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The article examines Soviet paper reuse as an ideological, economic daily practice, implemented through the advanced, but hitherto undescribed Soiuzutil'waste collecting system by the early 1930s as the reverse side of Stalinist industrialization. It argues that Soiuzutil'waste paper handling attempted to form a new socialist collective by reworking old print while cultivating citizens as classless scrap-collectors, for the sake of an (ir)rational resource optimization. While World War II intensified recycling efforts among the Allied and Axis powers, invasion and evacuation damaged Soviet waste collection to a point where no return of paper into a centralized system was possible. War forced printers and consumers to retreat to local self-supply networks, as paper remained a crucial, yet scarce resource. By analyzing technical-educational literature and correspondence of the reutilization offices, the article demonstrates the changing attitudes in the Stalinist war economy, the industries, and the population towards mobilizing and saving paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents information on books and articles pertaining to nuclear secrets in the Soviet Union. `Every Man Should Try,' by Jeremy Stone; `Bombshell,' by Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel; Details on articles that appeared in `Novoye Vremya.'

In the years before and after the Second World War, chemical and related industries in a variety of countries experienced a surge in innovation and development. As a result, the pulp industry became a space for considerable innovation. In Sweden, Johan Richter developed the Kamyr digester, a pulp cooker that could run continuously and was adopted by industry within a decade. Prior to Richter, Soviet engineer Leonid Zherebov designed a similar cooker. But after 25 years of experiments, Zherebov’s design failed, and Soviet factories began to produce pulp using imported Kamyr digesters. This article examines the history of continuous pulp cooking in the Soviet Union as a means to understand the nature of Russian technological innovation and its failures. The paper contends that his effort failed because of the technological system developed by Soviet forestry – a system characterized by a lack of open communication among its main institutional actors and a scarcity of resources to facilitate innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using recently released documents, this paper considers the viewpoints of Britain, the US and the USSR vis-à-vis Cyprus in the crucial years between 1955 and 1959. Having explained the author’s historical and mental underpinning, the paper shows how crude Cold War geopolitical considerations dictated the approach of all three countries, whatever the moral arguments. The documents revealed in the article show that the British colluded secretly with Turkey, and were fully aware that the Turkish Cypriot leadership had planted a bomb at the Turkish consulate, in order to instigate anti-Greek rioting—a fact covered up at the time, and only recently proven by the eventual release of British documents. The paper demonstrates unequivocally how the whole 1959 arrangement was predicated on the Anglo-Saxons’ insistence on a NATO solution, and how critical the USSR was about an arrangement that was clearly dysfunctional. The paper concludes that external tensions, fear of Russia, and a continuing attempt to solve a problem by repeating the same errors still hold true today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates the validity of the degree of Intra-Comecon (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) trade pattern in the pulp and paper trade between Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Ways of solving the raw material problem in the pulp industry; Share of Soviet wood in pulpwood requirements; Analysis of trade flows in the paper trade exports; Statistical data on paper production and consumption of Eastern Europe.

Drawing on higher education regionalism, this paper explores international branch campus (IBC) initiatives undertaken by one of the largest Russian IBC-exporting institutions, the Lomonosov Moscow State University (LMSU). To date, very little is known about higher education (HE) export-import between the post-Soviet countries. This qualitative inquiry critically examines the Soviet legacy of LMSU IBCs to understand their origins, purposes, and utility as a form of HE export. This paper sheds light on (1) the similarities and differences between six LMSU IBCs and (2) discourses used to rationalise the establishment of LMSU branch campuses. The findings from this paper suggest that LMSU IBCs are established (a) to promote the Russian HE model, (b) to strengthen political and cultural ties with neighbouring countries, and (c) to bolster LMSU's image and brand appeal in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a comparison between Romanian communist counterinsurgency (1944–1962) and similar campaigns fought by Western and Eastern governments in the early Cold War, in particular those waged by the British and French governments in their African, Asian and European colonies and those of the Soviet Union in its borderlands. The comparison focuses on three main components, population