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It is often asserted that the values and attitudes of Homo Sovieticus, marked in the rising "popularity" of Stalin, live on in contemporary Russia, acting as a negative factor in social and political development. This article critiques the argument that attitudes to Stalin reflect unreformed Soviet values and explain Russia's authoritarian regression and failed modernization. Our critique of this legacy argument has three parts. First, after examining the problematic elements of the Levada Center approach, we offer alternative explanations for understanding quantitative data on Stalin and the repressions. Second, we examine interview data showing that, for those with a pro-Stalin position, "defending Stalin" is only a small part of a broader worldview that is not obviously part of a "Soviet legacy." Third, we consider survey data from the trudnaia-pamiat' project and find common reluctance to discuss much of the Stalinist past, which we argue represents an agonistic stance. Thus, we interpret attitudes to Stalin within a broader context of complex social and cultural transformation where the anomie of the 1990s has been replaced with dynamics toward a more positive identity construct. On the one hand, the antagonistic mode of memory is visible in statist and patriotic discourses, which do not seriously revolve around Stalin but do resist strong criticism of him. On the other hand, we find many more in Russia avoid the Stalin question and adopt an agonistic mode, avoiding conflict through a "de-politicized" version of history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communist rule left a strong imprint on the development of Eastern European countries, but the precise mechanisms and directions of this legacy effect are subject to debate. This article looks at the legacies of giant infrastructural projects, which played an important role in the ideology and policy practice of communist regimes. Using the natural experiment of the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM), we investigate the influence of this project on post-communist voting behavior. We show that the BAM legacy reduces the share of votes for United Russia, the party of power of Putin's regime, and leads to a larger share of votes for the Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR). While the BAM legacy could be associated with a multitude of channels, we provide empirical evidence for at least one of them—the persistence of human capital, showing that BAM settlements are characterized by better educational outcomes than the control group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Iuridica Lublinensia is the property of Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Contra the often-held assumption that the Islamist danger has been at the forefront of Moscow's security agenda since the Soviet–Afghan War, this article shows how different Russian decision-makers held different views of Islamism during the Tajik Civil War (1992–97). It argues that different relations to the Soviet past, especially to the Soviet–Afghan War, explain the differences in assessing Islamism in Tajikistan between the security agencies and political elites. Unlike the reformers in the Kremlin, the legacy Soviet security elites and diplomats in Russia and the neo-communist leaders in Central Asia recalled the Islamist danger from Soviet times. They emphasized it to the Kremlin who came to embrace their view as the Tajik Civil War progressed and tensions rose in Chechnya. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper looks at the persistence of egalitarian norms in post-Communist societies by focusing on the former members of the Communist parties in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and Russia and their children. Using individual-level survey data, we distinguish between Russia and the CEE countries in this respect. While in the CEE there is some evidence that both former members of the Communist parties and their children have stronger preferences for redistribution than the rest of the population (the results for the children are more significant), in Russia, only children of Communists (but not Communists themselves) support redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The years 2014-2022 witnessed dynamic changes in Ukraine’s social, political and symbolic landscape. In its conflict against Ukraine, the Russian Federation employed methods of hybrid warfare that extended into the realms of communication, ideology, and historical discourse. In response, Ukraine sought to emphasize the distinctiveness and divergence of its symbolic sphere. Decommunization efforts included renaming streets and systematic removal of monuments associated with the communist era. The full-scale war that commenced after February 24, 2022, added deeper meaning to this process. The removal of monuments now extends beyond those commemorating figures and events from the communist period (decommunization), and extends to the tsarist and post-1991 Russian periods (deimperalization and derussification). The current article examines the dynamics of the monument removal process and the government’s endeavors to organize and institutionalize spontaneous public action. Prior to February 2022, decommunization in Ukraine focused on the Ukrainian collective memory, but now the “war of monuments” is directed against Russia. The analysis draws upon Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses Józef Mackiewicz’s views on old Russia and the Soviet Union, attempting to answer the question of whether Mackiewicz saw in totalitarian communist rule a continuation of Russian self-government or a new type of political phenomenon. Unlike most Polish writers and activists of political circles, Mackiewicz does not agree with the thesis formulated by Jan Kucharzewski in his work Od białego tsaratu do czerwonego [From the White to the Red Czarate], that the face of Russia was unchangeable, independent of political changes. Answering the question whether communism was institutionally and mentally rooted in the former Russian statehood, Mackiewicz strongly disagrees. He claims that communism was a completely different phenomenon, transcending systemic differences, which is why calling it “a red czarate” is completely wrong. He consistently separates the concepts of self-government and communism, opposes the view that the Soviet Union was a continuation of tsarist Russia, and therefore rejects the treatment of communist captivity as another iteration of the national dispute between Poland and Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Internacional de Pensamiento Político is the property of Revista Internacional de Pensamiento Politico - Universidad Pablo de Olavide and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

