Post-Socialist Societies

Drinking with Vova: SME in Ukraine between informality and illegality

by Abel Polese

This is going to be a chapter in a collection Jeremy Morris and myself are editing on informal economic practices in post-socialism

This chapter is intended to illustrate practices on the boundary between legality and illegality in order
to shed... more This chapter is intended to illustrate practices on the boundary between legality and illegality in order
to shed a different light on some of those engaging in diverse transactions. Challenging the vision of a "culture of corruption" (Miller et al 2001) and that “no discount” should be applied to corrupt practices (Papava and Khaduri 2001), the starting question of this chapter is: what makes a practice “corrupt” or
illegal? In this respect I suggest the need to contextualise and de-normativise illegal practices, since they depend on both social and legal norms. From a juridical standpoint a law is a law, but the value and applicability of a law is ultimately decided by people in social practice. What if there is a law and
the state is unable to enforce control or punish anyone because a substantial number of citizens do not follow it? There is a growing body of literature challenging the very significance of a written law in a context where other rules may apply. For instance, Wanner has remarked how a new moral order may
be applied to some spheres of Ukrainian life where the state’s protection is felt to be lacking. How illegal or immoral is it to try to bribe a court if the same court is issuing an order on the basis of false evidence produced against you? (Wanner 2005)

The present chapter raises questions about the validity of international reports and policy analysis on Ukraine, and possibly on the rest of the former Soviet world, that see illegal practices only as a social evil to eradicate. This is the position of a number of strands of developmentalist thought which
uncritically reject possible alternatives (Nederveen Pieterse 2006), positing that it is only a matter of time before transitional countries will adopt a functioning neoliberal model. In contrast to this, it has been argued that that monetary transactions do not encompass or explain economic activity – this is evident from the work of the growing school of diverse economies (Community Economies Collective 2001, Gibson Graham 1996, 2008). In addition, economic effectiveness might not mean the end of non-market oriented transactions (Williams 2005), which may also serve to partially challenge the de-personalisation of power relations in the labour market and the separation between the social and economic sphere predicted by Polanyi (1946, see also Hann and Hart 2009). Empirical evidence has showed that ‘success’ may also be measured by satisfaction of spiritual obligations, being active in social life (Pardo 1996) and that even the meaning of money differs depending on the social and
economic norms of a society (Parry and Bloch 1989).

The Apple Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree? : Kazakh-Speaking University Studetnts' Language Ideologies Concerning "Community"

by Erik Aasland

Paper presented at the UCLA Conference on Language and Identity in Central Asia, May 4, 2012.

The question for my project is: In an environment of mandatory proverb instruction for youth, what do youth express as... more The question for my project is: In an environment of mandatory proverb instruction for youth, what do youth express as significant by means of these same proverbs? I will explore how Kazakh-speaking college students use Kazakh proverbs to narrativize “community”. I will do this be evaluating their knowledge and use of Kazakh proverbs addressing such issues as nationalism/patriotism, unity, family, and ethnic identity.

Русский ультранационализм: актуальное состояние исследований

by Andreas Umland

Tartaria Magna. 2012. T. 1. № 1. С. 171-189.

From Soviet to Post-Soviet with Transformation of the Fragmented Urban Landscape: The Case of Garage Areas in Estonia

by Tauri Tuvikene

Published in 'Landscape Research' 2010

While every social formation creates its specific landscape, the landscape is never homogenous but is rather... more While every social formation creates its specific landscape, the landscape is never homogenous but is rather fragmented. In addition to the elements that have been formed under the forces of the current era, the landscape also contains elements from previous eras. Functions of some of these landscapes have changed, reflecting societal conditions as other elements may have preserved their previous function. The garage area is one of the examples of the last case as it proliferated in the former Soviet socialist system where it had an importance in dealing with the system's shortcomings. With the fall of the Soviet system, garage areas have not been demolished and are still in use. Hence, the aim of this paper is to analyze the dynamics of urban landscape by applying Widgren's 'formal procedure of reading landscapes' and its terms form, function, context and processes using garage areas in the transformation of Estonian society as a case study. The paper analyzes two aspects. First, it shows how the formation of garage areas was conditioned by the Soviet system. Second, it will discuss how the ownership system in connection with preservation of functions has been able to influence the persistence of garage areas. While being a detail that enables insight into socialist as well as Western societies, garage areas have not received attention in previous literature.