control, intelligence and military operations. Highlighting both similarities and differences across different cultural, economic, geographical, ethnic and political landscapes, the perspective laid out in this paper is an argument in favour of systematic and sustained comparative approaches to asymmetric warfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various professional, economic, and personal reasons underpin current migration flows. This article integrated the concepts of lifestyle travelling and lifestyle migration by bringing the tourism-migration nexus to the fore to analyse lifestyle issues of individuals that impact their decisions to be mobile. Sixteen in-depth semi-structured interviews with young Russian migrants, a 'modern' population with different perspectives about opportunities to travel and migrate than their USSR predecessors, were conducted with a focus on their life experiences, mobility 'careers' and starting points of migration. Thematic analysis and iterative engagement with data led to the creation of the Movement Continuum. This Movement Continuum connects different stages of movement ranging from the first trip, long-term travelling, permanent migration, and the final decision to settle down. The paper suggests the continued need for a better understanding of the importance of lifestyle in mobility and migration journeys. It identifies those moments of crisis in the mobility and migration journey that affect an individual's intentions to stay on the move and/or to migrate. The findings complement discourses around the role of personal crisis in migration, mobilities, and tourism and highlight the necessity for further research regarding the better exploration of the relationship between lifestyle travel and lifestyle migration in tourism geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though an individual's right to legal identity has been internationally codified, in certain instances, the legal identity and associated documents may lack widespread international recognition. This is the case in aspirant (de facto) states such as Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria. This paper argues that certain legal identities become liminal due to the nonrecognition of the conferring authority, and/or the associated legal identity documents. The recognition of legal identity documents can change based on where a person is located (territorial jurisdiction), the administrative authority issuing the documents, and the authority assessing the legitimacy of the conferred legal identity documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Russian industrial heritage and its interactions with society. It focuses on changing identities and the transformation of industrial enterprises from connecters to the future in Soviet times, to bridges to both the past and the future for different social groups in post-Soviet Russia. Based on regional examples from the Russian northwest, this article analyzes the trajectories of industrial enterprises from urban centers to peripheries, and the socio-cultural appropriation they experience. Based on newspaper articles, online comments of citizens, and materials from Internet communities, this analysis explores discussions about the reuse of abandoned industrial heritage in Russia. First, it shows how industrial enterprises have moved from centers of the future to peripheries of the past during the last century, and continue to do so at present. Second, it examines how citizens interact with them today, producing nostalgia for the "lost" Soviet past and using abandoned buildings for stalker adventures. The paper concludes that abandoned enterprises transform from industrial centers to cultural sites, binding past, present and future together in a temporal conjunction where three unique temporalities co-exist and overlap: the socialist past, the modern Russian present, and imagined futures. Abandoned heritage is a dynamic participant in cultural and social activities but simultaneously it signifies disappearing industrial socialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, many maps produced in the former Soviet Union have become available. However, researchers have focused on topographical maps or those of Western cities produced by the General Staff for military use, and less on maps created by GUGK, the state mapping agency, for domestic purposes, including tourism. By contrast, this paper focuses on maps produced for tourists, whether travelling by private car or on an organized rail or bus tour. The 42 maps reviewed take three main forms: those covering a single administrative region, ranging from an oblast to a Soviet republic; those of a specific tourist area or associated with a literary hero; and strip maps connecting major cities. The paper considers the general design and symbology used on these maps, tracing some of the stylistic changes and developments in the quarter-century prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the statute of Soviet Union Ministry of the Timber, Pulp, Paper and Woodworking Industry's All-Union Khozraschet Foreign Trade Association Eksportles (VO Eksportles). Provisions and structure of VO Eksportles; Nature and objectives of activities; Council and management; Foreign trade transactions; Accounts and distribution of profits.