During the past decade, China has rapidly emerged as a major player in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Will it divide Europe? Might these formerly communist countries align themselves again with a communist superpower to their east? Or does their past experience of Russia and communism generate suspicions of China? This article explores what public opinion data from a fall 2020 survey of six CEE countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, Serbia, and Slovakia) can teach us about the drivers of CEE attitudes toward China. It suggests that China has become a "second Eastern power" beyond Russia against which many people in the CEE have come to define themselves. Although there are large differences between CEE publics in their views of China, individual-level self-identifications with the East or West, and attitudes toward the communist past and communism today consistently shape views of both Russia and China. Russia looms large for all in the CEE, but especially for Latvia and Poland, whose views of China appear to be almost completely mediated through attitudes toward their giant Russian neighbor. We conclude with thoughts on the implications of these findings about the structure of CEE public opinion toward China for the future of the "16þ1" mechanism and CEE-China relations more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The life topic of Hélène Iswolsky (1896–1975), Russian émigré, was her lost homeland, Russia. In her texts, she describes Russia as a profoundly spiritual nation, resisting the communist regime. Raised in a Protestant-Orthodox family, Iswolsky embraced the Catholic faith in 1921, and the Church became her second home. The personal experience of conversion profoundly affected her work: on the level of the interconfessional dialog, she strove for a better understanding between Orthodox and Catholics; on the politico-social level she stood for the creation a of a new system – anticapitalistic, anticommunist, built on the bases of the Christian ethics. The book L’Homme 1936 en Russie soviétique, in which Iswolsky reflects on the situation of the coeval Soviet Union, will be analyzed with regard to the political context of the 1930s. The crucial questions will concern the image of Russia the author presents, and the reception of this image by the French public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to research on enterprise formation by studying location decisions of Russian enterprises in various industries, taking into consideration the role of historical heritage, comparing firms created during the communist period to younger ones. We apply a negative binomial model and use the Ruslana database provided by the Bureau van Dijk. Our results show that firms created during the communist period have a specific structure, and that, once this specificity is taken into account, they do not differ from other firms with respect to their sensitivity to the main location factors (market potential, business risk, local human capital, and knowledge base). There are some differences across industries, including that firms in the high-tech and integrators industries are particularly sensitive to the knowledge base. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction to our special issue on the politics of memory in the post-Soviet space, we present a four-part analytical framework through which to evaluate recent developments in the region. Specifically, we focus on: 1) the circulation of memories across space and time; 2) the factors that condition the recall of the past; 3) the actors involved in these processes; and 4) the logics that guide how the past is represented and interpreted. This framework provides a means through which to conceptually order and discuss the individual contributions to this issue, as well as to evaluate the wider relevance of Russia's 2020 Victory Day commemoration, which marked the 75th anniversary of World War II's end. A central claim advanced in this article is that researchers need to distinguish not just between the nationalized remembering we increasingly see being manifest across the former communist states of East-Central Europe and the more universalistic appeals of the cosmopolitan memory regime that predominates in Western Europe, but also contemporary Russia's attempts to promulgate an "empire memory" that represents a competing set of generalizable norms for how the past should be depicted. The latter is significant because it directly challenges the specificity and contextual embeddedness of national recall as well as key mnemonic precepts of the post-national–meaning largely spatially and temporally unbounded–attention that has been accorded to victimhood and suffering in recent decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses Marx's conviction that the expansion of the capitalist mode of production was a basic prerequisite for the birth of communist society. It overviews this idea through the whole of Marx's oeuvre, from his early political writings to the studies of the last decade. Particular relevance is given to the analysis of Capital and its preparatory manuscripts, where Marx highlighted in depth the fundamental relationship between the productive growth generated by the capitalist mode of production and the preconditions for the communist society for which the workers' movement must struggle. Finally, the article shows that in the end of his life—for example when he studied the possible developments of the rural commune (obshchina) in Russia—Marx did not change his basic ideas about the profile of future communist society, as he sketched it from the Grundrisse on. Guided by hostility to schematism he thought it might be possible that the revolution would break out in forms and conditions that had never been considered before. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the place religion holds in post-Soviet Russian society, and most importantly, the case of the dominant Russian Orthodoxy. It shows that the gap between low everyday religiosity and high public profile of religion is the key to a specific Russian version of secularity. How religion's spectacular appropriation of physical and social space, up to the imaginative space of the national culture as such, does not cancel the strong counterweight of deeply ingrained secular cultural arrangements – either genetically linked to some European variations or specifically related to (post)communist experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how historical representation of the deportation of Kalmyks to Siberia has changed in compliance with the politics of history in Russia. It traces the shift from silence on this topic under communism to the dramatisation of it in the 1990s when the communists lost their power, and finally to the softening of this event in the last decades when state ideology under Putin's administration is striving to unite the peoples of Russia around the victory in the World War II, leaving the history of the 'purged peoples' on the sidelines of this triumph. This evolution from a tragic to a more positive narrative is reflected in the messages of public spectacles about the deportation. The softened approach to this traumatic event was also linked to generational change: its eldest witnesses today are the people who were born between 1943 and 1956 and who were too young to remember its hardships. The author analyses classic theatre performances ('Arash', 1995, and 'Kalmychka', 2018) and mass agitational campaigns, such as the Trains of Remembrance which took present-day Kalmyks to Siberia to express gratitude symbolically to Siberians who helped them in the difficult period. These spectacles are not mere historical illustrations of the past, but new revisions of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconstructs the views of Soviet schoolchildren of the 1930s about the future, which they nearly always identified with communism. The attitudes to this this perspective among the pre‐war school students are quite remarkable taking into account that they were the first generation of the Soviet citizens molded in accordance with the USSR's ideological matrix, within the school system of the 1930s that had been remodeled to meet the communist ideological priorities. The texts created by individuals belonging that age group, provide a fairly clear picture of the hierarchy, combinations, and depth of grasping the messages of the program to form a communist consciousness. Based on the analysis of children's essays, statements, and ego documents of high school students, the article shows group differences in how the Communist ideal was perceived. For younger adolescents, this ideal did not penetrate deeply into their consciousness. Rather, it provided an external framework for technogenic fantasies and adventurous escapades. Thus transformed, these fantasies in fact demonstrate typical reactions to problematic areas of communication with the outside world, peculiar to age‐related psychology. For older adolescents enduring hardships and loneliness, this ideal was a model for the relationships between people and between a person and society–which promised to solve their problems. Creative and socially active youngsters were inspired by a communist outbreak of discoveries, radically changing the conditions of human existence, and were looking for a way to apply their personal resources to it. One of the results of this search and hence the product of communist education was an unofficial rating of professions and professionals widely adopted by young people. At the top were the intellectual activities involving a good education, opportunities for creative achievement, and the people representing these qualities. The lowest were non‐creative mass professions without heuristic potential and those involved in them. These hierarchies of people and occupations led to the increased heterogeneity and inequality in society, in other words, they worked in the opposite direction to the building of a homogeneous communist society of equal subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After centuries of first tsarist and then communist censorship in Russia, censorship was finally prohibited by the Constitution in 1993. The censorship-free 1990s (with all the pros and cons) were followed by a search for new mechanisms of censorship and new forms of prohibition by the authorities to determine a certain control of the state over the mass media and various forms of art, including literature. New legislation (the 2013 law banning propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships and denial of traditional family values among minors, the 2014 law banning foul language in the arts, the 2016 amendments of anti-extremism law) has become one such mechanism. On the one hand, the laws result in authors' self-censorship; on the other, they provide not only the authorities but also individuals, activist groups or various citizen or religious associations with the opportunity to sue the author or the publisher of a literary work in court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study of successor unions to the official unions in the former USSR, which uses data from 1992-98 field work and surveys of union leaders, demonstrates that, contrary to the claims of some observers, successor unions are capable of reform. Compared to the old unions, the successor unions examined in this study were more decentralized and democratic, placed more emphasis on job-related concerns, and had leaders with more varied profiles and compensation. The author finds no relationship between leaders' membership in the Communist Party and either their political beliefs or the probability of their being newly elected leaders. Union membership was far higher in successor unions than in the new, alternative unions. Tempering these indications of reformation, however, is