The streets and city squares no longer echo with rebellious slogans and impassioned speeches. Where enormous crowds once surged, shoppers now traverse, hardly cognizant that they tread on spaces where the fate of nations was once contested. Though it has been merely a decade since the Soviet collapse, the human flood that once washed across these lands has been largely swallowed back into the oceans of everyday routine. For most, the glasnost' revolution has become a hazy, distant past – another epoch, another country, another world – submerged in the inexorable currents of time.

To be sure, new waves of mobilization were stirred in the initial aftermath of the Soviet collapse. Chechen and Volga Tatar nationalists demanded the right to the same national states that Estonians, Russians, and others gained when the USSR disintegrated. The breakup of the Soviet state intensified violent conflicts in Karabakh, Abkhazia, Ossetia, and Moldova. Crimean Russians overwhelmingly voted for separation from Ukraine and reunification with their Russian homeland; Crimean Tatars demonstrated for the opportunity to return to the same territory, their once expropriated homeland. Tajiks and Georgians fought civil wars among themselves. Within Russia “shock therapy” evoked new outbreaks of protest from the now predominantly communist opposition and precipitated the violent breakdown of Russian political institutions in October 1993.