Register Now! The Making of Solidarity: A Conference on Eastern and Central European Dissidents - Instytut Pileckiego

The full programme of our conference "The Making of Solidarity" a Conference on Eastern and Central European Dissidents is now available!

The Making of Solidarity: A Conference on Eastern and Central European Dissidents

16.-17. November 2026

Registration is open - reserve your place now: https://forms.gle/oTa46KSrGF2RpvwF6

A close reading of Ivan Dziuba’s classic 1965 essay Internationalism or Russification? offers a useful lens through which to understand a distinctive feature of Russian colonialism: its operation not only through discrimination and coercion, but also through the language of brotherhood. Written from within the Soviet system, this insight anticipated questions that postcolonial theory would not fully engage with for decades. It also serves as a reminder that Eastern and Central European intellectuals were thinking rigorously about imperial power long before postcolonial frameworks entered broader academic discussions of the region. The Making of Solidarity takes this intellectual tradition as its point of departure — not merely as historical background, but as a body of thought that continues to illuminate the present. To do so demands a particular approach to history: one that treats dissident thinking as a form of knowledge production in its own right, and that attends carefully to how the memory of dissidence has itself been shaped — which figures have been canonized, which forgotten, and by what institutional, political, and cultural processes those selections have been made.

The conference challenges the dominant understanding of Eastern European dissidence that took shape in international academia during the Cold War and became further entrenched in the years following 1989. This understanding tended to privilege figures who had already established networks in Paris or London, while overlooking workers and labor activists, as well as religious, national, and cultural communities whose resistance took different, less readily translatable forms. It elevated Russian voices, at times even those inflected with imperial nostalgia, while failing to fully recognize the anti-imperial thought of Ukrainian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, and other dissidents. The Making of Solidarity proposes a reorientation: toward those whose resistance has been harder to recover, and toward what Václav Havel famously described as “the power of the powerless”—the refusal of ordinary people across the full breadth of Eastern and Central Europe to live within a lie. 

The conference also marks the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Polish Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) in 1976—one of the most consequential initiatives to build solidarity across class divisions under an authoritarian regime. This anniversary is not merely commemorative. The making of solidarity—the difficult and unfinished work of bringing together people from diverse backgrounds in opposition to structures of oppression—remains a challenge for contemporary societies. It is through this continuing relevance that the legacy of dissident movements still speaks to the present.

These histories are now being reconstructed—and actively contested—across digital platforms, with Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine lending new urgency to figures such as Vasyl Stus, the Ukrainian poet and dissident who died in a Soviet labor camp in 1985. By bringing together historians, literary scholars, postcolonial theorists, and digital humanists, The Making of Solidarity asks not only which histories have been overlooked, but also under what conditions their recovery becomes possible—and what forms of solidarity, across time and borders, that recovery demands.

Conference Agenda and Highlights

Monday, 16 November | Rethinking the History of Dissent

The first day will explore cultural opposition, anti-imperial critique, and the intellectual connections that shaped dissident movements across Eastern and Central Europe. The opening panel, “Beyond the Dissident Canon: Cultural Opposition and Anti-Imperial Critique,” will bring together Mykola Riabchuk, Tereza Hendl, and Stefanie Eisenhuth to examine nonconformist cultural movements, anti-imperialism, and overlooked forms of resistance. Later sessions will address cross-border intellectual exchange, the public reception of Polish dissidents in Sweden, German influences on the Polish Christian opposition, and the challenges of making Ukrainian dissident archives visible.

The evening programme will feature an opening keynote by Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, followed by the panel discussion “Writing the History of Dissent: Voices and Blind Spots,” with Ben Nathans and Franziska Davies, moderated by Yeva Yakubovska. Together, these sessions will consider how the history of dissent has been written, whose voices have shaped its dominant narratives, and which perspectives remain overlooked.