some evidence of institutional inertia and persistence of privilege in the successor unions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the reign of Peter the Great, Russia has identified itself in opposition to Europe. In the late 1980s, Michael Gorbachev and associates forged a liberal representation of Europe and initiated a Western-oriented foreign policy. Against this westernizing or liberal representation of Europe stood what was at first a makeshift group of old Communists and right-wing nationalists, who put forward an alternative representation that began to congeal around the idea that the quintessentially Russian trait was to have a strong state. This article traces how this latter position consolidated into a full-fledged xenophobic nationalist representation of Europe, which marginalized first other forms of nationalism and then, particularly since 2013, liberal representations of Europe. The official Russian stance is now that Russia itself is True Europe, a conservative great power that guards Europe's true Christian heritage against the False Europe of decadence and depravity to its west. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Codrul Cosminului is the property of Codrul Cosminului and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The late 1980s and early 1990s were characterized by the sudden rise of nationalist movements in almost all Soviet ethnic regions. It is argued that the rise ofpoliticalnationalism since the late 1980s can be explained by the development ofculturalnationalism in the previous decades, as an unintended outcome of Communist nationalities policy. All ethnic regions are examined throughout the entire history of the USSR (49 regions, 1917–1991), using the structural equation modeling (SEM) approach. This paper aims to make at least three contributions to the field. First, it is a methodological contribution for studying nationalism: a “quantification of history” approach. Having constructed variables from historical data, I use conventional statistical methods such as SEM. Second, this paper contributes to the theoretical debate about the role of cultural autonomy in multiethnic states. Finally, the paper statistically proves that the break between early Soviet and Stalinist nationalities policy explains the entire Soviet nationalities policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The downfall of the Communist regime in the Soviet Union was at first considered by sociologists as a matter of transition from a dictatorial to a democratic regime. As a result, they inferred an affinity between the ongoing processes in the states constituting part of the Soviet Empire and the process of democratization occurring in Latin American or Southern European states. Shortly afterwards, however, the disparity between the various processes became obvious, when in some of the post-Soviet states the dictatorial regime lingered on, while others returned to a dictatorial regime after having been democratic in the past. Thus, sociologists have, in fact, no guidelines to account for the regime changes in these states, and it is also not clear what type of regime developed during Yeltsin’s presidency and what type of regime is developing in Russia under Putin.Rus, whither are you speeding to? Answer me. No answer. The middle bell trills out in a dream its liquid soliloquy; the roaring air is torn to pieces and becomes wind; all things on earth fly by and other nations and states gaze askance as they step aside and give her the right of way. (Nikolai Gogol)Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. (Winston Churchill) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Danubius is the property of Danubius and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper reviews 1960s' Soviet technical assistance projects related to town planning and housing in Afghanistan: the drafting of the 1964 master plan for the development of Kabul and the planning and construction of the first Mikrorayon neighbourhoods envisioned in this plan. Drawing on previously unexplored archival materials from Soviet building institutions, it documents the circumstances and outcome of the Soviet town planners' employment in Kabul, and situates their involvement in the context of competitive coexistence between communist and capitalist development aid missions in Afghanistan. In conclusion, the paper underscores the multipolar character of knowledge transfer between unequal stakeholders. It proposes a reading of the contested history of the 1964 master plan for Kabul as an example for the emergence of a productive, conflictual space of negotiation between experts in the design of urban space from South, East and West, within which concordant visions of modern urban development acquired their shape and global reach. Ultimately, the general plan's vision of a tabula rasa reconstruction of central Kabul according to 1960s' international planners' wisdom had little effect. But its most significant outcome, the Mikrorayon neighbourhoods, provided an everyday experience of modern urban lifestyle for a minority until the development of Kabul was brutally interrupted by civil war and foreign military forces. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Nostalgia for the communist past originates in positive evaluations of communist political and economic systems and in identification with the Soviet Union. It is people's socialization in a particular political culture and identity, rather than their negative feelings toward the current regime and its performance, that explains this phenomenon. The same factors operate in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine, irrespective of country-specific developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a conference that was held in honor of the 140th birthday of the deceased Jewish Marxist theorist and activist Rosa Luxemburg. The conference, titled "Rosa Luxemburg: Theorie, Kontext, Aktualität," was held in Moscow, Russia from October 5-6, 2011. Topics discussed included archival finds about the economic works by Luxemburg, a comparison between her ideas on imperialism and a capitalistic view of imperialism, and the economic and political influence of Luxemburg.