Annist, A. 2005. The worshippers of rules: Defining the right and wrong in local participatory project applications in Estonia.

by Aet Annist

Published in D. Mosse; D. Lewis (Toim.). The Aid Effect: Giving and Governing in International Development (150 - 170). London: Pluto Press
!! Not the exact replica of the published article.

Developmental cultures evolve through a complicated set of interests and agendas as well as the concerns of various... more Developmental cultures evolve through a complicated set of interests and agendas as well as the concerns of various stakeholders. The ethnographic data I collected during fieldwork in two south-east Estonian communities, and at different levels of a DFID-funded multi-agency participatory rural programme (RP) seeking to reduce poverty and social exclusion in rural communities in the Baltic states, is well suited to study this complex scene of global and local development relations.
I examine the evaluation process of project applications from rural Estonian communities at precisely the stage where the programme’s general ideology is tested and translated into practice. The chapter shows how local development agents strictly follow the requirements and regulations that organise the evaluation process in such a way as to create the impression of a trustworthy partner for foreign funders. At the same time, the process serves to conceal a frequent reliance on personal information, such as a suspicion about the motives of certain applicants, when rejecting projects.
The ethnographic cases provided illustrate both the process of translation in development industry as well as of the sensitivities in relation to the developmental status of post-Soviet societies.

Annist, A. 2009. Outsourcing Culture: Establishing Heritage Hegemony by Funding Cultural Life in South Eastern Estonia

by Aet Annist

Published in Lietuvos etnologija: socialinės antropologijos ir etnologijos studijos. 2009, 9(18), 117–138.

The following article compares the Soviet and post-Soviet processes of hegemony creation. Based on long-term... more The following article compares the Soviet and post-Soviet processes of hegemony creation. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I describe how in Estonia, where highly formalised cultural sphere was a norm already in the 19th century, Soviet cultural hegemony was never properly established. The Soviet system of blanket-funding unintentionally enabled the perseverance of nationalist cultural counter-hegemony. In contrast, the current system of project based funding is more effective in creating cultural hegemony. I provide ethnographic examples of how such new practices of governmentality are outsourcing the establishment of emblematic
hegemony of a small cultural group, Setos.

THE FALL OF SOCIALISM: THE MAUSOLEUM OF GEORGI DIMITROV IN SOFIA AND THE BERLIN WALL

by Mariya Ivancheva

The Politics of U.S. Television Coverage of Post-Communist Countries

by Ivan Katchanovski

Ivan Katchanovski and Alicen R. Morley, Problems of Post-Communism, Volume 59, Number 1, January/February 2012, pp 15-30.

A link is to an earlier version of the paper which was presented at the Post-Communist Politics and Economics Workshop at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University

An analysis of the coverage of post-communist countries by the major U.S. television networks from 1998 to 2009... more An analysis of the coverage of post-communist countries by the major U.S. television networks from 1998 to 2009 reveals that U.S. allies receive more positive coverage than do non-allies or adversaries and that there are systematic biases in the representation of many post-Soviet countries.

Evgenia Ivanova interviews Olga Karatch // Women in Politics: New Approaches to the Political, #1 (2012)

by Evgenia Ivanova

Olga Karatch is a Belarusian politician. She is the Vitebsk Region Chair of the United Civic Party of Belarus and a Board Member of the named Party. Olga is a Co-Founder and Co-Chair of the International Centre for Gender Initiatives "Adliga: Women for Full Citizenship". She is Chair of the International Centre of Civic Initiatives "Nash Dom". In 2008, Olga was awarded the title of "The Human Rights Activist of the Year" from the Belarusian Chapter of Amnesty International. She also received the International Award for Civil Courage in Germany in 2010.

On the 7th of October, 2011, during a press conference with Russian mass media, Mr. Lukashenko, the President of... more On the 7th of October, 2011, during a press conference with Russian mass media, Mr. Lukashenko, the President of Belarus, expressed his attitude towards the possibility of a woman becoming the President of Belarus. In particular, he said:

… I would not let a woman to take others' position, just for one reason. This is unsuitable for a woman, this is too hard, that is first of all. I, just like the President of Russia, is also the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. I just cannot imagine how a woman will be walking before the ranks, or will be at maneuvers… Of course now women can wear trousers, but it is still not the same. It is not women's business. In the European Union it is different, probably a woman can be a President there, but still it would look strange and unnatural. And they have different functions there, but they are a more representative kind, or like that. We are the opposite. Here we have to work hard, we have to run around, we have to stroll wide in order not to rip our pants in the seams, like that, and not other way. That is why it is not for women. Besides, we, Slavs, would not accept a woman as the President. It is a position for men, for men only, you truly would not want to be the President, it's a lot of troubles, a misfortune even, God save you from that. 

