scholarly journals Post-Soviet Heritages in the Making

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1080-1088
Author(s):  
Gertjan Plets

Despite the growing interest in post-Soviet space (the countries formerly located in the Soviet Union or its sphere of influence) in the field of memory studies, researchers have only just begun to the study how ‘things and practices’ from the past are mobilized, institutionalized and repackaged in this particular part of the world. This special collection explores how heritage is being made in a highly diverse and multicultural space where Soviet modernist conceptions of culture and identity interact with local deeply rooted attitudes as well as post-Soviet economic and political challenges.

Politologija ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 93 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-97
Author(s):  
Giedrius Česnakas ◽  
Vytautas Isoda

[full article, abstract in English; abstract in Lithuanian] Lithuania has been a target of Russia’s soft power efforts for the past two decades. The aim of this article is to analyse Russia’s soft power influence possibilities in Lithuania. First, it analyzes how soft power is interpreted in Russia compared to the Western conception. Then, Russia’s soft power instruments and their core goals are reviewed, not all of which fall under the category of “soft power instruments” according to the Western understanding. The article proceeds with demographic changes in Lithuania and trends of consumption of Russian culture and information in Lithuania. The main argument is that Russia is not aiming to apply soft power to the general Lithuanian society but to particular groups within the population (Russophone minorities and residents with sentiments for the Soviet Union). It can be assumed that demographic trends and Russia’s aggressive actions will increasingly limit its soft power capabilities. However, the greatest setback to Russia’s soft power in Lithuania is arguably caused by its continuing reliance on hard power when it comes to countries of the post-Soviet space.


2019 ◽  
Vol 87 (4) ◽  
pp. 23-32
Author(s):  
M. V. Melnyk

It has been stressed that the topic of philosophical and legal interpretations of the deformations of legal awareness in the XX – early XXI century is actively developed by scholars of the countries of the post-Soviet space. Emphasis has been placed on the development of the doctrine on legal nihilism that has been developed in Western European philosophical and legal thought, as well as on the problem of totalitarian legal awareness that has emerged in Soviet society. It has been revealed that the foundation of the concept of the deformations of legal awareness in Ukrainian philosophical and legal science was laid by the great household names of the past – P. I. Novgorodtsev, I. A. Il`in, M. M. Alekseev, L. I. Petrazhitskii, B. I. Kistiakivskyi and others. There is not so much in the world scientific thought about the deformations of legal awareness, where the concept of legal nihilism is the exception. The foundations of the doctrine of nihilism were laid by such outstanding thinkers as F. Nietzsche, A. Schopenhauer, M. Heidegger, F. H. Jacobi. Therefore, nowadays the doctrine of legal nihilism is the most developed in relation to the types of the deformations of legal awareness. It has been determined that the “golden age” of this extremely negative social phenomenon occurred at the beginning of the XX century, after the formation of the USSR. Totalitarian propaganda machines, the Soviet Union in particular, tried to transform society into a governed crowd, brainwashed by a certain ideology that led to a degeneration of legal awareness into a totalitarian consciousness and, as a consequence, to the widespread deformation of legal awareness. However, the deformations of legal awareness were not discussed at theoretical level, because they were considered a vestige of bourgeois times. Discussion about the deformation of legal awareness was initiated by the prominent Soviet legal scholar E. A. Lukasheva in her work “Socialist Legal Awareness and Legality”, where she characterized that the legal awareness of a particular individual can be defective, limited, and backward from the general level of public consciousness, can contain harmful installations and defective assessments of legal phenomena.


2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-149
Author(s):  
Michael O. Slobodchikoff

This article investigates how states can begin to cooperate and form bilateral relationships given severe barriers to cooperation. Certain issues can prevent cooperation from occurring despite strategic interests in doing so by both states. However, if states agree to use the institutional design feature of territorial or issue neutralization, then conflict can be averted even if some of the major hindrances to cooperation remains unresolved. I examine in greater detail how both territorial and issue neutralization are used as institutional designs feature in building a cooperative bilateral relationship. Through two major case studies, the self-imposed territorial neutralization of Finland in its relations with the Soviet Union as well as issue neutralization in the relationship between Russia and Ukraine following the collapse of the Soviet Union, I am able to show that territorial and issue neutralization may be effective tools for resolving conflict in the post-Soviet space and could create cooperative relationships instead of conflictual ones.


