Abstract Uzbekistan’s cottonization took off with the first Five-Year Plan and its sky-rocketing targets. Pre-revolutionary experience, however, pointed at the superiority of smallholdings over large production units, including kolkhozy, for cotton agriculture. The Central Asian ‘agrarian debate’ revolved around this theme, shaping the careers of historians and economists, especially Pëtr G. Galuzo, Nikolai N. Kazhanov, and his ‘school’ at SAGU . By clarifying how this controversy was related to better-known ‘metropolitan’ disputes, and explaining its link to practical agricultural policy, this article reconsiders the theoretical underpinnings of collectivization in the cotton sector and contextualises early Soviet scholarship about the colonial period.
Abstract This study examines the demographic transformation of Soviet Nagorno-Karabakh, moving beyond traditional narratives of political suppression to analyze long-term, state-sponsored structural practices. Utilizing demographic engineering as an analytical lens, the research investigates how the Azerbaijan SSR operated as a “nationalizing state” by exploiting the inherent contradictions of Soviet ethno-federalism. Focusing on the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast ( NKAO ) as an illustrative case, the study triangulates All-Union statistical data with official leadership admissions to demonstrate that the region’s Armenian demographic decline was a state-sponsored outcome. The findings operationalize the peacetime mechanisms of demographic engineering deployed by Baku: administrative reconfiguration, state-orchestrated resettlement, targeted labor out-migration, economic marginalization, and socio-cultural subordination. Ultimately, this research demonstrates how a decades-long, structurally engineered effort to align political boundaries with ethnic realities reshaped the region’s demographic landscape, offering novel insights into the institutional vulnerabilities of Soviet nationality policy.
Abstract This article examines urban environmental transformation and place identity in Soviet and post-Soviet Riga through the lens of environmental oral history. Focusing on the Lower Daugava neighbourhoods, it explores how Soviet industrial and urban planning policies reshaped not only the physical landscape but also the affective, social, and ecological relations of residents. Drawing on biographical interviews, the study reveals how people experienced, interpreted, and remembered environmental degradation, displacement, and the loss of familiar spaces. During the post-Soviet era, the article identifies practices of return and re-attachment as emerging forms of eco-social agency, through which individuals attempt to restore a sense of continuity and belonging within altered urban ecologies. The analysis contextualizes personal narratives within broader political and environmental histories, demonstrating how memory, sensory experience, and emotion influence the reconstruction of place identity in a city still marked by Soviet environmental legacies.
This article aims to examine the experiences of the Armenian language during the Soviet era within the framework of Soviet language planning and policy. Although the Armenian language is often perceived as having been less affected by these policies, it has received relatively little scholarly attention. This study seeks to provide a comprehensive overview of the period, highlighting the developments and particularities unique to the Armenian linguistic context. It also explores both the similarities and differences between the Armenian case and the language-related challenges faced by other Soviet nationalities. Special attention is given to the dissident movements of the 1960s and 1970s, with a focus on the role of the language question within them. Additionally, the article considers the influence and contribution of the Armenian Diaspora to language-related developments in Soviet Armenia.
This article explores how Russia’s intelligence agencies have evolved over the past 500 years, mainly in response to threats and decisions made by its leaders. It argues that when leaders strengthened and reformed the intelligence system—like Ivan the Terrible, Stalin, and Putin—they managed to keep power. But those who ignored threats often lost their regimes. The article shows that Russia’s intelligence growth has mostly been reactive, shaped by crisis rather than long-term planning. Today’s challenges, including failures in Ukraine and the Wagner rebellion, suggest more changes are coming. Overall, the article highlights how deeply Russia’s intelligence services are tied to its leadership and survival as a state.
When the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania in 1944, Soviet leaders expected the new republic to assimilate into established policies of state atheism. Instead, Catholicism remained the predominant religion among Lithuanians and retained its central role in Lithuanian national identity. My research investigates the tensions between Lithuania’s Catholic community and Soviet atheist ideology through the intersection of religious expression and institutional action. This paper utilizes bureaucratic documents and diverse correspondence to address two central questions: to what extent would Soviet administrators compromise ideology for stability, and what influence did Lithuania’s Catholic community have on an atheist state? Believers’ open engagement with Soviet administrators, as well as their belief that administrators might act on their behalf, signifies the priority of stable governance over ideological goals concerning Catholicism in Lithuania. This paper highlights the disparity between the rhetoric of Soviet administrators and the practical decisions implemented in the Soviet Union’s geographical peripheries.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the threat of nuclear war dominated foreign policy making in the Soviet Union and the United States. Consideration of a first strike nuclear attack moved from a secondary position among high-ranking government officials to a primary place of deliberation. This article argues that not everyone accepted the fear and suspicion that engulfed the two superpowers. Acting outside official administrative structures, Henry Saltonstall Dakin, a prominent San Francisco philanthropist, was one of these people. Operating behind the scenes, supporting innovators and risk-takers, and challenging the political status quo, Dakin was, in one of his associate’s words, “the patron of citizen diplomacy,” the person whose encouragement and financial support served to establish a vision of a common humanity during the darkest period of the Cold War.
