1989 in the East

1989 in the East revisits the processes that led to the collapse of communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the USSR. This disintegration appeared to be the result of complex mobilisations where the repertoires of action, the institutional and non-institutional ties, the ideological preferences, and the identities of the actors, including the most official ones, have been profoundly changed. The modes of contestation have gone from a self-limited subversion of established institutions, with some forms of collaboration with the regime, to much clearer and more radical forms of head-on opposition. Opposition movements developed according to rhythms and modalities specific to each country, sometimes to each social sphere. Social mobilisations, institutional transformations (both visible and less visible), and the emergence of new actors in all social spheres are therefore central issues in this book.

This book, based on rich empirical material, will be of interest to specialists in the region, as well as, more generally, to students of regime change and collapse, political crises, social movements, authoritarian regimes, and the forms of mobilisation that develop within them.

Pascal Bonnard is a political scientist and associate professor at Jean Monnet University of Saint-Etienne (France). He has worked on the politicisation of ethnicity and of memory in the post-Soviet space and on the circulation of norms at the margins of Europe. His current research topics include the workers from the Eastern Bloc (teachers, engineers, doctors) in the Arab countries during the Cold War and the reorganisation of the French administration in Algeria after the country’s independence.

Carole Sigman is a senior research fellow at the French National Centre of Scientific Research (CNRS) and a member of the Centre for Russian, Caucasian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies (CERCEC, CNRS/EHESS). As a political scientist, she focuses on the authoritarian systems and their transformations. She first studied the disintegration of the Soviet system through the history of the Moscow "informal" political clubs during perestroika and is now exploring the contemporary Russian authoritarian regime by focusing on the transformations and reforms of the university system.