This paper uses critical discourse analysis and critical literacy to analyze the first in a series of literacy primers developed with US support for children in Afghanistan in the 1980s, called 'Jihad literacy'. The text is analyzed for its ideological content as related to the themes of religion, violence, and martyrdom in the historical perspective of the Cold War and the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. The paper demonstrates how the notion of 'Jihad' was subverted to promote a holy war against the Soviet invasion. The educational system supported by the US created a radical version of Islam based on violence and martyrdom, shaping the Afghan society to this day. We contend that the same or similar institutions shape current discourses as in the past and that children are the main victims of politico-economic warfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at identifying convergence clubs in suicide rates for a sample of 20 of FSU countries during the 1994–2016 period. A novel machine learning approach revels that while the null hypothesis of overall convergence has been rejected at the 5% significance level, there are four convergence clubs in the region. Within these clubs, different countries are on different transition paths and speeds of convergence, suggesting different policy interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soviet military maps utilized a comprehensive cartographic symbology that was designed for mapping the globe at various scales, including thousands of towns and cities in street-level detail. This paper presents an analysis of the Soviet symbol specifications, as defined by the official cartographic production documents, and aims to offer some insights into how the challenges of mapping a global diversity of urban and natural environments were addressed. A further stage of the analysis examines a sample of 19 Soviet military city plans to evaluate the implementation of the official symbology specified in the production documents. This finds that barely half of this symbology was utilized and that new symbols were routinely created as improvised solutions. By comparing the theoretical context of the symbology with its real-world application the paper offers a critical appraisal of the versatility of the Soviet approach that may inform current and future global mapping initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following reunification after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the eastern German city of Dessau lost population and entire industrial sectors to the more dynamic economies of western Germany, leaving behind a glut of vacant and derelict properties. Dessau's planners proscribed their demolition, replacing them with a greenway surrounding neighbourhoods as water does an archipelago that has substantially increased biodiversity but has failed, despite the city's encouragement, to attract community support. This paper explores what adjustments might be necessary for the archipelago model to be more readily adopted by other shrinking cities and new urban developments worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of language and script change among the Turkic communities of the Soviet Union often focuses on the switch from Arabic to Latin scripts. Less attention is paid to adaptations of the Arabic script to Turkic vernaculars, and to attempts aimed at convincing the literate masses of their usefulness. In the current paper, I aim to do just that. By making use of Turkic-language periodicals from Crimea, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, I throw light on the era before Latin. I explore writers', editors' and other intellectuals' efforts to vernacularize written languages and enforce national boundaries along Soviet lines through changes to the dominant script. More than this, I investigate these actors' use of magazines to convince their readers of new vernacular, language- and territory-based national identities. In doing so, I demonstrate that periodicals became implements of national consciousness creation targeted at the Turkic citizens of the early Soviet Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes intercultural issues in marriages between Japanese men and women from former Soviet Union countries. Focusing on the differences in meanings and assumptions that guide couples in their marriages and the historical-cultural roots of these differences, the paper argues that spouses adapt, negotiate, and change their expectations to each other in response to the cultural encounters that deviate from their familiar cultural patterns. The data for the research was collected by the author between 2006 and 2014 in urban areas of Japan. It consists in-depth interviews with Russian-speaking women (48) and Japanese men (20), participant observation in couples' homes, women's gatherings, and communication in an online Russian-language community. The analysis reveals the effects of cultural differences on relationships between spouses in international marriages in Japan, discusses the fluidity and change of cultural notions over time, and explains how spouses justify these changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In view of the missing consensus on how corruption relates to firm innovation, this paper empirically studies the relationship between petty corruption and product, process, marketing and organisational innovations in the former Soviet Union region. Exploiting cross-sectional firm-level data from the fifth round of the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey, the paper argues that institutional context has utmost importance when approaching this link. Probit estimations for a full sample of former Soviet Union countries indicate a positive link between bribes and firm innovation. Considering variations in institutional development levels, the paper distinguishes three clusters of countries within the region with respect to the quality of institutional structures based on Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) data from the World Bank. The results reveal that the grease-the-wheel effect of bribery on firm innovation strongly remains in countries with weak institutional quality. To explore this link further, this paper made several additional estimations and robustness