In the 1990s, countries in Eastern Europe, like Poland, could no longer sustain the instability of Soviet rule and were eager to gain independence. The collapse of Soviet domination in Poland after 1989 allowed the country to democratize politically and restore religious freedom. Pope John Paul II used this moment to reignite religion within Poland's socio-cultural fabric, reminding the nation of its deep-rooted Catholic traditions. By integrating religiosity into Poland's major political movement, Solidarno & sacute;& cacute;, Pope John Paul II succeeded at fostering a stronger religious consciousness among the Polish people. By researching the archived Polish Catholic Church newsletter, St. Ladislaus News and Canadian-Polish language weekly newspaper Czas, several key themes emerged pointing to the multifaceted influence of Pope John Paul II. This research highlights the role of Pope John Paul II's papacy in strengthening Polish national identity through religion, providing Poles with democratic freedom as they gained independence.
This article examines the Museum of Zemlevedenie at Moscow State University as a late-Stalinist knowledge-production site in which an integrative yet conceptually heterogeneous vision of Earth sciences was made authoritative through spatial, visual, and pedagogical means. Located on the seven highest floors of the main MSU building, the museum founded in 1951 by the geographer and writer Georgy K. Efremov and opened in 1955 was embedded in postwar triumphalist culture and in the monumental architecture of the Stalinist "skyscraper university." Drawing on museum guidebooks (1955-1978; English edition 1973), the museum's periodicals (Zemlevedenie; Zhizn Zemli, 1955-2011), catalogues of paintings and exhibition materials, institutional narratives, seven site visits (2020-2022), and interviews with directors and curators, the article analyses how Zemlevedenie a weakly bounded, synthesis-oriented formation associated with physical geography and the study of interconnections within the geographical envelope was operationalised in exhibitionary form. The analysis shows that the museum resolved conceptual plurality not through disciplinary texts, but by translating it into an experiential worldview organised "from cosmos to microcosmos." Its durable vertical sequence structured Earth sciences into a hierarchical narrative spanning the origin and structure of the Earth, endogenous and exogenous processes, mineral resources, and landscape zones of the USSR and the world, while also projecting Soviet knowledge claims beyond national territory to a planetary and near-cosmic scale. A second argument concerns the museum's distinctive visual regime: through nagliadnost' and a carefully engineered synthesis of specimens, explanatory graphics, and socialist realist landscape painting produced at scale by major artists under institutional coordination the museum rendered scientific relations self-evident and politically legible. Situating these findings within scholarship on Soviet science, spatial imaginaries, and museum studies, the article demonstrates how late Stalinist institutions stabilised integrative natural-science projects through architecture, dis-play, and visual authority, linking the ordering of nature to postwar narratives of mas-tery and global stature.
The existing studies on the Second (2020) and the final Karabakh Wars (2023) can be divided into three groups, depending upon how they explain Armenia/Karabakh’s unexpectedly easy defeat. The first group emphasizes the Russo-Ukrainian War which forced Russia to concentrate on Ukraine and to refrain from protecting its traditional clients. The second group focuses on Azerbaijan’s (and partly Turkey’s) will and ability to make use of Russia’s retreat as a golden opportunity. The third group underscores Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s incompetent and reckless foreign and military policies. This study belongs to the third group. In the countries located in Russia’s Near Abroad, industrial decline and patronal politics hindered development of opposition parties, trade unions, and independent intellectuals. Instead, the geopolitical values of these countries induced the West to invest in local NGO s, which apparently substituted the role of opposition parties and civil society and eventually caused civil revolutions in Armenia, Ukraine, and Moldova. Yet the leaders whom these revolutions put in power lacked administrative experience and expertise, especially in diplomacy and military affairs. Unable to comprehend the institutional logic of the Karabakh peacekeeping system, Pashinyan destroyed it twice: the system led by the OSCE Minsk Group in 2020 and the post-2020 system highly dependent on Russia in 2022–23. Long before the Velvet Revolution of 2018, Karabakh politicians had become overdependent on their Armenian patrons, so they could not check Pashinyan’s suicidal Karabakh policy.
What happens to authority under duress, when individual and collective habits are severely disrupted and individual interests (including survival) can offset sanctions for disobedience? World War II , and especially the Blockade of Leningrad, challenged Soviet institutions and authority. To what extent did ingrained habits of obedience and discipline (a Soviet “subjectivity”) buttress authority and order, and to what extent did disruption and duress contribute to agency that could potentially undermine authority and order? To explore Soviet power under assault, we investigate variation in authority, obedience, and agency of Leningrad civilians in two contexts in the period leading up to the Blockade: defensive labor and civilian evacuations. For defensive labor (constructing defensive fortifications), civilians were more likely to obey because such work was better aligned with pre-existing habit and routines, did not disrupt private space and relations, and were relatively more subject to state capacity to reward or punish. For civilian evacuations, obedience was more tenuous because the regime had less capacity to reward and punish, because there were no relevant pre-existing routines, and because evacuations disrupted private autonomy, so that civilians’ incentives and regime policies did not align.
In the 1990s, countries in Eastern Europe, like Poland, could no longer sustain the instability of Soviet rule and were eager to gain independence. The collapse of Soviet domination in Poland after 1989 allowed the country to democratize politically and restore religious freedom. Pope John Paul II used this moment to reignite religion within Poland’s socio-cultural fabric, reminding the nation of its deep-rooted Catholic traditions. By integrating religiosity into Poland’s major political movement, Solidarność , Pope John Paul II succeeded at fostering a stronger religious consciousness among the Polish people. By researching the archived Polish Catholic Church newsletter, St. Ladislaus News and Canadian-Polish language weekly newspaper Czas , several key themes emerged pointing to the multifaceted influence of Pope John Paul II . This research highlights the role of Pope John Paul II ’s papacy in strengthening Polish national identity through religion, providing Poles with democratic freedom as they gained independence.