We asked a Belarusian politician, Olga Karatch, what does she think of this kind of care Mr. Lukashenko was expressing for female politicians.

'Death to fascism isn't in the catechism': legacies of socialism in Croatian popular music after the fall of Yugoslavia

by Catherine Baker

Narodna umjetnost 47:1 (2010): 163-83

This paper discusses both textual and structural legacies of socialism in Croatian popular music since the collapse of... more This paper discusses both textual and structural legacies of socialism in Croatian popular music since the collapse of socialism and Yugoslavia. Yugoslav socialism struggled to reconcile socialist consciousness and capitalist consumerism, forcing the producers of popular culture to make sense of the political field that surrounded them and put ideology into practice. The structural conditions of cultural produc- tion under socialism, the use of socialist iconography and memory as resources in post-socialist popular music and the negation of the socialist experience by patriotic musicians reflect three layers of socialist legacy in contemporary Croatian popular culture.

Tito’s children?: educational resources, language learning and cultural capital in the life histories of interpreters working in Bosnia-Herzegovina

by Catherine Baker

Sudosteuropa 59:4 (2011): 477-501.

The foreign military forces and international organisations that have operated in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) since 1992... more The foreign military forces and international organisations that have operated in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) since 1992 recruited thousands of local people, often young students, to work as interpreters. Drawing on 31 life history interviews conducted in 2009–10 with language workers who grew up in former Yugoslavia, this paper seeks to answer whether certain age groups and social strata that emerged from socialist Yugoslav society were better able to benefit in the ‘SFOR economy’ that resulted from the effects of international intervention in BiH. In the process, it combines applied-linguistics approaches to language-learning narratives with area-studies perspectives on postsocialism to show how particular forms of language learning equipped people to adjust to the socio-economic crisis. Although all Bosnian schools taught foreign languages, pupils were assigned arbitrarily to different languages and English was not available in all schools. This study suggests on a limited sample that education outside the state classroom was a more helpful source of the necessary cultural capital to work as an interpreter and was easiest to access for children of urban professional families. The interpreting jobs that these subjects found during and after the war made them more privileged than workers on local-currency wages but less privileged compared to their parents’ pre-war lives. The work-based identity they went on to construct was informal and has not produced a public narrative that constructs interpreters as a recognised social group.

Post-socialist Transition and Spatial Development of Serbia

by Tamara Maricic

Vujošević M., Zeković S., Maričić T.
3th WSEAS International Conference on Urban Planning and Transportation (UPT ΄10), Proceedings of the WSEAS International Conferences “Latest Trends on Urban Planning and Transportation”, M. Jha (ed.), Corfu Island, Greece, July 22-25, 2010, WSEAS press, pp. 60-65, ISSN 1792-4391 ISBN 978-960-474-206-6

During the post-socialist transition Serbia was isolated from the mainstream trends of European integration andmore During the post-socialist transition Serbia was isolated from the mainstream trends of European integration and
convergence. Its comparative advantages and competitiveness have worsened in two key aspects - in its structural
qualities and in its territorial capital. The economic recovery from 2000 onwards has the form of “growth without
development”. Serbia has unsustainable spatial development patterns. Now, the country has found itself in the position of
an economic, ecological and financial semi-colony of few powerful international political, economic and financial actors.
There are shown some basic elements of the prospective future through the use the scenario approach.