In the second half of the years 1970s, under a communist regime in which the censorship was at her home, in Romania was given free for celebrating the centenary of the State Independence, that under the terms in which the recovery of the past was made selectively and in the areas useful for the regime. So as in 1968 came the time for "declassification" of the moment 1918, celebrating for the first time, after half of century, the unification of Transylvania with Romania in the terms and conditions imposed by the regime, the year 1977 meant the celebration with pomp of 100 years of independence. The present study tries to capture the concrete relationships associated with the censorship which accompanied this phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines an aspect of the Russian and East European Revolutions that has been largely overlooked by historians. That of the Independentist Ukrainian Marxists who challenged both the Russian Communists and the Ukrainian nationalists in their quest for an independent Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic. Originating in Ukrainian Social-Democracy, the Nezalezhnyky (Independentists) anticipated many of the ideas of the communist oppositions' who sought to reassert the libertarian goals of the revolution. Struggling first within the Ukrainian Peoples Republic then the Ukrainian SSR, their campaign had international ramifications and gained the support Bela Kun's Soviet Hungary. In 1919, commanding a section of the Red Army the Nezalezhnyky led a pro-soviet rebellion larger and far more serious than the Kronstadt uprising. Organised as the Ukrainian Communist Party, between 1919-1925 they were the last legal-opposition party in the USSR. In the face of harassment they were the only communists to explicitly advocate a theory of permanent revolution and developed a concept of proletarian hegemony. They opposed NEP as return to capitalist advocating soviet democracy and a self-governing of Ukraine. The history and ideas of these Marxist's provides a new insight into the fate of the Russian, Ukrainian and East European revolutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Georgii Plekhanov is often credited with being the 'father of Russian Marxism'. He was not, however, the first Russian Marxist. That distinction belongs to Nikolai Ivanovich Sieber (Ziber), whose dissertation on Marx's economics appeared in 1871, the year before the Russian translation of Das Kapital, and introduced Plekhanov's generation of Russian revolutionaries to Marxist ideas. Sieber's work was then given a prominent endorsement in the second edition of Das Kapital, wherein Marx praised the depth of understanding Sieber had displayed of his economic theory. In view of this, one might consider that Sieber should be regarded as a dominant figure in the history of Marxism in Russia but, in fact, he is seldom mentioned by historians - and, when he is, it is generally cursorily and dismissively. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to examine the interrelationship of Sieber and Marx and to place Sieber's writings in the context of the emergence of the Russian conception of Marxism at the end of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws a profile of Anna Politkovskaja, the journalist murdered in Moscow in October 2006. When the communist regime collapsed she sided with the "Democrats" (Boris Eltsin), but afterwards she departed from them when the first Cecenia War began (autumn 1994). With the beginning of the second Cecenia War (August-September 1999) Anna Politkovskaja definitively understood the Democrats no longer existed in Russia. In fact, opening the road to the new massacre had been their own responsibility. Once she had understood the truth, she began to tell the way "they", the "Democrats" had organized the Cecenia Wars. Many times she went to that devastated land and denounced the dreadful war crimes committed there by the Russians, writing on her daily Novaja Gazeta. She openly condemned the Russian army and government for their lacking in respect of civil rights and their violation of the Constitutional State, both in Russia and Cecenia. In the West she had published a book -Putin's Russia- from which she gained fame. But it provoked the Russian President to anger. The strong will of this woman with a feeble voice to testify and inform has been blown out, together with her obstinate tenaciousness. Anna Politkovskaja had staked her own life, conscious of the risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais is the property of Centro de Estudos Sociais and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The system and function of property rights have been transformed in the switch from pre-Revolutionary to contemporary law. A historical view of this institution reveals how the law has served various purposes over time: for the marketplace or for economic planning and the distribution of goods. Remnants of the Communist past have gradually undergone an original sort of ‘sedimentation’ in contemporary law, which is now trying to assimilate the legacy of European law. To understand this process, the category of property is analyzed as well as the reform of civil law and the definition of its scope. Changes in property rights are reviewed in the light of recent privatizations. Given the complexity of these trends, the difficulty of creating a real estate market makes thoroughgoing institutional reforms a necessity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]