Vortrag von Tatsiana Astrouskaya als HURI Research Fellow in Harvard

Culture and Resistance: Why is it Time for a New History of Soviet Dissent?

A lecture by Tatsiana Astrouskaya, HURI Research Fellow at Harvard and Research Fellow at the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe in Marburg

Moderated by Andrea Graziosi, Jacyk Distinguished Fellow at HURI. 

May 5, 2026, 12:00PM - 01:30PM

This event is organized by HURI as part of the Ukraine Study Group public event series.
About the Lecture

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.
 

Tatsiana Astrouskaya, PhD, is a research fellow at the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe in Marburg and teaches Digital History at the University of Giessen. She currently leads the EU-funded interdisciplinary research project A Land on the Move: Transnational Perspectives on Belarusian History and Culture. Tatsiana studied Philosophy and Critical Social Theory in Minsk (Belarus) and Vilnius (Lithuania) before earning her PhD in Eastern European History from the University of Greifswald (Germany) in 2018. She is the author of the award-winning monograph Cultural Dissent in Soviet Belarus: Intelligentsia, Samizdat, and Nonconformist Discourses, 1968–1988 (Harrassowitz, 2019); Belarusian and Russian translations were published in 2022 and 2025, respectively. Her work has appeared in leading journals and edited volumes, including The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture. She has received fellowships and research grants from, among others, the German Research Foundation, the Visegrad Fund, and the Open Society Foundation. Her research focuses on the history of cultural and political dissent, memory politics, and digital transformation in the post-socialist space.

In addition to her academic work, Tatsiana is actively involved in civic and public history initiatives. She is a member of the editorial board of the London-based Belarusian émigré publishing house Skaryna Press and a co-founder and editor of the interdisciplinary H-Belarus network.