflege
- Samizdat und Öffentlichkeit
- Oral History und Erinnerungskultur
Dissertationsprojekt
Cultural in Form, Political in Content?
Sociocultural Associations of Leningrad Underground in Gorbachev’s Russia
This doctoral project aims to reveal the emergence, operation, and transformation of the grassroots groups involved in historic and ecological preservation during Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms of glasnost and perestroika in Leningrad. It explores the crystallization of the independent groups within a broader framework of late Soviet Leningrad and re-evaluates the ideologically loaded concept of neformaly which was labeled by Soviet journalists and scholars to the grass-roots groups formed outside of the official institutions. By combining archival primary sources and oral histories the project explores both the lived and institutional practices of self-organization in the second largest city of the Soviet Union during the last years of its existence. It shows that the youth was deeply committed to the reforming rather than the dismantling of the Soviet system reflecting such ideological principles of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms as “democratization”, “socialist pluralism”, and “fundamental renewal of society”. This thesis contributes to the growing corpus of the literature on the peculiarities of late socialism, in that it examines a case study that reveals the paradoxes and ambiguities of the final decades of the Soviet Union in a local dimension.