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...

The poetry and prose of the literary elite in Tajikistan took part in the strengthening of national myths as well as in the building of a national consciousness in Tajikistan before and after Perestroika. In Tajik literature of the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, many defined the image of the...

Russia's defeat in the Crimean War cast new doubt upon the fundamental political traditions, social structures, national myths of the Nikolaevan era. It precipitated wide-ranging reforms, including military reforms, which were predicated on a shift in mentality. This essay examines the new...

This paper investigates the development of the environmental movement in post-Soviet Russia, and in particular examines the dynamic interaction between Russian green activists and Western aid donors attempting to foster civil society development in the former Soviet Union. Focusing on three...

Surveys rank Russians among the unhappiest people in the world. Contrary to popular accounts of a uniquely melancholic national character, the subjective wellbeing of Russians depends heavily on both individual and collective economic wellbeing. Individual differences in living standards account...

The Pankisi Gorge region is located just south of the Georgian-Chechen border in the Republic of Georgia. Most of the inhabitants of the region are descendents of ethnic Chechen and Ingush, known as "Vainakh" or "Kists." Since 1994, Pakisi has witnessed an influx of refugees from the...

Since the late 1980s, the Caucasus and Caspian littoral states have passed through a period of extreme turmoil. In addition to the economic costs of decentralizing and marketizing their economies and the political difficulties associated with constructing new political and institutional...

Russia's literary tradition was the primary locus of Russian debate on the Caucasus until the media revolution of the post-Soviet 1990s. This paper examines how the idiom of nineteenth-century literary romanticism, both in its representations of the North Caucasian peoples and in its implied...

In the early 1990s, energy companies around the world began to realize the enormity of the still-untapped oil and natural gas reserves of the Caspian Sea basin, igniting a scramble to develop new extraction and transport networks to bring these resources to the world market. The result has...

In the post-Cold War era, the issues of nationalism, ethnopolitics, and ethnic conflict have been most pressing in the three Transcaucasian states -- Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia -- and in the North Caucasus region of the Russian Federation. The Caucasus is extraordinarily diverse, with a...