Post-socialist Transition and Empirical Evaluation of the Future Spatial Development of Serbia

by Tamara Maricic

WSEAS TRANSACTIONS on ENVIRONMENT and DEVELOPMENT
Issue 9, Volume 6, September 2010

Due to different political and economic factors during its post-socialist transition Serbia has been isolatedmore Due to different political and economic factors during its post-socialist transition Serbia has been isolated
from the mainstream trends of European integration and convergence. The country’s comparative advantages and
competitiveness have worsened in two key aspects - in its structural qualities and in its territorial capital. The
economic recovery after the changes in 2000 onwards has the form of “growth without development”, while the
spatial development patterns have appeared to be rather unsustainable. Today, Serbia has found itself in the
position of an economic, ecological and financial semi-colony of few powerful international political, economic
and financial actors. In the last part, we will present results of an empiric evaluation of the three scenarios for
spatial development of Serbia until 2020 based on comparative analysis of 29 indicators by applying the Spider
method.

Как превратить российский либерализм в политический фактор?

by Andreas Umland

Geopolitika [Центр геополитических исследований, Вильнюс, Литва]. 2012. 14 февраля.

Без широкой коалиции демократов и их сотрудничества с реформаторами внутри режима, «белая революция» может закончиться... more Без широкой коалиции демократов и их сотрудничества с реформаторами внутри режима, «белая революция» может закончиться так же, как и прежние попытки демократизации России.

From State-socialism to EU-Accession: Contrasting the gendering of (executive) political power in Central Europe

by Maxime Forest

Preliminary version of a chapter published in Bauer, G. and M. Tremblay (eds.) Women in Power Executives: A Global Overview. London, New York: Routledge, 2011, pp. 65-84

A comparison of women's access to power executives in Central and Eastern Europe since WWII, with a focus on the Czech... more A comparison of women's access to power executives in Central and Eastern Europe since WWII, with a focus on the Czech Republic, Lithuania and Croatia.

Traumatic natures in the swamp. Concepts of nature and participatory governance in the Danube delta

by Kristof Van Assche

Published in Environmental Values

This paper focuses on local constructions of ‘nature’ in governance processes, and the importance of historical and... more This paper focuses on local constructions of ‘nature’ in governance processes, and the importance of historical and institutional contexts for their genesis and functioning. Through extensive field study in the Romanian Danube delta, it is demonstrated that the origin and distribution of certain concepts can be credited to a history of conflicts over land and resource use. Considering the implications for participatory natural resource governance, we argue that this capacity of the governance context to produce and transform concepts of nature, poses real challenges. To these challenges can be added legacies of disempowerment and marginalization, evident in local inhabitants’ images and concepts of nature, which we seek to understand by developing a theory of traumatic nature.

Post-socialist Masculinities

by Ana Luleva

Beyond post-socialist conversions: Functional cooperation and trans-regional regimes in the global South

by Tavis D. Jules

The collapse of the Soviet Union had major ramifications for the small developing countries of the Caribbean Community... more The collapse of the Soviet Union had major ramifications for the small developing countries of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) as three of the then 13 countries experimented with strands of socialism, festering political fragmentation/ideological pluralism regionally. As the rivets of the Iron Curtain came unfastened, the emerging markets of CARICOM were forced to rethink their geopolitical positions while reforming their national educational systems. This chapter examines how the dissolution of socialism in the former socialist countries of Southeast/Central Europe and the former Soviet Union created a reform atmosphere across CARICOM countries. CARICOM’s response to the impact of 1989 lies in how it spent the 1980s dealing with the 1973-74 oil crises, ideological pluralism, and the subsequent imposition of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) under the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The successive degeneration of ideological pluralism within CARICOM countries caused by the simultaneous collapse of cooperative socialism in Guyana, revolutionary socialism in Grenada, and democratic socialism in Jamaica paved the way for post-socialist transformations regionally. This chapter considers how the policy process of functional cooperation—the non-economic policy mechanism upon which CARICOM seeks to integrate its members—facilitates the policy tool of lesson-drawing to take place between member states while laying the foundation for post-socialist change across CARICOM. Using data from the educational policies of ten countries, this chapter illustrates how CARICOM members used the global policy alterations of 1989 as a reference point to reform their educational systems. Educational reforms occurred as member states drew lessons from each other—in the form of cross-national consultations—guided by the policy process of functional cooperation.

Could Russia’s Ultranationalists Subvert Pro-Democracy Protests?

by Andreas Umland

World Affairs Journal Online Edition, 18 January 2012.

The Sources and Risks of Russia’s White Revolution: Why Putin failed and the Russian democrats may too

by Andreas Umland

Geopolitika [Vilnius Centre for Geopolitical Studies], 3 January 2012.