Contact
Work group
Economy
Alexa von Winning is Assistant Professor at University of Tuebingen, where she also obtained my PhD. Her first book came out with Oxford University Press: Intimate Empire. The Mansurov Family in Russia and the Orthodox East, 1855-1936 (2022). Her current research examines economic discourses and practices of "becoming capitalist" in Russia and Belarus. She has been a fellow at Imre-Kertész-Kolleg (Jena), the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center (Urbana-Champaign), and the German Historical Institute (Moscow).
Research project
Becoming Capitalist in Russia and Belarus (1970-2000)
The project examines neoliberal discourses and practices that spread widely throughout the former socialist countries in the 1990s, tracing their origins and outcomes in a wider chronological perspective. The transformation into market democracies after 1989/1991 demanded fundamental reforms of political and economic institutions from the Eastern European countries – but not only that: Academic observers, international political and economic elites, as well as regional decision-makers were convinced that the population also needed adaptation and renewal. With the help of coachings, trainings, and self-help literature, managers and employees were to shed their socialist imprints and prepare themselves for the new capitalist world. They were called to transform themselves from supposedly passive “Soviet people” into self-confident, entrepreneurial participants of the market economy. Picking up these widespread imaginations of “adapting the people”, the project traces the practices and experiences of “becoming capitalist” in Russia and Belarus in late socialism and the first post-socialist decade. While both contemporary elites and the wider population understood “becoming capitalist” as a westernizing endeavor, it included Soviet experiences and imaginations.