Tatsiana Astrouskaya
Research Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute
February - May 2026
Supported by HURI with the Lev and Oksana Iwanna Sijak Szczur Ukrainian Fund
Research Project
De-centering Dissent: Rethinking Cultural Resistance Under Late Socialism
The recent outbreak of violence in Eastern Europe has once again prompted a reconsideration of how individuals and communities can effectively resist authoritarian regimes. While the early 2000s saw the history of dissent in the Soviet Union relegated to the margins of scholarly interest, it has since reemerged as a critical reference point. Contemporary interpretations of these events - among scholars, journalists, and political commentators - often rely on the “history of Soviet dissent” as a lens for understanding both Russian society and the broader political landscape of Eastern Europe. Although the violence employed in the war against Ukraine and in the repression of dissent across the region is undeniably rooted in the Soviet and imperial past, such direct reliance risks perpetuating a mythology that continues to shape external perceptions of Russian society and its attitudes toward the war.
This project responds to these limitations by reconsidering both the history and the conceptual framework of Soviet dissent, with a particular focus on lesser-studied resistance movements and actors in Ukraine, Belarus, and other national republics. It seeks to deconstruct the dominant Russia-centered narrative and to explore the (semi)peripheral forms of resistance that have often been overlooked. By examining the transnational dimensions of dissent - networks and connections among groups and associations within the Soviet Union and beyond - the project highlights the coherence of resistance practices across national boundaries, challenging conventional understandings of “center-periphery” relations. It also considers the persistence of these practices beyond the Cold War and discusses their continued relevance for contemporary resistance movements.
Biography
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.
[Photo credit: Tatsiana Vlasenka]