checks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an insight into the framework employed to revisit Mongolian modern history. The term "environmental disaster" signifies the social process of entanglement in human-environmental interactions, emphasizing the failure of human actions. The Mongolian pastoral society is vulnerable to various kinds of disasters, among which the most problematic is dzud (cold and snow disaster), resulting in heavy damage to livestock. A severe disaster can be a cue to initiate social change, which emerges at the phase of resilience, as disasters may be recognized as a result of social instability. Although there were two severe dzud, the total number of livestock was relatively stable during the collectivization era (1959–1992). After the collapse of the socialist regime and the end of economic dependency on the USSR, the nation's total number of livestock increased until 1999. However, it saw a sharp decrease during the nationwide dzud (in 1999–2002), which continued for three years. This unprecedented dzud also brought about a change in pastoralism. Nowadays, even the people in pastoral lands depend on imported commodities associated with globalization. The rural landscape in Outer Mongolia has changed into two types: suburban areas, including areas around cities and near major roads; and remote areas, including typical Mongolian rural areas that do not have up-to-date socio-economic services. This distinction makes it a complex situation, especially when the questions of disasters arise for the Mongolian people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on two assumptions oft discussed in the academic literature: that the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), the Moscow Patriarchate, and Patriarch Kirill are part and parcel of the Kremlin's regional strategy, and that the Orthodox Churches in Eastern Europe (particularly those in former Soviet states), are appendages to the Russian Orthodox Church and also part of the Kremlin's regional strategy, effectively creating fifth columns for the Kremlin. There is extensive academic literature debating both assumptions, particularly as regards Georgia's and Ukraine's relations with Russia. However, these two are not the only states on the frontlines of Russian-Western geostrategic tensions. The Baltic States, as members of both the EU and NATO, are equally vital and possibly even more so. As the English-language academic literature concerning the relationship between the Kremlin, the ROC, and the Baltic States is limited, this paper attempts to further that conversation and asks whether, by more openly embracing Baltic Orthodox churches, the Baltic governments could limit Kremlin strategic influence in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the effects of social assistance on subjective well-being looking at the case of Kyrgyzstan. For this purpose, we exploit recent changes in the design of social assistance and apply a difference in difference (DiD) method combined with an inverse probability weighting (IPW) technique. In contrast to the existing literature, we find that in the short-term, the receipt of social assistance benefits is associated with lower levels of subjective well-being. Our findings also reveal that participation in social assistance leads to some reduction in satisfaction regarding recipients' own economic conditions. Moreover, we find that the negative effects on subjective well-being disappear for the oldest generations, which experienced the dissolution of the Soviet Union. By contrast, the effect is negative for the youth, who grew up in a new society where needing help is ultimately the responsibility of the individual citizen. For individuals with high trust in political institutions, the negative effect of state intervention does not hold, while it persists in case of low trust in political institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of social sciences in general and the discipline of international relations (IR) in particular always remain areas of less scholarly significance, because the leading academic circles remain less inclined towards the non-Western production of knowledge in the international system. The main discussions of IR generally revolve around Western discourses and approaches to knowledge. The end of the decades-long Cold War and the elimination of the Soviet Union from world politics allowed Western academic circles to influence the production of knowledge in the international system. In this way, the production of knowledge and the promotion of knowledge have ignored non-Western academic perspectives. Contrary to conventional academic patterns, there is a need to realize the significance of non-Western literature in academia while updating the conventional academic patterns. In this scenario, this paper attempts to address the questions of the production of knowledge and promotion of knowledge on the basis of alternative perspectives and different approaches to acquiring knowledge. While emphasizing non-Western or non-American approaches to knowledge, the central theme of the paper endeavours to highlight the importance of non-Western ways of looking at world politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine how migrant women make sense of their new positions in the labour market while drawing on and negotiating past meanings and experiences. I explore the individual biographies of legally privileged co-ethnic women repatriates from the former Soviet Union to Germany through a gendered perspective of work. These women found that the ethnic promise of being 'real' Germans given to them proved insufficient to access the labour market on equal terms, while their past Soviet socialisation led to struggles for recognition and marginalisation into low-status jobs. Although their labour-power is oftentimes devalorised, these women actively operationalise different memories of socialist work to reinvent themselves in a new context as worthy, resilient, and adaptable members of a capitalist society. Their stories of work reflect their present- and future-oriented life strategies and demonstrate how they relate different ideologies and systems of value, distant spaces and times in an attempt to challenge dominant discourses on human worth. By exploring individualised life