What did the citizens of the Soviet Union identify with? Where did the societal faultlines lie? Did mass demonstrations effectively de-stabilize Soviet order? How did informal groups come into being within a society based on uniformity? What impact did new media and new forms of interconnectivity have on the development of a multinational Soviet society? What remained after the end of the Soviet Union?Using Soviet soccer teams from Moscow (Spartak, Dynamo, ZSKA) and Kiev (Dynamo) as examples, Manfred Zeller tells a story of community and enmity in the post-Stalinist multinational empire. This brilliant monograph exposes the complex loyalties that governed group identities and explains phenomena like the love-hate relationship between Kiev and Moscow.'Moscow against Kiev' in Soviet times wasn't a question of war and peace, but in soccer it was already a feeling of 'us against them' and a question of victory or defeat in the complex multinational setting of the region.Zeller's book is an important contribution to the research of Soviet pop culture after Stalin as well as to contemporary debates on antagonism in the post-Soviet world.

This study focuses on Soviet television audiences and examines their watching habits and the way they made use of television programs. Kirsten Bönker challenges the common misconception that viewers perceived Soviet television programming and entertainment culture as dull and formulaic. This study draws extensively on archival sources and oral history interviews to analyze how Soviet television involved audiences in political communication and how it addressed audiences’ emotional commitments to Soviet values and the Soviet way of life. Bönker argues that the Brezhnev era influenced political stability and brought an unprecedented rise of the living standards, creating new meanings for consumerism, the idea of the “home,” and private life among Soviet citizens. Exploring the concept of emotional bonding, this study engages broader discussions on the durability of the Soviet Union until perestroika.

This captivating volume brings together case studies drawn from four post-Soviet states—Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova. The collected papers illustrate how the events that started in 1985 and brought down the USSR six years later led to the rise of fifteen successor states, with their own historicized collective memories. The volume’s analyses juxtapose history textbooks for secondary schools and universities, and how they aim to create understandings as well as identities that are politically usable, within their different contexts. From this emerges a picture of multiple perestroika(s) and diverging development paths. Only in Ukraine—a country that recently experienced two popular uprisings, the Orange Revolution and the Revolution of Dignity—the people themselves are ascribed agency and the power to change their country. In the other three states, elites are, instead, presented as prime movers of society, as is historical determinism. The volume’s contributors are Diana Bencheci, Andrei Dudchik, Liliya Erushkina, Marharyta Fabrykant, Alexandr Gorylev, Andrey Kashin, Alla Marchenko, Valerii Mosneagu, Alexey Rusakov, Natalia Tregubova, and Yuliya Yurchuk.

Duncan Leitch exposes the unexpected consequences of international aid for post-communist transitions. Examining the efforts to reform relations between Kiev and the regions of Ukraine, Duncan Leitch explores how and why fiscal decentralization and regional policy programs initiated by the Ukrainian government and supported by the Western donor community failed to achieve a sustainable outcome. Drawing on concepts from institutional theory, comparative politics, and development studies, Leitch explains the complex interactions between external donors and the domestic recipients of their advice. His findings shed light on the narrow circumstances under which short-term success can be achieved, but also point towards the failings of the donor community to lay the groundwork for lasting reform. A valuable resource for anyone working in the development sector in Eastern Europe or beyond, this book provides a new outlook on the political realities of the reform process, the relevance of international advice, and the domestic pressures leading to the Maidan uprising of 2013.

The second part of this multi-volume project assembles a series of recollections and debates on the Ukrainian revolutions of 1990, 2004, and 2013–2014. After an introduction to the methodology of oral history, it presents twenty interviews with participants and eyewitnesses of the events in Ukraine, and documents a series of workshop discussions conducted at a symposium held in 2017. In these workshops, activists and observers of each of the three revolutions exchanged and compared their memories, analyses, and evaluations. This volume thus not only provides a comprehensive collection of firsthand accounts of the three historic Ukrainian upheavals, but also reveals the interrelations between them. The volume documents assessments from Barbara Krauz-Mozer, Markiyan Ivashchyshyn, Natalia Klymovska, Vakhtang Kipiani, Mykola Kniazhycki, Natalyia Zubar, Yulia Tymoshenko, Aleksander Kwaœniewski, Viktor Taran, Markiyan Matsekh, Yulia Tychkivska, Leonid Findberg, Yulia Mostova, Oksana Zabuzhko, Eduard Drach, Michailo Cherenkoff, Andriy Dudchenko, Oleg Mahdych, Rebecca Harms, Herman van Rumpoy, and Jacek Saryusz-Wolski.

