Watermelons and Abandoned Watchtowers

2020 ◽  
pp. 251-265
Author(s):  
Sören Urbansky
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Local Initiatives ◽  
Wire Fence ◽  
Two Sides

This chapter examines the development of Sino-Soviet relations and their impact on the Argun borderland from the post-Mao and post-Brezhnev years to the early 1990s. It explores how the boundary between the two communist states gradually became permeable again through center-driven political and economic reconciliation between the two countries and how, with slackening control at the border and the simultaneous political and economic power breakdown of the Soviet Union, informal cross-border contacts grew as well. While the border was still heavily guarded, the borderland soon slipped out of the control of the metropole, at least on the Soviet side of the barbed-wire fence. Indeed, the chapter argues that local initiatives accelerated the process of rapprochement between the two sides. Officially approved contact channels were quickly replaced by zones created by the local border people.

scholarly journals The Artist Nomad

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Clinton Jacob Buhler
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Personal Politics ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
Two Sides ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World

When Ronald Reagan infamously declared the Soviet Union to be the “Evil Empire” in 1983, he was playing upon a fundamental axiom of Cold War politics: that the world can be neatly divided between the First World of Capitalism and the Second World of Communism.  Equating this divide with that of good and evil only served to strengthen the notion that the two sides were mutually exclusive.  Personal politics were an extension of this perspective.  One was either a Capitalist or a Communist—to reject one was equivalent to embracing the other.  This paper examines the art of dissident artists such as Alexander Kosolapov, Leonid Sokov, and Ilya Kabakov; artists from the Soviet Union who were exiled to the West during the Cold War.  It seeks to better understand why these artists’ rebellion against the Soviet system did not translate into an embrace of Western culture upon arrival in America.  The roots of their critical artistic approach are interpreted through the prism of ideological nomadism which reveals their art to be deeply ambivalent.  These artworks are analyzed as a disruption to the binary understanding of the Cold War and Post-Soviet eras by their embrace of a liminal position in the overlap between the capitalist and communist cultural milieus.

CIVIL WAR IN TAJIKISTAN : IT’S IMPACT ON TAJIK-RUSSIA RELATIONS

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (26) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jajneswar Sethi
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Industrial Development ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
State Relations ◽  
Two Sides ◽  
Second World

The relations between Tajikistan and Russia have passed through various stages of development starting from the Tsarist Colonial times to the present. Though the disintegration of the Soviet Union brought about drastic changes in the post-Second World War balance of power affecting the interests of both the countries, there is still a continuity in Tajik-Russia relations. The relation between the two sides has remained strong and cordial even after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Tajikistan witnessed a civil war in 1992 that resulted in large-scale out-migration of Russians who constituted the skilled and the elite groups key to the industrial development of Tajikistan. Realizing the seriousness of the situation, the Tajik Government adopted policies and confidence-building measures which cemented their relationship again. Now the inter-state relations between the two countries are on firm footing..

Ending the Korean War: The Role of Domestic Coalition Shifts in Overcoming Obstacles to Peace

2009 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Stanley
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Preference Information ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Bargaining Models ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Two Sides

Bargaining models of war suggest that war ends after two sides develop an overlapping bargaining space. Domestic mechanisms—domestic governing coalitions, a state's elite foreign policy decisionmaking group, and their role in ending interstate war—are critical in explaining how, when, and why that bargaining space develops. Through preference, information, and entrapment obstacles, wars can become “stuck” and require a change in expectations to produce a war-terminating bargaining space. A major source of such change is a shift in belligerents' governing coalitions. Events in the United States, China, and the Soviet Union during the Korean War illustrate the dynamics of these obstacles and the need for domestic coalition shifts in overcoming them before the conflict could be brought to an end.

Staging Friendship at the Barbed-Wire Fence

2020 ◽  
pp. 195-216
Author(s):  
Sören Urbansky
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Local Population ◽  
Far East ◽  
World War ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Nikita Khrushchev ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wire Fence

This chapter deals with the late 1940s and the 1950s, a period that is generally perceived as a honeymoon between the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union, albeit one marred by the seeds of future conflict. Though the social and economic fallout of World War II was certainly felt in the borderlands, many things had changed for the better compared to the years leading up to 1945. There was no longer the threat of war to tyrannize the local population and transform the borderland areas into highly militarized zones. On the Soviet bank of the Argun, the siege mentality against enemies from within, the dull hatred of anything and anyone foreign, cultivated in the Soviet Far East and in other regions of the Soviet Union since in the 1930s, gradually withered. Under Nikita Khrushchev, who succeeded Stalin in power, people in the Soviet borderland no longer feared deportation, imprisonment, and other repressions dealt out by their own government as much.

scholarly journals Perspective on Sub-national Governance of Crossborder Regions: Democratic Governance in Anti-democratic Times?

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Svensson
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Technical Assistance ◽  
National Level ◽  
Regional Governance ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Council Of Europe ◽  
Border Regions ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
New Development

In the past decades, subnational cooperation between municipalities and regions has become more common all over the world. In Europe and its neighborhood this tendency has been especially visible, much due to policy advocacy and technical assistance by regional intergovernmental organizations such as the Council of Europe, the European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. This development accelerated in the 1990s in tandem with the transition and democratization processes that started after the fall of the Soviet Union. However, in many places democratization has stopped or started to reverse, leading to backsliding away from democracy. While democracy has always been different in crossborder regions due to the special status of their governance arrangements, this new development accentuates a need for new tools to understand the implications of various threats to democracy for the future of crossborder cooperation. This Perspective article provides an overview of the literature on participatory governance and democracy with relation to border regions, and suggests some mechanisms whereby current backsliding developments might harm sub-national cross-border democracy and a way by which current indexes of democracy at the national level could be adapted to the “messy” spaces of cross-border regional governance. This allows the Perspective article to be useful to both further research in the area and policy practitioners. Empirical examples from Central and Eastern Europe, are used as illustrations.