strategies and gendered invocations of the past, this paper contributes to the discussion on post-socialist subjectivities, how they intersect with ambiguous socialist experiences and dilute the neoliberal project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Great powers use others' territory for spying. Existing work shows that hosts of spying sometimes enjoy high leverage over great powers in exchange for their cooperation. At other times, hosts wield less leverage. Why? This paper points to the quality of intelligence that great powers glean from a host's territory and the availability of alternatives to account for this variation. In U.S. spying on the Soviet Union from Iran, changes in these factors during the 1960s caused Iran's leverage over the United States to increase. U.S. concessions enabled the Shah's excesses. But the United States retained access to extraordinary intelligence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Honing in on how citizens in the former Soviet Union find themselves in an information competition over their own past, this paper explores whether and why ordinary people's perceptions of historical events and figures in their country's past are in line with a Russian-promoted narrative that highlights World War II – known as the "Great Patriotic War" in Russia and some former Soviet states – as a glorious Soviet victory and Stalin as a great leader. We draw on comparative survey data across six states and one de facto state in 2019–2020 to examine whether geopolitical or cultural proximity to Russia is associated with a more favourable view on a Russian-promoted narrative about the past. We find that closer geopolitical proximity to Russia is associated with perceiving the past in line with the Russian-promoted narrative, though the findings are less consistent when it comes to measures for closer cultural proximity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article surveys the way dissident movements from the Soviet era have been documented in North American archives and libraries. It first presents the challenges involved in acquiring, preserving, and making accessible samizdat and other underground publications, as well as archival documents and personal papers of those organizations and individuals involved in dissident activities from the 1950s to the 1980s. A brief overview follows of the more significant samizdat and dissident collections, and of efforts to preserve Solidarity material, succeeded by a summary of issues involved in metadata creation for samizdat material. The article is supplemented by a selected listing of samizdat and archival dissident collections held in North American repositories. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay surveys and examines the prints and drawings by Slavic and Slavic-born artists in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, most of which were donated to the museum by Joseph H. Hirshhorn and were formerly in his private collection. Many of the artists whose works on paper Hirshhorn acquired were refugees from Jewish communities in Tsarist Russia or immigrated after the Russian Revolution. This essay considers the fact that Hirshhorn himself was an emigre from a Slavic country, having come from Russian-controlled Latvia as a child. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on environmental glasnost that seems to be growing. The February issue of the"Soviet Life" briefly describes the ecological disaster that is Lake Baikal and the scientific dispute about the proposed solution to stop further pollution. Soviet biologist Alexander Yegorov says that wastes from two pulp and paper mills have had disastrous effects on the lake's flora and fauna. To stop the pollution of Lake Baikal, the Soviets are constructing a pipeline to carry some of the waste to the Irkut River, a tributary of the Angara River, which flows north toward the Arctic Ocean.

After the end of the USSR, the mobility infrastructure in Tajikistan followed a trajectory of decay. Transport systems had to be reorganized, mobility practices had to be reshaped, and some areas became less accessible. Meanwhile, new international connections have emerged thanks to new political openness. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2022, this paper offers an empirical analysis of the nexus between remoteness and connectivity by looking at the evolution of physical infrastructure in Tajikistan's VMKB province over the past thirty years and discussing the rather contradictory yet simultaneous processes of internationalization and marginalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democratic police reform models dominate discussions on police reform in non-Western contexts. Researchers and practitioners often attribute reform failings to personnel and institutional failure within police organisations, the weakness of formal external institutions of control and accountability, lack of inclusion of, or customisation to, hybrid forms of governance or a failure to address social injustice more broadly. Drawing on analysis of political and police transformation in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Russia this paper suggests low state capacity and authoritarian and neo-patrimonial politics present more prominent barriers to DPR. In low capacity states police pay is insufficient and bureaucratic control weak. Formal reforms have little influence over the police who are influenced by organised crime and corrupt police leaders and politicians. Authoritarian and neo-patrimonial elites often stymie reform initiatives which undermine their political and economic interests. Full DPR is thus unlikely without increasing state capacity and political elite will and capacity to democratise control of the police. But contrary to democratisation being key to successful reform the relationship between regime type and reform outcomes is more nuanced. Partial reform is possible where a partially authoritarian/neo-patrimonial regime has the ability to improve police effectiveness and clampdown on corruption and prioritises these. