Culture and Resistance: Why is it Time for a New History of Soviet Dissent?
Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute
Pritsak Memorial Library
34 Kirkland St.
Cambridge
Tue., May 5, 2026, 12 – 1:30 p.m. 
The rise of Soviet dissent is commonly associated with the Brezhnev era and the human rights movement that took shape in Moscow in the second half of the 1960s. Contacts with foreign journalists and embassies ensured the visibility of Moscow-based activists in the West. Yet, for all their courage and significance, these actors often came to stand in for the full spectrum of resistance practices across the Soviet Union, obscuring their diversity.
This was particularly evident in relation to cultural and national activism, which was frequently dismissed–by both contemporary observers and later analysts–as secondary, derivative, or politically immature. As a result, such forms of resistance received less international attention and support, further diminishing their chances at success. The epistemological frameworks established during the Cold War continue to shape interpretations of dissent today.
Focusing on practices of cultural resistance in Ukraine and Belarus, where cultural and political struggles were rooted in longer histories of opposition to the different forms of cultural and political domination, this lecture aims to question the established understanding of Soviet dissent at least in two ways. First, it argues for a more differentiated historical account of political and cultural activism in the Soviet Union, one that takes as its point of departure ideas and practices often relegated to the periphery. Second, it challenges linear narratives of continuity, proposing alternative temporal and spatial frameworks for understanding dissent and its legacies.
Gazette Classification: Lecture
Organization/Sponsor: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute
Speaker(s): Dr. Tatsiana Astrouskaya , HURI Research Fellow at Harvard and Research Fellow at the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe in Marburg
Contact Info: [email protected]
Harvard Key Required: No
More info: www.huri.harvard.edu…