2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-110
Author(s):  
David Erkomaishvili

The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 allowed independent states, which emerged in its place, to construct their own alignments. The choice of the case for empirical analysis had been made based on several unique characteristics. Orthodox Alliance Theory had almost never properly addressed alignments in the post-Soviet space due to the lack of access to information during the Soviet period - along with the structure of the state: only Soviet alignment policies were taken into consideration, instead of those of its constituent republics as well - and modest interest of alliance theorists in the region. Continued disintegration of the post-Soviet space, which has not stopped with the collapse of the Soviet Union but keeps fragmenting further, creates a unique setting for researching the adequacy of Alliance Theory's classic assumptions as well as developing new approaches. This work traces the development of the post-Soviet system of collective security and its subsequent transformation into a series of bilateral security relations, along with the shortfall of multilateralism.


2016 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-443 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marian Burchardt ◽  
Hovhannes Hovhannisyan

This article draws on the notion of ‘cultural defense’ to examine how nationalism shapes contemporary contestations around religion and secularity in Armenia. While clearly relevant, this framework has rarely been used for the analysis of religious change in the Caucasus region as part of the broader post-Soviet space. This article fills this lacuna. Simultaneously, it moves beyond the relatively narrow interest in the degree of secularization or reinforced religious nationalism as social outcomes of cultural defense situations. Instead, we are interested in how boundaries between religion and secular spheres in society are drawn in particular ways, how the resulting religious – secular configurations have evolved since the end of the Soviet Union – of which Armenia was a part – and how concepts of nationhood and nationalist mobilizations have shaped this process.


Author(s):  
Katarzyna Lidia Babulewicz

Musical Representations of the Past in Animations for Children Produced in Central and Eastern Europe in Times of Communism The subject of the article is the composition strategies of presenting the bygone time in animated films produced in the integrated cultural space that was, during the communist era, Central and Eastern Europe. Productions made in two countries – in the Soviet Union and in Poland – are considered. The discussion of film examples is conducted in an approximate chronological order, according to the time of production of individual pictures. The presentation of specific productions is not intended to exhaustively analyse these audiovisual works, but to review thematic threads related to the past and in their context compositional ideas and tendencies.


2009 ◽  
Vol 35 (S1) ◽  
pp. 237-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
PAUL KUBICEK

AbstractThe Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was designed to manage the collapse of the Soviet Union and foster post-Soviet cooperation in political, economic, and security spheres. Over a decade into its existence, most analysts would rate it a failure: many post-Soviet states do not participate in CIS ventures, the institutional machinery of the CIS is weak, and Russia, the most dominant post-Soviet state, has tended to favour bi-lateral relationships over multi-lateral institutions. Why is this the case? This article looks at the CIS through the prism of theories of regionalism, demonstrating that the CIS was handicapped on many fronts, including emergent multi-polarity in the post-Soviet space and domestic-level political considerations in many post-Soviet states.


1970 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 548-565
Author(s):  
Lincoln P. Bloomfield

When the United Nations Charter was drafted in 1945 the provisions for keeping the peace had to be drawn up in the abstract. There was no tangible enemy, crises were in the future, and commitments were made in a vacuum. It was only when it became clear what the world was really like that “peacekeeping” was invented. It turned out that in most conflict situations there was no definable aggressor or victim, that the danger was uncontrolled escalation of local conflicts into the nuclear realm, and that the real enemy was a fantastically complex set of instabilities, inequities, and passions to which 1945 international ground rules were inadequately related.


1961 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Richard Lowenthal

The policy declaration and the appeal to the peoples of the world adopted last December by the Moscow conference of eighty-one Communist parties mark the end of one phase in the dispute between the leaderships of the ruling parties of China and the Soviet Union—the phase in which the followers of Mao for the first time openly challenged the standing of the Soviet Communists as the fountain-head of ideological orthodoxy for the world movement. But the “ideological dispute” which began in April was neither a sudden nor a self-contained development: it grew out of acute differences between the two Communist Great Powers over concrete diplomatic issues, and it took its course in constant interaction with the changes in Soviet diplomatic tactics. Hence the total impact of that phase on Soviet foreign policy on one side, and on the ideology, organisation and strategy of international Communism on the other, cannot be evaluated from an interpretation of the Moscow documents alone, but only from a study of the process as a whole, as it developed during the past year on both planes.


Polylogos ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (№ 4 (18)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Artur Avakov

The article is devoted to the most famous integration organizations and programs in the post-Soviet space: CIS, CSTO, EAEU, GUAM, Union State of Belarus and Russia, Eastern Partnership. The work analyzes the stages of their formation, achievements and problems. For this, a systematic approach, a method of critical analysis, comparative historical and other scientific methods of cognition were used. Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, political, economic and cultural ties between the new republics were preserved. After the USSR ceased to exist, a demand arose in the states of the post-Soviet space for new legal mechanisms and organizational formalization of these ties. The coexistence and struggle of various interests in the post-Soviet space predetermined a number of features in the emergence and functioning of integration projects.  


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