Democracy Promotion and Authoritarian Diffusion: The Foreign Origins of Post-Soviet Election Laws

Flawed electoral legislation in post-Soviet states has facilitated the conduct of undemocratic elections. This article argues that the low quality of electoral legislation in the region results in large part from a process of ‘authoritarian diffusion’, whereby the election laws of the post-Soviet states extensively borrow and adapt from Soviet laws and post-communist Russian laws. The authorities of most post-Soviet states have routinely disregarded recommendations by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and the Venice Commission to improve electoral legislation. Besides presenting evidence of ‘authoritarian diffusion’ across the post-Soviet area, the article highlights the enduring impact of the Soviet legacy and of Russia's relatively hegemonic position in the region.     

Russian-speaking Belarusian Nationalism: An Ethnolinguistic Identity Without a Language?

Abstract

This essay examines the development of a form of Russian-speaking Belarusian national identity. While Belarus’s early post-Soviet nationalists relied upon Belarusian as the central pillar of national identity, this has been challenged by more ‘pragmatic’ nationalists using the ‘language of the people’, namely, Russian. Analysing history textbooks and popular history books that represent three key identity projects in Belarus, this study sheds light on the specific programmatic ideas of a new Russian-speaking Belarusian nationalism. Despite the emergence of the geopolitically-motivated Russian World (Russkii Mir) concept, some Russian-speaking nationalists have articulated a programme that paradoxically draws upon Russian neo-Eurasianist thought, but which is simultaneously anti-Russian.     

The Politics of International Law in the Post-Soviet Space: Do Georgia,Ukraine, and Russia ‘Speak’ International Law in International Politics Differently?

Abstract

Since the Soviet Union’s collapse, Ukraine, Georgia and Russia have faced the challenge of taking their positions in the politics of international law as part of their transformation processes. Strong dynamics of conflict have shaped these states’ politico-legal actions and interactions, for example, the Russo–Georgian War, the annexation of Crimea and the armed conflict in East Ukraine. This essay explores whether, how and why Georgia, Ukraine and Russia ‘speak’ international law in international politics differently. It discusses conceptual approaches to empirically analysing the processes of translating political preferences into legal arguments as well as how ‘communicators of international law’ in the post-Soviet region use the language of international law differently.     

Russia–Kazakhstan Relations in the Early Post-Soviet Era: Explaining the Roots of Cooperation

Abstract

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan was faced with domestic conditions that made cooperation with Russia rational. Kazakhstan inherited a large ethnic Russian population and a severe economic depression. These conditions affected other countries emerging from the Soviet Union, but only Belarus matched Kazakhstan’s level of strategic cooperation with Russia. President Nursultan Nazarbaev’s dominance of Kazakhstan’s national security agenda offers a partial explanation for the cooperation, but we still need to ask what makes him different from the leaders of other post-Soviet countries that faced the same conditions. Kazakhstan’s pattern of historical development provides the key to understanding the cooperation. The timing of the country’s contact and experiences with the Russian-led empires led to a ‘dominant ally’ image of Russia that continues to decide the two countries’ relationship to the present day.     

Towards an Explanation of Intercommunal Peace in Kabardino-Balkaria: Post-War Nationalities Policy and Late Soviet Society in the North Caucasus

Abstract

This essay examines socio-economic processes during the Soviet period to help explain the causes of peace and conflict in the post-Soviet North Caucasus. It argues that the absence of an ethnically stratified social structure in Kabardino-Balkaria is one of the reasons why this republic enjoyed relative intercommunal peace and stability in the 1990s and early 2000s. By contrast, the surrounding national republics of the North Caucasus that came out of the Soviet era with socio-economic disparities along ethnic lines witnessed higher levels of intercommunal conflict. This essay looks to the understudied topic of post-World War II and late Soviet nationalities policies to explain Kabardino-Balkaria’s divergent historical trajectory.     

An Alternative Internationalism: The Main Lines and Legacies of Polish Sovietology,Promethean Orientalism and the Soviet ‘Southern Borderlands’, 1926–1939

Abstract

‘Prometheism’ was an interwar movement of borderland nationalists from the former Russian Empire who envisioned the division of the Soviet Union into independent nation-states. This article argues that ideological affinities and diasporic connections made the Promethean cause an attractive ‘alternative internationalism’ to the Soviet system for exiled thinkers hailing from the so-called ‘southern borderlands’ of Crimea, the Caucasus, the Volga region and Central Asia. In the 1930s, Prometheism drew intellectuals from these regions to Poland, where the movement’s thinkers formulated ambitious visions of Eurasian liberation from Soviet power.     

