Bücher der Reihe Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society

The USSR¿s dissolution resulted in the creation of not only fifteen recognized states but also of four non-recognized statelets: Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Transnistria. Their polities comprise networks with state-like elements. Since the early 1990s, the four pseudo-states have been continously dependent on their sponsor countries (Russia, Armenia), and contesting the territorial integrity of their parental nation-states Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Moldova. In 2014, the outburst of Russia-backed separatism in Eastern Ukraine led to the creation of two more para-states, the Donetsk People¿s Republic (DNR) and the Luhansk People¿s Republic (LNR), whose leaders used the experience of older de facto states. In 2020, this growing network of de facto states counted an overall population of more than 4 million people. The essays collected in this volume address such questions as: How do post-Soviet de facto states survive and continue to grow? Is there anything specific about the political ecology of Eastern Europe that provides secessionism with the possibility to launch state-making processes in spite of international sanctions and counteractions of their parental states? How do secessionist movements become embedded in wider networks of separatism in Eastern and Western Europe? What is the impact of secessionism and war on the parental states? The contributors are Jan Claas Behrends, Petra Colmorgen, Bruno Coppieters, Nataliia Kasianenko, Alice Lackner, Mikhail Minakov, and Gwendolyn Sasse.

In 2012, soon after his election to a third presidential term as president, following a four-year stint as prime minister (to avoid modifying the constitution), and in the wake of an unprecedented wave of popular protests, Vladimir Putin issued his ¿May Decrees.¿ Notable among them was the government¿s commitment to increase the salaries of doctors, scientific researchers and university teachers to double the average in their respective regions by 2018. But then on December 30 of that year, the government issued a ¿road map¿ for education, revealing that the salary increases in higher education would be paid for, not by significant new government funding, but by ¿optimization,¿ which would eliminate 44% of the current teaching positions in higher education. This was justified in part by a forecasted drop in student enrollment. Thus opened a new, accelerated period of reform of higher education. David Mandel examines the impact of these reforms on the condition of Russiäs university teachers and the collective efforts of some teachers, a small minority, to organize themselves in an independent trade union to defend their professional interests and their vision of higher education. Apart from the subject¿s intrinsic interest, an in-depth examination of this specific aspect of social policy provides valuable insight into the nature of the Russian state as well as into the condition of ¿civil society,¿ in particular the popular classes, to which Russian university teachers belong according to their socio-economic situation, if not necessarily their self-image.

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the demise of the Cold War¿s bipolar world order, Soviet successor states on the Russian periphery found themselves in a geopolitical vacuum, and gradually evolved into a specific buffer zone throughout the 1990s. The establishment of a new system of relations became evident in the wake of the Baltic States¿ accession to the European Union in 2004, resulting in the fragmentation of this buffer zone. In addition to the nations that are more directly connected to Zwischeneuropa (i.e. ¿In-Between Europe¿) historically and culturally (Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine), countries beyond the Caucasus (Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia), as well as the states of former Soviet Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan) have also become characterized by particular developmental pathways. Focusing on these areas of the post-Soviet realm, this collected volume examines how they have faced multidimensional challenges while pursuing both geopolitics and their place in the world economy. From a conceptual point of view, the chapters pay close attention not only to issues of ethnicity (which are literally intertwined with a number of social problems in these regions), but also to the various socio-spatial contexts of ethnic processes. Having emerged after the collapse of Soviet authority, the so-called ¿post-Soviet realm¿ might serve as a crucial testing ground for such studies, as the specific social and regional patterns of ethnicity are widely recognized here. Accordingly, the phenomena covered in the volume are rather diverse. The first section reviews the fundamental elements of the formation of national identity in light of the geopolitical situation both past and present. This includes an examination of the relative strength and shifting dynamics of statehood, the impacts of imperial nationalism, and the changes in language use from the early-modern period onwards. The second section examines the (trans)formation of the identities of small nations living at the forefront of Tsarist Russian geopolitical expansion, in particular in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Southern Steppe. Finally, in the third section, the contributors discuss the fate of groups whose settlement space was divided by the external boundaries of the Soviet Union, a reality that resulted in the diverging developmental trajectories of the otherwise culturally similar communities on both sides of the border. In these imperial peripheries, Soviet authority gave rise to specifically Soviet national identities amongst groups such as the Azeris, Tajiks, Karelians, Moldavians, and others. The book also includes more than 30 primarily original maps, graphs, and tables and will be of great use not only for human geographers (particularly political and cultural geographers) and historians, but also for those interested in contemporary issues in social science.

