Overview

The recent history of post-Soviet societies is often described in terms of the transition metaphor. Images of movement as well as changing places and situations were foundational for the social conceptualization of the new nations. The idea of looking for novelty and new beginnings legitimized the dissolution of the USSR as well as many state- and economy-related experiments. This volume describes how the new societies survived this period of regime change, economic crises, internal wars, political drawbacks, and social innovations, and how they are making sense of it. The volume's contributors include Russian, Ukrainian, and German scholars who analyze political, social, and cultural ideologies: Natalia Koulinka, Kostiantyn Fedorenko, Pavel Skigin, Jesko Schmoller, Valentyna Kyselova, Anton Avksentiev, Chris Monday, Egor Isaev, Oleksandr Zabirko, Sergiy Kurbatov, Alla Marchenko, Jennifer J. Carroll, Daria Goriacheva, and Darya Malyutina.

Full Product Details

9783838213880

Table of Contents

Reviews

"""How to make sense of the ideological imagination of the societies born out of the collapse of Soviet ideology, is the central question of this volume of original and highly nuanced articles edited by two of the best scholars of the post-Soviet condition.""—Ivan Krastev, Centre for Liberal Strategies ""Ideology after Union is a remarkable collection of essays dedicated to the interrelation of state, society, and culture in the post-Soviet space. The case studies reach out well beyond their individual scope and paradigmatically analyze the political uses of ideological discourses.""—Ulrich Schmid, University of St. Gallen ""Alexander Etkind and Mikhail Minakov have assembled a first-rate collection of scholars, who have written stimulating and original essays on the politics of post-communist societies in Europe and Central Asia.""—Rajan Menon, City University of New York ""'The best in post-Soviet thought and analysis' would probably not sound too pretentious as a characteristic of this collection of twelve essays, written by authors coming from the newly independent countries of the former Soviet Union. Published originally in one of the most innovative social sciences journals of the region, the essays document, assess, and contextualize the process in which the elites and societies of the post-Soviet states emerge from the shadow of the common political and ideological legacy to chart their own course in the world that rapidly changes around them. This anthology is as much about the understandings of history as it is about the visions of the present and the future, and is a must-read for anyone interested in the region.""—Serhii Plokhy, Harvard University"

Author Information

The editors: Dr. Alexander Etkind is Professor of History at the European University Institute at Florence, and taught at King’s College Cambridge. He is author of Eros of the Impossible (Westview 1996), Internal Colonization (Polity 2011), Warped Mourning (Stanford UP 2013), Roads not Taken (Pittsburgh UP 2017), and Remembering Katyn (Polity 2012) as well as co-editor of Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe (Palgrave 2013) and Cultural Forms of Protest in Russia (Routledge 2017). Dr. Mikhail Minakov is Senior Advisor at The Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC, and taught at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. He is the author of, amongst other books, Development and Dystopia (ibidem Press 2018), and co-editor of Demodernization (ibidem Press 2018). He edits the Ideology and Politics Journal and the blog Kennan Focus Ukraine.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available