The breakdown of the Soviet Union has transformed the Russian Far East into an economic, national, and geopolitical borderland. Commodity flows and labor migration, especially from China, have created both economic challenges and opportunities for the local population. The article investigates...

This paper follows the transformation of Kyrgyzstan’s president, Askar Akaev, over the course of the 1900s from an initial path of liberalization to more authoritarian tendencies. Akaev’s role in Kyrgyzstan’s post-Soviet trajectory is largely neglected in current...

Abstract: The paper examines the determinants of trust in religious institutions in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia—three countries with low levels of religiosity as measured by attendance, prayer and fasting, yet high levels of trust in religious institutions. The analysis employs...

Old Odessa has been mythologized as Russia’s gilded city of sin, a multi-ethnic southern seaport bustling with international trade, where exotic goods and people saturated its markets, taverns, and beaches, imbuing the landscape with glitter and color. The city developed an infamous...

Emotion, the key to human motivation, is an integral part of politics. This paper shows how a consideration of emotions contributes to the existing causal theories of ethnic violence. The author begins with a discussion of identity and nation, examining how the concept of national identity has...

Much like husbands and wives, single mothers and grandmothers struggle over the sharing of paid work and “second shift†responsibilities. Using in-depth interview and ethnographic data from Russia, this article applies elements of Hochschild’s (1989) framework to illuminate...

This paper explains the non-democratic political outcome in Serbia of the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the process, the author reexamines several theories of "Serbian exceptionalism" in the specialist literature on Serbia and Yugoslavia, pointing out the inadequacy of some one-sided or...

As Russia’s nineteenth-century Gypsy craze swept through Moscow and St. Petersburg, Gypsy musicians entertained, dined with, and in some cases married Russian noblemen, bureaucrats, poets, and artists. Because the Gypsies’ extraordinary musical abilities supposedly stemmed from...

This essay analyzes the capacity and constraints of authority in the contexts of constituted vs. non-constituted leadership. Building on Ronald Heifetz’s distinction between informal and formal authority as the basis for exercising leadership and broadcasting power, this paper evaluates...

Beginning in the late 1980s, communist regimes in both Yugoslavia and the USSR faced a crisis of legitimacy, causing a demand for competitive regional elections and widespread demands for autonomy and independence in these republics, which in turn threatened to reduce the status of the Russian...