Nation-building projects through new capitals: from St. Petersburg to Yerevan and Astana

The aim of this article is to provide a comprehensive explanation for the reasons behind governments’ decisions to relocate and build new capital cities. The process of capital-building is not a mere phenomenon of urbanization; rather it is a process of “text inventing” for nation-building projects. To emphasize implications for identity behind city constructions, the paper will discuss urbanization practices of Soviet Yerevan and post-Soviet Astana. However, to verify the validity and generalizability of the proposed argument, the article will also briefly provide historical analysis of relocation of capitals from Moscow to St. Petersburg, and from Istanbul to Ankara. The reconstruction of the capital of Soviet Armenia, Yerevan, in the 1920s is important in understanding the role of utopias in initiating identity transformations. The central conceptual premise of the article is Samuel Huntington’s theoretical concept of a “torn country” and the redefinition of civilizational identity. One reason capitals have been relocated and new capitals have been built throughout history is a need to initiate a long-term transformation of identity.     

Where Do I Belong? Narratives of Rodina among Russian-speaking Youth in Kazakhstan

Abstract

This essay engages critically with the personal narratives of rodina (home, motherland) among Russian-speaking youth in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. It is argued that the concept of rodina as an important locus of belonging cannot be imbued with a single meaning; instead, it is characterised by internal conflicts and variations. Supported by empirical material, the essay moves beyond the confines of ‘nation’ and ‘nationality’ to illustrate the different ways in which Russian speakers frame their perception of rodina, and how such narratives can influence the construction of self- and community-identification.     

The Uses of Sovereignty in Twenty-first Century Russian Foreign Policy

Contemporary Russian foreign policy demonstrates a dual approach to state sovereignty, using a Westphalian model of sovereignty outside the former Soviet region and a post-Soviet model inside it. This approach performs three functions in contemporary Russian foreign policy: securing Russian national interests at domestic, regional, and international levels; balancing against the United States; and acting as a marker of ‘non-Western’ power identity in an emergent multipolar order. The conflict between these two models increasingly appears to threaten the last of these objectives, however, and as a means of advancing foreign policy objectives the approach thus appears caught in a self-defeating logic.     

From New Socialist Cities to Thaw Experimentation in Arctic Townscapes: Leningrad Architects Attempt to Modernise the Soviet North

Abstract

The article examines a crucial shift in models of domestication of the Soviet Far North during the Thaw period. The closure of the Gulag system and the social transformations of the 1950s caused changes in the social space of the Soviet North and in the role of expert knowledge in the USSR. By focusing on modernist urban projects for the Soviet Arctic, I analyse how urban specialists during the Thaw attempted to formulate a new conception of the North as a place for ‘ordinary life’ and therefore transform a peripheral region into an ‘average’ Soviet space.     

Four Positions on the Recognition of States in and after the Soviet Union,with Special Reference to Abkhazia

Abstract

This essay looks at why, how and with what degree of success the international community has applied its recognition policies in the post-Soviet space. The essay addresses the issue from a normative perspective by comparing these policies with alternative policies on recognition that have arisen in Soviet and post-Soviet debates. A basic distinction is made between four normative positions. The essay compares the kind of just cause these positions claim to defend, the motives of those supporting each of these positions, the likelihood of success in achieving the stated objective, and the consequences and drawbacks inherent in each of these positions for post-Soviet conflicts over sovereignty generally and more specifically for the Georgian–Abkhaz dispute.     

War,Violence and the Making of the Stalinist State: A Tillyian Analysis

Abstract

Defining the state as ‘organised violence’, based on the emergence of the modern European national state system, Charles Tilly identified four essential war-driven, state-building activities: ‘war-making’; ‘state-making’; ‘protection’ of elite ‘clients’; and ‘extraction’ of resources. Drawing on Tilly's primary categories of analysis, this essay considers the ways in which war, or the threat of war, real or imagined, shaped the Soviet state, particularly in its Stalinist manifestation. This essay argues that Tilly's warfare-state paradigm, judiciously deployed, brings into high relief facets of Soviet state-making that few other paradigms do.     

Russia's Post-Orange Revolution Strategies to Increase its Influence in Former Soviet Republics: Public Diplomacy po russkii

The role of public diplomacy in Russian foreign policy has grown in recent years. There are two distinctive strands of Russian public diplomacy: one directed mainly towards Western states, and one towards the former Soviet republics. Despite the rhetoric of mutual interests and high respect for state sovereignty, the post-Soviet strand of Russian public diplomacy has more in common with the Soviet practice of ‘active measures’ than with the soft power of attraction commonly connected with public diplomacy. Russia's current policy runs the risk of eating away the soft power potential that Russia still enjoys in many post-Soviet states.     

