From Experts to Revolutionaries: The Role of Intelligentsia in Soviet Estonia and East-Central Europe during the Late Cold War

The project studies the role of expert intelligentsia in late socialism, perestroika, and the 1989 revolutions in Soviet Estonia and East-Central Europe. We suggest that state-socialist experts and intellectuals played a crucial role in opening up the political sphere in the socialist states. Drawing on new sources, we presume that the networks built by the Estonian expert community with their East European counterparts progressed into political cooperation in the late 1980s. However, the transnational aspect of expert networks and conceptual spillovers has been previously unexplored. The project presents a novel theoretical approach by exploring the emergence of the transnational expert community and its "languages" from the 1960s to the late 1980s. To this end, the project integrates case studies from 5 countries (Estonian SSR, Lithuanian SSR, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Slovenia) into a single framework. The project will be carried out with an international team of historians.