scholarly journals Vasily Abaev: the Russian Antistructuralist

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 1084-1093
Author(s):  
Vladimir Mikhailovich Alpatov
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Structural Linguistics ◽  
General Linguistics ◽  
Structural Methods ◽  
Two Sides

Some linguists did not accept the structural ideas in the 1920s–1950s. One of the serious critics of structural linguistics in the Soviet Union was Vasily I. Abaev (1900–2001). His works on general linguistics were ignored or criticized though some of Abaev’s ideas were interesting. He distinguished two sides of language: “language as ideology” and “language as techniques”. According to him, every “element of speech” has a “technical and empiric nucleus” and an “ideological envelope” consisting of unstable “notions, sentiments and associations”. He considered structural methods as convenient if this level of language is mainly systematic (phonology), however, did not see much use in them concerning syntax and semantics.

World Economic Growth and the Soviet Challenge

1968 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 455-475 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanislaw Swianiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
World Economic ◽  
The Military ◽  
Advanced Capitalist

An Economist and a political scientist studying the postwar world cannot fail to be impressed by two outstanding features of postwar development: the expansion of the military and economic power of the Soviet Union and the acceleration of economic growth throughout the world, particularly in the advanced capitalist countries. In this article I propose to investigate possible interrelations of these phenomena.

scholarly journals Tajikistan Russia Relations in Emerging World Order

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (37) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jajneswar Sethi
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
World Order ◽  
Religious Fundamentalism ◽  
Regional Security ◽  
Dual Citizenship ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Peace And Security ◽  
Financial Arrangements ◽  
Language Law

The relation between Tajikistan and Russia has remained strong even after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Both countries share a common perspective on various issues, such as, threat of religious fundamentalism, national separatism and cross-border terrorism which constitute the main threat to regional security, stability and development. So far as inter ethnic relation is concerned Tajikistan’s adoption of the Language Law in 1989 has slightly affected, Tajik-Russian relations. But the Tajik Government undertook some confidence building measures which included the protection of Russian speaking people’s interests by changing the language law and by granting dual citizenship to the Russian people. In the sphere of economy, though Tajik-Russian relation were badly disturbed because of the commercial and financial arrangements in Russia after the demise of the Soviet Union, still the inter regional economic links between the two countries remain. Both sides signed inter-state inter-governmental and inter-departmental documents regulating trade and economic cooperation between Tajikistan and Russia. So far as the strategic and security factor is concerned, Tajkistan totally depends upon Russia for maintaining peace and security in the region. Tajik Russia relationship is no longer based on ideological grounds, rather it is more practical and mutually beneficial in nature.

CROSS-BORDER COOPERATION IN THE ADJACENT REGIONS OF RUSSIA AND UKRAINE. UNTAPPED POTENTIAL

2021 ◽  
pp. 91-103
Author(s):  
Mikhail Yu. Mukhin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
Effective Work ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Cross Border Cooperation ◽  
Regions Of Russia

The article is devoted to the development of the cross-border coop- eration in the adjacent regions of Russia and Ukraine in the post-Soviet period. Analyzing the course, circumstances and results of those many-sided contacts, the author came to the conclusion that the cross-border cooperation between the two countries was influenced by an example of the effective work of the “Eurore- gions” created in the EU countries. The positive experience accumulated earlier in the countries of Western and Central Europe promised the transformation of the border regions of Russia and Ukraine into a kind of locomotives of the economic and socio-humanitarian cooperation between the countries. However, the creation of similar Euroregions on the Russian-Ukrainian border was delayed until the beginning of the 21st century. Only the stabilization of the economic situation in the post-Soviet space and overcoming the economic shock that fol- lowed the collapse of the Soviet Union created the necessary prerequisites for a large-scale intensification of the cross-border cooperation. The most dynamic de- velopment on the Russian-Ukrainian border in 2002–2013 was the development of the Euroregions “Donbass”, “Slobozhanshchina” and “Yaroslavna”. Unfortu- nately, the gradual increase in tension between Moscow and Kiev, characteristic of the 2000s, significantly slowed down the formation of those Euroregions. The political crisis that began in 2014 and continues up to the present day has finally made the development of the cross-border cooperation between Russian and Ukrainian regions unlikely.

Transnationalism in One Country? Seeing and Not Seeing Cross-Border Migration within the Soviet Union

Slavic Review ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
pp. 970-986 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lewis H. Siegelbaum ◽  
Leslie Page Moch
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
International Migration ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Soviet State ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
Economic Ties ◽  
Former Soviet Republics

In the early 1990s social scientists began to refer to migrants who retained familial and economic ties with their country of origin as transnational. The term eventually gained currency among historians who had found multiple examples of such ties in earlier decades and centuries. Although migrants traveling among former Soviet republics came to be understood as transnational, Soviet-era migrants never have been so characterized. We contend that this is due to a double blindness: that of migration scholars to the Soviet Union as a “state of nations,” and that of historians of the Soviet period to migration as a complicating element in the construction of nationality. By emphasizing the transnational dimension of “internal” Soviet migration, we seek to sharpen awareness of how nationality worked in the Soviet context, particularly in its last decades. We thus posit the maintenance of economic, familial and other affective ties across Soviet national boundaries as the Soviet version of transnationalism—transnationalism in one country. We also suggest the ways that despite its well-deserved reputation for limiting international migration and otherwise restricting its citizenry, the Soviet state facilitated transnationalism within its borders.

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