Jeremy Smith

Markku Kangaspuro

Modernisation has been a constant theme in Russian history at least since Peter the Great launched a series of initiatives aimed at closing the economic, technical and cultural gap between Russia and the more 'advanced' countries of Europe. All of the leaders of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia have been intensely aware of this gap, and have pursued a number of strategies, some more successful than others, in order to modernise the country. But it would be wrong to view modernisation as a unilinear process which was the exclusive preserve of the state. Modernisation has had profound effects on Russian society, and the attitudes of different social groups have been crucial to the success and failure of modernisation. This volume examines the broad theme of modernisation in late imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russia both through general overviews of particular topics, and specific case studies of modernisation projects and their impact. Modernisation is seen not just as an economic policy, but as a cultural and social phenomenon reflected through such diverse themes as ideology, welfare, education, gender relations, transport, political reform, and the Internet. The result is the most up to date and comprehensive survey of modernisation in Russia available, which highlights both one of the perennial problems and the challenges and prospects for contemporary Russia.

Modernisation in Russia since 1900

Jouko Nikula

Ivor Stodolsky

The downfall of the Soviet Union was an unexpected incident, which was neither forecast by Sovietologists nor aimed at by the initiators of perestroika. However, the result of this world historical development was deep changes in international relations; the bipolar world changed to unipolar and the Cold War was over. It is not a surprise that perestroika has inspired widely as well the academic community as the politicians and public to discuss and analyse the political and social processes of the Soviet society, the role of economy, the political and military pressure of President Reagan's administration, and glasnost, not to forget the new foreign policy of Mikhail Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze. In this book, perestroika is approached as an evolutionary process that led to unintended consequences, the breakdown of the Soviet Union. But perestroika and glasnost were transnational processes and consequently they did not have consequences only in the Soviet Union. The common understanding is that, at the least, Prague Spring in 1968, the economic reforms of Hungary and Poland in the 1970s, and the Solidarity opposition movements of eighties in Poland established a strong prehistory of the way to perestroika and new thinking. After perestroika and glasnost were launched by Gorbachev, in particular during its deeper reforms of the late eighties, it had a profound influence on all of Eastern Europe and to some extent on Western Europe. Moreover, we can't understand many features and processes of current Russia if we don't know the history of the Soviet Union. It is obvious that many structural and institutional solutions of current Russia, not to speak of political culture, go back to the Soviet era and the power struggle between President Yeltsin and Parliament in the beginning of nineties. The consequences of perestroika and the legacy of the Soviet Union are discussed in several articles, which also take into account the development of Eastern Europe as an integral part of the Soviet sphere of influence.

Process and Consequences

Perestroika

Julie Fedor

Jussi Lassila

Tatiana Zhurzhenko

This edited collection contributes to the current vivid multidisciplinary debate on East European memory politics and the post-communist instrumentalization and re-mythologization of World War II memories. The book focuses on the three Slavic countries of post-Soviet Eastern Europe – Russia, Ukraine and Belarus – the epicentre of Soviet war suffering, and the heartland of the Soviet war myth. The collection gives insight into the persistence of the Soviet commemorative culture and the myth of the Great Patriotic War in the post-Soviet space. It also demonstrates that for geopolitical, cultural, and historical reasons the political uses of World War II differ significantly across Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, with important ramifications for future developments in the region and beyond. The chapters 'Introduction: War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus', ‘From the Trauma of Stalinism to the Triumph of Stalingrad: The Toponymic Dispute over Volgograd’ and 'The “Partisan Republic”: Colonial Myths and Memory Wars in Belarus' are published open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com. The chapter 'Memory, Kinship, and Mobilization of the Dead: The Russian State and the “Immortal Regiment” Movement' is published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

Markku Kangaspuro

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