Research Topics

Moscow, December 25, 1991, 7:30 pm: without pomp and ceremony, two Kremlin staffers take down the Soviet flag and hoist the white-blue-red Russian tricolor. The Soviet Union is history.

This unspectacular act had profound consequences, and not only for the republics of the now former Soviet Union and the states of the “Eastern Bloc”. The turning point changed the policy of the Soviet Union’s successor state, and it also changed the policy of the West towards this state. The ideological opposition and even hostility that for years and decades long ensured an uneasy stability in the political relations between the East and the West was now over, from one day to the next. Not only no one in politics, but also no one in East European Studies, had expected the turnaround in the countries of the “monolithic Eastern Bloc”, much less predicted it.

Break for the East European Studies

For politics and scholarly research in East and West the new situation meant a great challenge. In East European research it was initially completely unclear what this turning point meant for the subject and how it should be dealt with. The developments also took by surprise Wolfgang Eichwede, founding director of the Research Center for East European Studies at the University of Bremen: the loss of credibility of the Eastern European systems had been coming for some time, but in addition to their lacking economic competitiveness it was their constant self-deception that finally brought about the end.

While in politics relief at the end of the Cold War was great and ideas were soon developed on how to use the expected “peace dividend”, for East European research the end of the Soviet Union, however much the historical change was welcomed, initially signified a real crisis. Above all, for “sovietologists”. Research on the “enemy” no longer had an enemy to research and was obliged to respond to the criticism that it had failed in predicting the future.

Research center with a worldwide unique archive

At its founding in 1982, the Research Center for East European Studies was primarily concerned with documenting and studying alternative culture in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and East Germany. Its first priority is still its archive, in which over 10,000 documents, art works and photographs by dissidents from the countries of the Eastern Bloc found and continue to find a safe haven. These include about 500 personal archives such as those of the writers Lew Kopelev and Jurij Trifonov and the philosopher Boris Groys.



The first problem faced by the Center was that nobody really wanted it. There was “concern”, as supporter and then mayor of Bremen, Hans Koschnick, emphasized in an interview on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the institution’s founding, “that the Center [might] lead to a clouding of the positive development of East-West relations”, or be staunchly anti-communist. It was therefore rejected by politicians in both the West and the East, as well as by the University of Bremen, which was notorious as a “red training school”.

Yet the initiators of the Center, led by Eichwede, were not interested in political propaganda of any sort, but rather in gathering information on the “other” Eastern Europe, that of the dissidents. As difficult as it was to establish and maintain the Center, it proved to be worth the effort, as Eichwede notes in retrospect. After all, the Center now has “an archive that is probably unique in the world”.

Self-assertion and new themes

With the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent changes in its successor states, the Center was faced by the question of whether an institution that dealt with dissident culture and politics in Eastern Europe was still needed. But it found new themes. In addition to the archive for self-published documents (Samizdat), subjects have been taken up with which hardly any one concerned himself in the 1980s, such as those of corruption and energy policy. In the Center’s historical research, the focus today lies on investigating the history of the Soviet Union and the diachronic study of its successor states and societies.

An e-mail list distributes the analyses to the broad public, and they are read not only by citizens interested in Eastern Europe but also in the Bundestag and by business. The archive keeps growing and thriving; 20 years after the end of the Soviet Union, it is now also open to researchers from “the East”.