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The manifestation of Russian imperial ambitions in February 2022 caught many around the world by surprise, but Ukrainian scholarly attempts at decolonization had been ongoing for years prior to the invasion. Intellectuals have strived to re-imagine Ukrainian identity beyond the conceptualization of the country in imperial discourse as 'little Russia'. This paper examines how the phenomenon of the intelligentsia has been re-interpreted, by performing a critical discourse analysis of Ukrainian scholarly discourse on the dichotomy between 'intellectuals' and 'intelligentsia', a dichotomy previously used by the Soviet Union to juxtapose Western and Soviet academics. The study focuses on scholarship that has been underrepresented in the global science system because its research outputs have been communicated in Ukrainian rather than English. The analysis demonstrates how the scholarly discourse reclaims the agency of Ukrainian intellectuals and challenges the Soviet collectivist understanding of the term 'intelligentsia'. Ukrainian academics approach the reassessment of colonial legacies critically. They reject the intellectuals–intelligentsia dichotomy by reconciling the two terms to accommodate the identity of Ukrainian scholars who are able to shape their individual purpose through their restored academic freedom and individual agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the interrelation between the process of militarisation of everyday life and individual subjectivities. More specifically, it explores one of the less obvious manifestations of this process – the issue of 'military' miracle drugs. By this term, I understand the various pharmaceuticals that (1) are perceived to treat a very broad range of medical conditions, often without any scientific evidence proving their efficiency; and (2) are believed to have been developed by/for or have other connections to the military. The characterisation of the Soviet system (including and perhaps especially during the Cold War) as 'militarised' has existed for a long time and remains commonplace. However, in this article, I would like to advance a more nuanced understanding of this militarisation. In the following, I show that 'military' miracle drugs remained an important goal for citizen scientists as well as a desirable object of consumption for the Soviet public throughout the Cold War. In contrast to the conventional historical narrative, I further show that the Soviet state authorities did not attempt to advance this 'pharmaceuticalisation' but rather perceived this process as dangerous and tried to halt it as much as possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a wealth of original material from Russian and East European archives, in addition to Western primary sources, this paper focuses on the uneasy Soviet–Somali patron–client relationship in the 1970s. It traces the development of Moscow's stake in Mogadishu since Mohamed Siad Barre's coup d'état in 1969 and dissects largely futile Soviet attempts at embedding lasting presence in Somalia's military ranks and security apparatus. As this paper shows, Somalia's socialist experiment proved a challenging affair on multiple counts, not only for the Soviets but also for the African country's leaders. Mogadishu's turn to the left faced serious opposition from within Somalia's own society, suffered from insufficient commitment and division within the state apparatus, and was confronted by local and international pressures coming from Arab and Western quarters. This cleavage strongly impeded the successful completion of the arduous tasks of socialism-building, resulting in short-lived and largely unsuccessful experiments at little understood social engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The region of Central-Eastern Europe has been the inspiration of many different geopolitical analyses. This paper focuses on the origins and development of an important concept for the organization of the region; the Polish geopolitical concept of the Intermarium. The roots of this concept can be traced back to the nineteenth century, but the doctrine was formulated most intensively in the interwar period as a reaction to the position of the Polish state located between two great powers – Germany and the Soviet Union. The renaissance of the Intermarium idea in Poland came after the end of the Cold War. At present, the concept has been reintroduced by leading Polish politicians through the creation of the Three Seas Initiative, which aims to integrate the interests of the Central-Eastern European states. In this paper, S. B. Cohen's concept is applied to discuss the geopolitical situations in which the Intermarium idea emerged and developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows how academics from the postsocialist countries of the Global East are increasingly claiming a voice in the publishing space of international geography journals. Based on a longitudinal database of editors, board members and authors of 22 leading English-language geography journals since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it demonstrates how the number of authors from postsocialist countries, notably from the new EU member states, has risen almost seven-fold since the 1990 s, exhibiting the strongest growth rate among all world regions. Yet, their roles as gatekeepers of academic knowledge (editors, board members) are much weaker. With its analysis, the paper intervenes in epistemological debates about the marginal role of the postsocialist Global East in the geopolitics of knowledge. It suggests that despite constant challenges, academics from the postsocialist Global East are becoming more and more visible internationally. It is, therefore, an opportune time to articulate a collective epistemological project, pushing for a greater role in redefining its conditions and modalities – all the while being mindful that no amount of conceptual innovation expected from scholars of the region can make up for a critical reflection of inherently difficult political issues in increasingly neoliberalized academic knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The plans of world cities outside the USSR that were produced by the Soviet military during the Cold War each include a List of Important Objects. These are items of significant strategic economic, administrative or military importance. This paper examines these object lists from Soviet military plans of British cities and discusses their contents. It concludes that