University of Tartu (Estonia)
Juhan Saharov is a Research Fellow (PhD) in Political Theory at the University of Tartu. He is specializing in the intellectual history of economic and political thought in the late Soviet Union and East-Central Europe, focusing on market socialism, the role of expertise in state socialism, and the transformation of ‘self-management’ and ‘sovereignty’ concepts in Soviet republics during perestroika. He has held visiting fellowships at Stanford University and the Imre Kertész Kolleg (University of Jena). Currently, he is the PI of the research project ‘From Experts to Revolutionaries’ (2025–2028) at the University of Tartu, which examines the transformation of the intelligentsia, its expertise and professional languages in the Baltics and East-Central Europe during the late Cold War. The project investigates how scholarly elites evolved from scientific experts into catalysts of political change, mapping Estonian experts’ networks in East-Central Europe during the late 1980s.