Existential Resistance and Transition in Soviet West

Time period:

1 November 2016 – 31 December 2017

Project leader:

Li Bennich-Björkman

Funder:

Riksbankens Jubileumsfond

Type of award:

Project grant

Total funding:

1,477,000 SEK

There are different forms of dictatorships, of what we call non-democratic rule, and they give rise to different paths away from dictatorship. A major idea in this book is that different forms of dictatorship also create various types of open or less open resistance among those that they rule over; political and social. The radicalness, scope and monolithic form of political dictatorship that the Soviet type of Communism represented, lasting for several decades, proves to be historically unique and makes the question about what kind of resistance it shaped important to inquire. Even though resistance at times demonstrated political and social content, I claim in the planned book that resistance that was existential in nature still is the most important to understand when it comes to the USSR in particular. Understanding civil life and soft resistance in the Soviet West – in Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Western Ukraine with L´viv as a center of intellectual resistance - in the period delimited by the “thaw” after Stalin´s death and the “glasnost” politics of Michail Gorbachev forms one core of the book. How the existential resources developed during the Soviet dictatorship affected the transitions, and why for example in Ukraine their influence was so limited, forms the other core of the book. The book builds on primary material collected over a period of more than 10 years, and secondary sources in all four languages.