Privileged Exclusion in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan: Ethnic Return Migration,Citizenship, and the Politics of (Not) Belonging

This article explores issues of citizenship and belonging associated with post-Soviet Kazakhstan’s repatriation programme. Beginning in 1991, Kazakhstan financed the resettlement of over 944,000 diasporic Kazakhs from nearly a dozen countries, including Mongolia, and encouraged repatriates to become naturalised citizens. Using the concept of ‘privileged exclusion’, this article argues that repatriated Kazakhs from Mongolia belong due to their knowledge of Kazakh language and traditions yet, at the same time, do not belong due to their lack of linguistic fluency in Russian, the absence of a shared Soviet experience, and limited comfort with the ‘cosmopolitan’ lifestyle that characterises the new elite in this post-Soviet context.     

Diversity in Daugavpils: Unpacking Identity and Cultural Engagement among Minority School Youth in Eastern Latvia

Abstract

Studies of minority ‘integration’ often focus heavily on group boundaries of ethnicity, language and identity. This essay challenges these conventional approaches in Latvia by examining individuals’ quotidian, lived experiences and how these transcend common analytical boundaries. Using the Daugavpils region as a case study, I explore Russian speaker and Latvian participation in events explicitly linked with ‘ethnic’ Latvian cultural identity. I argue, by adopting multifaceted analytical measures of identities, ethnicity and belonging, new perspectives on banal integration and minority engagement within national culture emerge. Individuals engage with each other and with ‘national’ identity and culture in complex ways. Young ‘Russian speakers’ are often more integrated with their ethnic Latvian peers than the extant literature suggests, both civically and in Latvia’s cultural sphere, as consumers and producers of Latvian ‘national’ identity.     

Between Neoliberalism and Difference: Multiple Practices of Property in Post-Soviet Russia

Two decades of aggressive neoliberalisation in Russia has failed to produce a uniform system of private property and profit-maximising enterprises. Instead, the complex interactions of multiple ‘practices of property’ that are pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet in origin, and not private property alone, have created a diverse economic landscape. Moreover, multiple practices of property have produced both capitalist economies (such as Moscow's early capitalist enterprises) and non-capitalist, ethically guided economies (such as the indigenous enterprises of Arctic reindeer herders). The persistence of alternative economic logics in Russia illustrates the limits of the role of private property in shaping the post-Soviet economy.     

Nationhood and the minority question in Central Asia. The Russians in Kazakhstan

This article aims to present the situation of the Russian minority in Kazakhstan and to stress the political, social and identity evolutions in this country since independence in 1991. It develops three main points: the non-homogeneous nature of Russians in Kazakhstan; the development of non-ethnic allegiances that could explain the failure of the local Russian political parties; and the difficulties the leaders have in choosing between the defence of the political rights and the cultural rights of the country's first minority. In order to examine these issues, this article focuses on a series of issues: the place of the national question in the Kazakh public debate; the process of linguistic and ethnic Kazakhisation; the political activities of the Russian minority; the Cossack issue and the stakes of autonomist claims; and, finally, the issue of emigration and the narrative of the ‘return’ to Russia.     

National in Form,Putinist in Content: Minority Institutions ‘Outside Politics’

Abstract

Over the past three decades, Russia has developed a set of institutions for the management of ethno-linguistic diversity based on the principle of ‘national cultural autonomy’. This article examines the positioning of these institutions within Russian society, arguing that while state-endorsed discourses locate them within the culture sphere—treated as distinct from political processes—there is in fact an interpenetration of ‘politics’ and ‘culture’. The article identifies why these institutions position themselves within the ‘cultural sphere’ while also supporting the country’s meta-narratives on inter-ethnic tolerance and, effectively, the political status quo. Soviet legacies of inter-ethnic relations continue to be socially embedded, yet within this framework some dissenting voices are also discerned.     

Nationalities Policy in the USSR: Explaining the ‘Pendulum Swing’ Using Randall Collins’ Geopolitical Theory

Abstract

This article aims to explain the alternation of phases in Soviet nationalities policy through developments in foreign policy, demonstrating the alternation of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ waves. Drawing upon Randall Collins’ geopolitical theory within a broader historical macrosociology perspective, I examine the effect of geopolitical tensions on the patterns of nationalities policy. Collins argues that geopolitical stability positively affects multiculturalism, while periods of geopolitical tension are associated with assimilation. I test Collins’ theory using a dataset on USSR engagement in international conflicts between 1926 and 1991. The results conform to our theoretical expectations: international security issues had a significant effect on Soviet nationalities policy.     

Knowing Me,Knowing You: Media Portrayal of the EU in Kazakhstan

Abstract

The dichotomy of Self/Other prevails in shaping identity. This article asks how and to what extent the elements of the EU’s image produced by media discourse shape the national identity of Kazakhstan. It contends that a state’s identity can be formulated not in opposition—that is, not ‘Us against Them’—but rather, ‘Us as One of Them’. It argues that, in the case of Kazakhstan, the predominantly positive media discourse about the EU ‘Other’ contributes to a positive formulation of the Self via the legitimisation of the domestic regime on the national and international levels.