The Gaslighting of Eastern Europe
In the 1990s, 400 million people across Eastern Europe lived through an economic collapse deeper than the Great Depression. Mass privatization depressed prices, Western investors outbid domestic buyers, and 鈥渞estructuring鈥� meant mass layoffs. With prices low, asset stripping and liquidations multiplied. Rapid liquidation of state enterprises caused widespread unemployment just as prices rose, and social safety nets disintegrated. During the first ten years of the transition from socialism to capitalism, 47% of the population of Eastern Europe fell below the World Bank poverty line. By 1999, roughly 191 million people suffered severe material deprivation. Yet while families lost jobs, pensions, and years of life expectancy, Western institutions and commentators insisted things were 鈥済etting better.鈥� Through collective gaslighting, massaging statistics, celebrating televisions and cars, and blaming cultural 鈥渄eficiencies,鈥� experts erased the trauma of entire societies. To remember the transition only as a story of liberation and modernization is to erase the lives upended in the process.
About the speaker: Kristen R. Ghodsee is the Catherine Bryson Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of twelve books, including Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women’s Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War and Taking Stock of the Shock: Social Impacts of the 1989 Revolutions. Her most recent trade book is Everyday Utopia: Better Ways of Living Equally. Dr. Ghodsee has held residential research fellowships at Princeton, Harvard, Friedrich-Schiller-Universit盲t, the Max Planck Institute, the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS), University of Helsinki, and Sciences Po, among others. In 2012, Ghodsee was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for her work in Anthropology and Cultural Studies.
RSVP
This event is co-sponsored by the International Relations Program at Pomona College.