Thematic focus for 2021

#30PostSovietYears

05/03/2021
imago images / Cathrin Bach

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the end of the Soviet Union. In December 1991, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the Minsk Agreement, formally dissolving the USSR. It had been a protracted process. The demise of the Soviet Union not only had direct consequences for its independent successor states. It profoundly changed the world’s political tectonics, regional orders and domestic conditions.

Taking #30PostSovietYears as its thematic focus for the year, the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS), in cooperation with the Körber Foundation, the German Association for East European Studies (DGO), the German Historical Institute Moscow, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Russia and Memorial International, is hosting a series of events and online formats that revisit the watershed year of 1991 and examine the legacies of the Soviet era. We will be looking at the dynamics, impacts and traces of that turbulent time and also examining cultures of remembrance. We will shed light on local, regional and global perspectives on the dissolution of the world’s largest socialist state and on diverse regional and global security concepts whose impacts can still be felt today.