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.

This book aims to explain the reasons behind Russia's international conduct in the post-Soviet era, examining Russian foreign policy discourse with a particular focus on the major foreign policy schools of Atlanticism, Eurasianism, derzhavniki, realpolitik, geopolitics, neo-Marxism, radical nationalism, and post-positivism. The Russian post-Soviet threat perceptions and national security doctrines are studied. The author critically assesses the evolution of Russian foreign policy decision-making over the last 25 years and analyzes the roles of various governmental agencies, interest groups and subnational actors. Concluding that a foreign policy consensus is gradually emerging in contemporary Russia, Sergunin argues that the Russian foreign policy discourse aims not only at the formulation of an international strategy but also at the search for a new national identity.Alexander Sergunin argues that Russia's current domestic situation, defined by numerous socio-economic, inter-ethnic, demographic, environmental, and other problems, dictates the need to abandon superpower ambitions and to rather set modest foreign policy goals.

The papers presented in this volume analyze the civil uprising known as Euromaidan that began in central Kyiv in late November 2013, when the Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych opted not to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union, and continued over the following months. The topics include the motivations and expectations of protesters, organized crime, nationalism, gender issues, mass media, the Russian language, and the impact of Euromaidan on Ukrainian politics as well as on the EU, Russia, and Belarus. An epilogue to the book looks at the aftermath, including the Russian annexation of Crimea and the creation of breakaway republics in the east, leading to full-scale conflict. The goal of the book is less to offer a definitive account than one that represents a variety of aspects of a mass movement that captivated world attention and led to the downfall of the Yanukovych presidency.

The book provides a detailed description of “the Russian crime of the twenty-first century” as well as a thorough examination of the eighty sessions of the nine-month-long trial (during 2016-2017) of Boris Nemtsov’s alleged killers. It directs attention to the chief obstacle in determining what precisely happened shortly before midnight on February 27, 2015, on a bridge located a mere stone’s throw away from the Kremlin, in an area under the active surveillance of the Russian Federal Protective Service. The glaring absence of closed circuit videos from this most heavily guarded site in Russia is underscored. Given the absence of such key evidence, those seeking to investigate the murder have been akin to blind people stumbling about in obscurity. The attempts to penetrate this man-made fog undertaken during the course of the trial by the Nemtsov family attorneys, Vadim Prokhorov and Olga Mikhailova, as well as by numerous tenacious analysts of the crime, such as former deputy Russian energy minister Vladimir Milov, former Russian presidential economics advisor Andrei Illarionov, and leading mathematician Andrei Piontkovskii, are covered in full. The uneven case mounted by the prosecution and the scrappy defense effort of the attorneys for the alleged killers, many of them ethnic Chechens, are highlighted, as is the non-unanimous verdict which was reached by the twelve jurors. The findings of this study are in agreement with those of a number of commentators who contend that the actual organizers of the crime remain at large as does the assassination’s shadowy mastermind.

What are the reasons behind, and trajectories of, the rapid cultural changes in Ukraine since 2013? This volume highlights: the role of the Revolution of Dignity and the Russian-Ukrainian war in the formation of Ukrainian civil society; the forms of warfare waged by Moscow against Kyiv, including information and religious wars; Ukrainian and Russian identities and cultural realignment; sources of destabilization in Ukraine and beyond; memory politics and Russian foreign policies; the Kremlin’s geopolitical goals in its 'near abroad'; and factors determining Ukraine’s future and survival in a state of war. The studies included in this collection illuminate the growing gap between the political and social systems of Ukraine and Russia. The anthology illustrates how the Ukrainian revolution of 2013–2014, Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula, and its invasion of eastern Ukraine have altered the post-Cold War political landscape and, with it, the regional and global power and security dynamics.