Religion and Forced Displacement in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia

This book examines the social and political mobilisation of religious communities towards forced displacement in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. It analyses religious strategies in relation to tolerance and transitory environments as a result of the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, the post-2011 Syrian crisis and the 2014 Russian takeover of Crimea. How do religious actors and state bodies engage with refugees and migrants? What are the mechanisms of religious support towards forcibly displaced communities? The book argues that when states do not act as providers of human security, religious communities, as representatives of civil society and often closer to the grass roots level, can be well placed to serve populations in need. The book brings together scholars from across the region and provides a comprehensive overview of the ways in which religious communities tackle humanitarian crises in contemporary Armenia, Bulgaria, Greece, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.

Study on the Impacts of Emergency on Economic, Environmental and Social Areas Using Mixed Methods Research

Mixed methods research methodology appears to be a suitable approach for researching complex phenomena such as emergencies. Researchers study the impacts on different areas such as economy, society, or environment, mostly in separate studies. To better understand the reality of emergencies, it is necessary to study the problem in the broadest possible context. So, examining those impacts in one single study is a challenge. The objective of this article is to process a comprehensive assessment of an emergency that has the potential to establish the basis of a robust tool for public managers to support their decision-making, using mixed methods research methodology. The crisis is an explosion of an ammunition storage site in the Czech Republic - the former satellite country of the Soviet Union. The sub-methods used in mixed methods research are analysis of data, interviews, questionnaire surveys, and field research. The main findings include that in the economic area, growth of public budget expenditures was found; in the environmental area, primary and inducted impacts have been proved. Survey also confirms that the emergency reduced the personal sense of security and trust in public institutions in the affected community. Doi: 10.28991/ESJ-2022-06-01-07 Full Text: PDF

Israel's Moment

Israel's Moment is a major new account of how a Jewish state came to be forged in the shadow of World War Two and the Holocaust and the onset of the Cold War. Drawing on new research in government, public and private archives, Jeffrey Herf exposes the political realities that underpinned support for and opposition to Zionist aspirations in Palestine. In an unprecedented international account, he explores the role of the United States, the Arab States, the Palestine Arabs, the Zionists, and key European governments from Britain and France to the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Poland. His findings reveal a spectrum of support and opposition that stood in sharp contrast to the political coordinates that emerged during the Cold War, shedding new light on how and why the state of Israel was established in 1948 and challenging conventional associations of left and right, imperialism and anti-imperialism, and racism and anti-racism.

The last day in life of the Soviet Union. The first day of the existence of the Russian Federation

Статья посвящена истории одного дня в Московском Кремле. Это был последний день существования СССР – 25 декабря 1991 года. На фоне показа исторических событий того времени рассказывается о смене Государственного флага СССР на Государственный флаг Российской Федерации. Впервые публикуется уникальный документ – акт о замене флага, написанный непосредственно после этого события и подписанный всеми участниками. The article is devoted to the history of one day in the Moscow Kremlin. It was the last day of the USSR's existence – December 25, 1991. The events of that time create a perfect background, the Soviet flag was lowered from Kremlin and then replaced by the three-color Russian Federation flag. For the first time published is a unique document — the Act of flag replacement written shortly after the events and signed by all participants.

The Chinese Latin Alphabet: A Revolutionary Script in the Global Information Age

This article rethinks the history of Chinese script reforms and proposes a new genealogy for the Chinese Latin Alphabet (CLA), invented in 1931 by Chinese and Russian revolutionaries in the Soviet Union. Situating script reforms within a global information age that emerged out of the nineteenth-century communications revolution, the article historicizes the CLA within a technologically and ideologically contrived Sino-Soviet space. In particular, it shows the intimate links between the CLA and the Unified New Turkic Alphabet (UNTA), which grew out of a latinization movement based in Baku, Azerbaijan. The primary purpose of the UNTA was to latinize the Arabic script of the Turkic people living in Soviet Central Asia, but it was immediately exported to the non-Turkic world as well in an effort to latinize languages across Eurasia and ignite revolutionary internationalism. This article investigates the forgotten figures involved in carrying the Latin alphabet from Baku to Shanghai and offers a new framework to scrutinize the history of language, scripts, and knowledge production across Eurasia.

Preface

The Fourth international conference “Shape Memory Alloys” (SMA 2021) continues the tradition of regular scientific events on shape memory alloys held in various cities of the Soviet Union: Kiev (1980, 1991), Voronezh (1982), Tomsk (1985), Novgorod (1989), Kosov (1991), St. Petersburg (1995). These days, the First conference “Shape Memory Alloys: properties, technologies, and prospects” was held in 2014 in Vitebsk (Belarus), the Second one – in 2016 in St. Petersburg, the Third one – in 2018 in Chelyabinsk. The aim of the conference is to review modern research and development directions in the field of shape memory alloys and related phenomena: from studying their structure, physical, mechanical, and functional properties to mathematical modeling of the shape memory materials’ behavior and their applications. The conference schedule comprised oral and poster presentations in the framework of three parallel sections: • Structure, martensitic transformations and shape memory effects in alloys. • The theory of martensitic transformations and shape memory effect: modeling and calculations. • Novel materials. The manufacturing technology and application of shape memory alloys. Editors of Proceedings: Sergey Prokoshkin, Natalia Resnina, Sergey Dubinskiy, Yulia Zhukova, Vadim Sheremetyev, Victor Komarov, Kristina Polyakova List of Organizers, Program committee, Local Organizing Committee are available in this pdf.

“Doomed to Good Relations”

This article sheds new light on the end of the Cold War and the fate of anti-imperialism in the twentieth century by exploring how the Soviet Union and the Islamic Republic of Iran achieved a rapprochement in the late 1980s. Both the USSR and Iran had invested significant resources into presenting themselves as the leaders of the anti-imperialist movement and “the global movement of Islam,” and both the Soviet and Iranian governments sought to export their models of anti-imperialist postcolonial statehood to Afghanistan. However, by the mid-1980s both the Soviet Union and revolutionary Iran were forced to confront the limits to their anti-imperialist projects amid the increasing pull of globalization. Elites in both countries responded to these challenges by walking back their commitments from world revolution and agreeing to maintain the Najibullah regime in Afghanistan as a bulwark against Islamist forces hostile to Marxism-Leninism and Iran's brand of Islamic revolution. This joint pragmatic turn, however, contributed to a drought in anti-imperialist politics throughout the Middle East, leaving the more radical voices of transnational actors as one of the only consistent champions of anti-imperialism. Drawing on new sources from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as well as sources from Iran, Afghanistan, and the “Afghan Arabs,” the article sheds empirical and analytical light on discussions of the fate of anti-imperialism in the twilight of the Cold War.