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Deciding how to relate to the Soviet past is a key question in the politics of memory for the societies and political elites of the post-Soviet countries. Throughout the post-Soviet decades Armenian political and intellectual elites tried to form a complex attitude to the Soviet past, neither rejecting, nor appropriating the Soviet legacy completely, but assimilating it within the paradigm of national history. Within this paradigm Soviet Armenia is viewed as a stage in the development of Armenian nationhood, as "the second republic", which links the first "attempt" at building a nation-state, "the first republic" of 1918–1920, to the "3rd republic", i.e. the post-Soviet state of Armenia. This paradigm, in which the Soviet past is neither completely rejected, or accepted, but certain elements of it are integrated into the national history narrative, is optimal for post-Soviet Armenia, given both the peculiarity of Armenia's historical experience (particularly the role played by Russia/USSR in the context of Armenian-Turkish relations), as well as the current geopolitical setting, in which Armenia and Russia are formal allies. This attitude, which can be described as "mnemonic ambiguity", allows the assertion of an independent and sovereign Armenian state as legitimate, while at the same time avoiding a confrontation with an ally in the realm of memory politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) bills itself as an alliance. It is seen as Russia's hedge to NATO, yet it often acts in an inconsistent manner vis-a-vis its members when they face crisis situations. These situations are complicated by the fact that the alliance engages in a policy of strategic ambiguity without making a firm commitment to either side of a dispute. Since Russia often acts as a security guarantor on a bilateral level for these states, staying in the alliance may become counterproductive. In order to prevent defection of its members and assuage their fears of abandonment, while maintaining this unofficial policy of strategic ambiguity, and thus help the alliance patron, Russia, avoid entanglement, reassurances are needed. These reassurances come in the form of sunk costs, specifically joint annual military exercise, and the 2022 intervention in Kazakhstan. These sunk costs by the CSTO enhance its reputation for reliability, while maintaining its policy of strategic ambiguity. They reassure its members, assuaging their fear of abandonment, and keeping them invested in the alliance. This will be shown through the use of process tracing in a case study that examines an internal alliance dilemma with two of the organization's members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the prevalent view positions data as an objective and unbiased resource of truth about the world, scholars have noted that this understanding cannot be all-encompassing and data activists may comprehend the relationship between knowledge, reality, and data differently. Data activists are civil society actors with a critical stance towards datafication; they either consider data as a political issue or employ it to advance desirable social change. This article investigates activists' data epistemologies in a twofold manner. First, it poses the question of how activists can simultaneously use a certain dataset while questioning its credibility. Second, the article explores how activists' data epistemology transforms other domains of socio-political grassroots interventions. To answer these questions, I turn to the case of the DTP Map – an interactive geoweb map of traffic accidents in Russia made by activists using the official governmental data. Turning to the concept of contentious data politics, I demonstrate how the project transforms by continuously dealing with the data's epistemologically ambiguous nature. In their data practices aimed at gaining and maintaining the users' trust, activists have tried to ensure their project will be employed by various collectives for the common goal of reducing traffic accidents in Russia. Their data practices can be considered both a repertoire of social change and a stake of activist intervention. Crucially, in the process of map-making, activists do not gain the epistemologically unambiguous view of data but rather they manage to retain this ambiguity and make it a constitutive part of their project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by the recently experienced systemic shocks (the COVID-19 pandemic and the full-fledged Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine)—that have created new forms of uncertainties to our supplies—this paper explores the supply chain robustness under risk aversion and ambiguity aversion. We aim to understand the potential consequences of deeply uncertain systemic events on the supply chain resilience and how does the information precision affect individual agents' choices and the chain level preparedness to aggregate shocks. Augmenting a parsimonious supply chain model with uncertainty, we analyse the relationship between the upstream sourcing decisions and the supply chain survival probability. Both risk-averse and ambiguity-averse individually-optimising agents' upstream sourcing paths are efficient but can become vulnerable to aggregate shocks. In contrast, a chain-level coordination of downstream firm sourcing decisions can qualitatively improve the robustness of the entire supply chain compared to the individual decision making baseline. Such a robust decision making ensures that in the presence of an aggregate shock—independently of its realisation—part of upstream suppliers will survive and the final goods' supply will be ensured even under the most demanding circumstances. Our results also indicate that an input source diversification extracts a cost in foregone efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since March 2020, Russia has been facing three lasting challenges of uncontrollable threat and uncertainty: the COVID-19 pandemic taking place at the global scale, and two national-level ones, the radical amendments to the Constitution and a drop in oil prices and national currency. We used this opportunity to investigate the way personality resources predict individual differences in the cognitive evaluations of uncertainty and emotional responses associated with each situation. We conducted a longitudinal study with 4 measurement waves between April and November 2020 in a sample of Russian-speaking volunteers (N = 219). The assessment of each of the three situations at each measurement occasion included the evaluation of its degree of certainty/uncertainty, general orientation, positive and negative emotions. We used repeated-measures ANOVA to explore the differences in cognitive appraisals and emotional reactions across time and situations, and multilevel modeling with random slopes to investigate the individual differences in the change trends for these variables. The results suggest that individuals with higher levels of personality resources tend to appraise the challenging situations as more certain, have a better sense of orientation in these situations, show more positive emotional responses, and exhibit more positive change trends over time reflecting successful adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years Russia has changed rapidly from a socio-economic point of view. The economic changes have led to the development of slang phraseological units (herefrom, PUs) in the business communication. The Russian jargon PUs are taken from the dictionary Pochti seryoznyj slovar' delovogo obscheniya (Pogrebnyak: 2007) and are translated into Italian, mostly via English, functioning as Intermediary Language (herefrom, IL). The materials consist in Russian slang PUs that are ambiguous, as it appears hard to understand, whether they are calques from IL or properly Russian expressions. The study underlines the importance of the IL to avoid ambiguity and of the idiomatic translation to both understand business culture and language. The functional equivalence is also taken into account as an interlinguistic equivalence strategy needed to find a communicative coincidence between Source Language (herefrom, SL) and Target Language (herefrom, TL) contexts. To conclude, the work attempts to facilitate informal business communication between Russian and Italian partners and to mitigate misunderstandings that may arise in the presence of cultural differences between the two countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study tested how the Recency Preference and Predicate Proximity model (Gibson et al. in Cognition 59(1):23-59, 1996, https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(88)90004-2 ) plays out by examining the attachment preferences of native Russian speakers when processing locally ambiguous participial relative clause sentences with three potential NP attachment sites in Russian. Using a self-paced reading task, reading times and noun phrase selection responses were collected. Results showed significantly shorter reading times at the disambiguating region and higher accuracy rate of selection in the high-attaching condition than in the middle- and low-attaching conditions. No significant differences were found between the middle- and low-attaching conditions. We argue that Predicate Proximity is a much stronger factor than Recency Preference in Russian., (© 2024. The Author(s).)