there is considerable variation in their comprehensiveness and some inconsistency in the criteria used to select objects for inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the demise of the Soviet Union, the South Caucasus has turned into a powder keg for Eurasia with rising nationalism and erupting ethnic conflicts. This study explores the complex factors shaping political and military alliance formation by focusing on the South Caucasus. The article argues that the strategic alliances of regional and external powers mainly target to balance threats. The study demonstrates that each country in the region seeks to counterbalance its rival's ambitions and to secure its existence by allying with strong regional or external powers. It argues, however, that there are also cases of strategic compartmentalization, particularly due to extensive energy ties, which cuts across traditional alliance patterns. In this context, the paper also analyses the implications of the Second Karabakh War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the Russian political elite's security thinking and, through comparison of the similarities and differences between Soviet-era and current elite security thinking, how it has been influenced by historical experience, Russian domestic politics, and trends of the international system. The paper also attempts to analyze the influence of the political elite's security thinking on general public threat perception. The article argues that prospective Russian political elite external security attitudes are influenced by continuing threat perceptions based on past experiences in Russian history and Russia's perceived weaknesses, which fuel fears triggered by domestic, political, and socio-economic conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In comparison with Russia's substantial role in Balkan politics within the pre-World War I international system and extension of the Soviet sphere of influence to the Balkans in the bipolar era, the USSR's involvement in the affairs of South-Eastern Europe was modest in the interwar years. This was a consequence of the Soviet Union's dubious status in the Versailles order. The purpose of this paper is to examine how multi-variable trajectories of interaction between the Soviet Union and the Versailles order were projected at the level of Balkan politics. As the USSR lacked appropriate diplomatic, economic and military representations in the Balkans, it may be stated that the Comintern became an instrument for exercising Soviet influence in South-Eastern Europe. The paper shows both the difficulties faced and the perplexities of the policy of the Comintern. The paper finally underlines how the USSR moved from the initial world revolution endeavour to realpolitik. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to perform a large-scale meta-analysis to examine the relationship between ownership concentration and firm performance in emerging economies of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. A meta-synthesis of 1517 estimates collected from 69 previous studies indicated the presence of a statistically significant and positive effect of ownership concentration on firm performance. The synthesized effect size, however, is only modest at best. A meta-regression analysis conducted to identify the factors underlying the small effect size revealed that differences in target industries, estimation periods, design of ownership variables, data sources, estimators, and choices of control variables could have had systematic and profound effects on the empirical results presented in previous studies. We have also noted that publication selection bias is strongly suspected in this research field, and that, due to the magnitude of this bias, existing studies cannot be expected to provide genuine evidence regarding the effect of ownership concentration on firm performance in European emerging economies. Further empirical studies are required to identify the true effect in this region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Lithuania has been struggling with rapidly increasing centre–periphery polarization. There has been a growth in major cities and a significant decline in peripheral rural territories. The ongoing peripheralization is deepening the gap between centre and periphery. This paper introduces a peripheral region determination model, whilst highlighting that this complex geographical issue combines location, demographic, social, economic, cultural, political and natural factors. By analyzing the case of Lithuania using 1992–2012 data at the LAU-1 region level, the study reveals a polarized picture of the country and highlights the factors influencing peripherality in different regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many in the Soviet leadership, Ayatollah Khomeini's anti-Americanism was a sufficient reason for supporting the Iranian Revolution. Yet in Rostislav Ulianovskii's view, the revolution gave Iran a much bigger opportunity: a chance to fit in the Soviet theoretical concept of 'the non-capitalist path of development'. With this picture in mind Ulianovskii and the Tudeh Party developed a strategy of temporary support for Khomeini, expecting him to fulfil his temporary 'objectively progressive' role and give way to the truly 'progressive' forces. This paper investigates the ideological constraints that led to the formation of this strategy and its imminent failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the backdrop of the Soviet Union's 1970s reengagement with Africa through the Indian Ocean, this article investigates the overlapping extensions of aid and technical assistance to the island nation of Mauritius, focusing primarily on the unprecedented 1972 infrastructural development offer by the People's Republic of China. By analysing the minutes of the Sino-Mauritian Agreement on Economic and Technical Cooperation's negotiations as found in the United Kingdom's Foreign and Colonial Office dossiers, this paper examines Chinese aid diplomacy to Africa in a period which saw its admission to the United Nations, its realignment against the USSR, and the concomitant latticed transformations of its aid diplomacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is a sizable body of evidence linking greater economic freedom to