12:30–13:00 | Registration and Welcome Coffee

13:00–14:30 | Panel: “Beyond the Dissident Canon: Cultural Opposition and Anti-Imperial Critique”

• Mykola Riabchuk — Between Dissent and Officialdom: Nonconformist Cultural Movement in Lviv in the 1970s and 1980s
• Tereza Hendl — On Collateral Damage, Selective Anti-Imperialism and the Path to Liberation
• Stefanie Eisenhuth — Dissidence Without Dissidents? Letters from Lviv, 1989

Discussant: Radomyr Mokryk
Chair: Yeva Yakubovska

14:30–15:30 | Lunch

15:30–17:00 | Panel: “Dissent Across Borders: Intellectual Connections, Public Debate and Memory”

• Paweł Jaworski — Polish Dissidents as a Topic of Public Debate in Sweden in the 1970s
• Helena Anna Jędrzejczak — German Inspirations for the Polish Christian Opposition: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Kreisauer Kreis
• Manuela Putz — Archives of Dissent: Making the Legacy of Ukrainian Dissidents Visible

Discussant: Bartłomiej Kapica
Chair: Patryk Szostak

17:00–17:30 | Coffee Break

17:30–18:00 | Official Opening

Introduction: Russian and Soviet Colonialism as a Topic in Ukrainian Dissident Texts: Reconstructing the Intellectual Context by Andrii Portnov (Pilecki Institute)

18:00–18:30 | Opening Keynote

Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk

18:30–20:00 | Panel Discussion: “Writing the History of Dissent: Voices and Blind Spots”

Speakers: Ben Nathans and Franziska Davies
Moderator: Yeva Yakubovska

20:00 | Reception

Tuesday, 17 November | From Dissent to Solidarity

The second day will focus on the people, networks, and publications that helped transform dissent into collective action. The programme begins with a guided tour of our permanent  exhibition on Witold Pilecki, followed by a presentation of The Power of the Powerless: The Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) with Jan Skórzyński.

A particular highlight will be “Building Solidarity: A Conversation with KOR Co-Founder Piotr Naimski,” offering an opportunity to reflect on the history of one of the most consequential initiatives in Polish opposition to communist rule. Founded in 1976, KOR demonstrated how solidarity could be built across social divisions and became an important precursor to the mass movement that emerged in the following years.

The afternoon will continue with the keynote “It’s Solidarity, Stupid! What Can We Learn from Poland’s Solidarność?” by Mateusz Fałkowski, followed by “Publishing Dissent: Texts, Networks and Solidarity,” a panel organised in cooperation with the Jan Nowak-Jeziorański College of Eastern Europe in Wrocław (KEW). The conference will conclude with “Living Dissent: A Conversation with Ukrainian Dissident and Human Rights Activist Yosyf Zisels,” moderated by Margarita Yehorchenko. This final conversation will bring the historical experiences of dissent into dialogue with the continuing struggles for freedom, human rights, and democratic solidarity in Eastern Europe.

12:00–12:15 | Welcome Coffee

12:15–13:15 | Guided Tour of the Witold Pilecki Exhibition

13:15–13:45 | Book Presentation: “The Power of the Powerless: The Workers Defense Committee (KOR)”

Guest: Jan Skórzyński
Moderator: Jakub Szumski

13:45–14:00 | Coffee Break

14:00–15:00 | Building Solidarity: A Conversation with KOR Co-Founder Piotr Naimski

Moderator: Mateusz Fałkowski

15:00–16:00 | Lunch

16:00–16:30 | Keynote: “It’s Solidarity, Stupid! What Can We Learn from Poland’s Solidarność?”

Speaker: Mateusz Fałkowski

16:30–18:00 | Panel Discussion: “Publishing Dissent: Texts, Networks and Solidarity”

Organised in cooperation with the Jan Nowak-Jeziorański College of Eastern Europe in Wrocław (KEW).

Speakers: Radomyr Mokryk, Noemi Smolik and Gábor Danyi
Moderator: Maciej Piotrowski

18:00–18:30 | Coffee Break

18:30–20:00 | Living Dissent: A Conversation with Ukrainian Dissident and Human Rights Activist Yosyf Zisels

Moderator: Margarita Yehorchenko

20:00 | Dinner

Registration is open - reserve your place now: https://forms.gle/oTa46KSrGF2RpvwF6

The conference is organised by the Pilecki Institute Berlin in cooperation with the Jan Nowak-Jeziorański College of Eastern Europe in Wrocław (KEW) and the Stus Center (Стус Центр).