This volume deals with legal issues concerning Russia's annexation of Crimea and intervention in the Donbas, so-called 'frozen conflicts' and 'hybrid warfare, ' the use of courts and tribunals to address armed aggression, and the implications of recent events for the security guarantees connected to nuclear nonproliferation.

The protection of minorities in Bulgaria presents a paradox. Although minority protection played a prominent role in the accession of the country to the European Union, hardly any positive minority rights were adopted in post-communist Bulgaria. Apart from the reversal of communist assimilation campaigns, only limited progress has been made in the area of minority protection. Positive minority rights have remained very restricted, some minorities, notably Pomaks and Macedonians, have been denied recognition, and the formal adoption of legislation or policy documents has often not been followed by implementation.By charting minority rights policies in Bulgaria in the period between 1989 and 2004, this study clarifies the main reasons for the limited progress in the post-communist period. While, in contrast to some other countries in Central and Eastern Europe, minority "kin-states" did not play a major role in post-communist Bulgaria, the European Union and the Council of Europe were instrumental in putting minority questions on the agenda of Bulgarian governments. However, their impact was smaller than much of the literature on enlargement and conditionality would suggest. Domestic factors were crucial in shaping minority rights policies in post-communist Bulgaria. Of particular importance was the communist legacy, which acted as a brake on the development of minority rights.

The Russian nationalist idea, considered a marginal tendency in the 1990s, has, during the last years, transformed into an official state and widely popular ideology. The Russian political spectrum is unified in its promotion of a discourse grounded in undisguised anti-Westernism as well as the paranoid view that national unity and authenticity are threatened by various external and internal enemies. The space of political representation has become increasingly covered by nationalism to the point that it is today regarded a "politically correct" attitude in Russia. Nationalist and, in some cases, crypto-fascist factions operate in all major political parties of Russia today.The government actively contributes to promoting this trend through introducing patriotic education at school, revitalizing anti-Americanism as a foreign policy doctrine, new national holidays and commemorations, a growing cult of the military, frequent references to Orthodoxy, utilizing ultra-nationalist groupings in its manipulation of public life through "political technology", and essentializing "ethnic rights" of the national subjects of the Federation. The media has come to play a crucial role in the dissemination of cryptic and, sometimes, manifestly nationalist ideas. The submission of most major mass media outlets to the authorities highlights the "fourth power's" status as a proponent of nationalist discourse in its own right. The media has been playing an increasing role in exacerbating xenophobic tensions within Russian society.This nationalist climate is not restricted to politics and journalism, but is also to be found in numerous sections of cultural and academic life. Thus, in Russia today, apart from various cases of para-science and alternative history, the notion that certain academic disciplines have the mission to justify "Russian specificity" is widespread among scholars, as are approaches, defined as "civilizationist," that systematize national stereotypes. History, sociology, economics, and literature as well as the new disciplines of "culturology" and "geopolitics" propagate ethnocentric precepts with consequences yet to be explored.Contents:Marlène Laruelle, Deliberations on "Russian Nationalism" as a Subject of Academic Research; Galina Zvereva, The Discourse of the State Nation in Contemporary Russia; Viktor Voronkov and Oksana Karpenko, Patriotism as Nationalism of the (Post-)Soviet Man; Andreas Umland, Three Varieties of Post-Soviet Fascism: Conceptual and Contextual Problems of Interpreting Contemporary Russian Ultra-Nationalism; Aleksandr Verkhovskii, The Church's Project of Russian Identity; Dmitrii Dubrovski, Sports and Politics: Soccer as a National Idea in Contemporary Russia; Viktor Shnirelman, The Civilizational Approach as National Idea; Aleksandr Nikulin and Irina Totsuk, The Metahistorical Matrix of Great Power Rent-Seeking: Politico-Economic Peculiarities of the Academic National Idea; Natalia Ivanova, Specificities of the Nationalist Discourse in Contemporary Literary Criticism; Yulia Liderman, The Course towards Patriotism and the Answer of Russian Cinematography after 2000: New Budgets, New Genres, New War Movies; Vera Zvereva, TV Celebration Concerts: The Rhetoric of State Nationalism.