better environmental outcomes, there is an ambiguous relationship of trade to the environment. What occurs when trade expands among countries that already have shown that the environment is not a priority? Such an example comes from real life with the Eurasian Economic Union (EaEU), a collection of autocracies that have pursued integration but without any extensive, market-based liberalization. This paper examines the role of the EaEU in increasing trade among its member states and shows that the EaEU did indeed lead to more environmentally unfriendly production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Kazakhstan today, overt dissent is not typically tolerated. However, recent large-scale citizen protests over land use and the environment have resulted in significant concessions by the government. This paper examines the discourses and slogans of protests spaces, which invoke the (inter)national legal frameworks of the United Nations, the legacy of land and bio-species conservation in the former Soviet Union, and a nationalized moral paradigm of respect for ancestral lands, cultural heritage, and sovereignty. Protesters not only call upon government leaders to respect these existing structures of authority, but also position themselves pragmatically as agents of social and political change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neonatal male circumcision is closely tied to Jewish identity and is socially normative in Israel. Soon after the mass arrival of secular, uncircumcised Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the state sponsored mass circumcision campaigns for adolescents and adult men enabling them to join the Jewish collective, socially and religiously. Some two decades later, these men break the silence exposing their traumatic experiences in the wake of this body-altering surgery. This paper builds on the narratives of these men, belonging to Generation 1.5 of Russian Israelis, emerging in online forums, media features, live events and personal interviews. Driven by social pressure and the need to belong, most young men (and their parents) consented to the operation without proper counselling and unaware of its ramifications. Men share their intimate memories of the rapid surgical procedure, painful recuperation, and their belated regrets, both aesthetic and sexual. The willingness to expose their lingering trauma signals evolving concepts of masculinity and vulnerability among these former Soviet men. Their voices join the local and international movement opposing medically-unnecessary genital surgeries of any kind – on men, women and intersex people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the impact of human capital endowments on export intensity employing firm-level data for 29 transition economies. A particular focus is placed on comparing and contrasting Central and Eastern Europe countries (CEECs) with those from the former Soviet Union, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). The impact of the share of employees with higher education, provision of on-the-job training, years of experience of the top manager and labour cost on export intensity is assessed. To test these relationships, Tobit and Fractional Logit approaches are adopted. The estimation results suggest that, overall, having a more educated workforce exerts a positive impact on the export intensity of firms in transition economies, the magnitude being larger for CEECs. Average labour cost, as an alternative measure, also turns out to exert a positive but stronger impact. Insufficient evidence is found of a role for training programmes and years of experience of the top manager. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes an interdisciplinary perspective to focus on the role played by the rural-urban dual system in China's urbanization and migration. We explain its establishment in China in the 1950s and its genealogy in the industrialization strategy adopted in the USSR in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In the reform era, the system has been refashioned to suit a new set of demands of the state industrialization strategy to cater for the global economy. We analyze the mechanisms of the dual system, and how it has helped generate low-cost migrant labor for urban employers and siphon off revenues for urban governments by expropriating rural land. We also argue that there are fundamental differences between the dual system and the common "dualism," based on the Lewis dual-sector model, as observed in many developing countries. The plight of children of migrants is used to illustrate the main points made in the paper. Our research challenges the prevailing perspectives in Chinese geography and urban studies, many of which are based on market-driven neoclassical economics or global neoliberalism, often ignoring China's historical and institutional contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the popular triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and declaration of its socialist character in 1961, a form of Cuban socialism has been in power. The historical trajectory of Cuban socialism in power has moved through periods of fierce independence and debate about a particular Cuban model of socialism, close and disciplined political and economic alignment with the former Soviet Union, and renewed periods of critical debate following its collapse. A constitutional commitment to building Cuban socialism was ratified in 1976, and continues in 2018, with no so-called "transition" to capitalism following the collapse of "historical socialism." This article focuses on approaches of the Cuban state toward popular discussion and debate, and the potential for popular debate to support Cuban socialism and its legitimacy in power. Following an overview of some key historical events and cycles related to popular debate about Cuban socialism, the paper returns to contemporary events, including the 2018 presidential and National Assembly elections. The paper concludes by arguing that there are indications of expanded debate within Cuba, and a reconsideration of the role of official media in this debate, with the potential to contribute both to the ongoing development of Cuban socialism, and more broadly to debate about socialism in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]