The Pussy Riot affair was a massive international cause célèbre that ignited a widespread movement of support for the jailed activists around the world. The case tells us a lot about Russian society, the Russian state, and Western perceptions of Russia. It also raises gender as a frame of analysis, something that has been largely overlooked in 20 years of work by mainstream political scientists analyzing Russia's transition to democracy. It has important implications for how Western feminist categories can be applied to the Russian context. This introduction summarizes the main events associated with the trail of the three group members who were accused of staging a “punk prayer” performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in February 2012. It also introduces the findings of the six papers that make up this special section.

Both Yugoslav wars and Yugoslav basketball were conspicuous in Western media in the 1990s. While CNN transmitted scenes of horror from battlefields of Bosnia and Kosovo, several dozen professional athletes of Yugoslav background could be seen in action on U. S. sport channels. Yugoslavs, by far the most numerous among foreign players in the strongest basketball league in the world—the American professional basketball league (NBA)—sparked the audience's curiosity about their background and the peculiar Yugoslav style of basketball. The literature concerning the Yugoslav crisis and Balkan wars noted sporadic outbursts of ethnic hatred in sport arenas, but did not provide any detailed information on the otherwise important role of sport in Yugoslav history and society. Not even highly competent volumes such as Beyond Yugoslavia, which highlighted the country's culture, arts, religion, economy, and military, paid attention to what Yugoslavs called “the most important secondary issue in the world”—sport. Yet sport reveals not merely the pastimes of the Yugoslav peoples, but also the varieties of nationalism in the former Yugoslavia, including probably the most neglected of all local nationalisms: the official communist-era patriotic ideology of interethnic “brotherhood and unity.” The goal of this article is to highlight this type of nationalism manifested via state-directed sport using as a case study the most successful basketball program outside the United States.

The article explores ways in which the nineteenth-century Prussian military architecture has been used and promoted as a part of the local heritage in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. Accommodation of the old fortification buildings to tourism and museum work has been publicly discussed since the beginning of the 2000s, but neither local nor federal authorities have proposed a plan to adapt them to non-military purposes. As a result, these structures, which are protected by federal heritage laws and uniformly built of characteristic red bricks, have become an arena for various initiatives, experiments, and games with the past. Strategies of virtualization discussed in the paper reveal a lack of open public discussion about dark episodes of Russian and Soviet history. Consequently, it is important to learn more about how and why contemporary Kaliningraders appropriate the local German legacies, use globally accepted strategies of heritage construction, and develop cooperation with the EU countries, while remaining receptive to official historical narratives promulgated by the national center.

This article raises questions about the relationship between theory and practice, legality and illegality in the late Soviet nationalities policy, and the role played by various branches of power. It focuses on the Veps, an indigenous ethnic minority in the northwest of Russia. In the Brezhnev era, quite a few officials and census takers refused to register the Veps nationality in personal identification documents and during censuses, claiming, incorrectly, that the Veps were not in the official list of nationalities or that they were a people (narodnost'), not a nationality (natsional'nost'), and hence could not be registered as one. The Veps were counted as Russians instead. These bureaucratic practices, widespread in Leningrad and Vologda oblasti, but not in Karelia, contradicted official nationalities policy, passport regulations, and census instructions. It seemed that the Soviet state no longer recognized the Veps as an ethnic community. The article claims that the mass refusal to register the Veps nationality was intentional and directed by the regional authorities. The goal was to accelerate the assimilation of the Veps, a policy that worked well. The official number of Veps decreased extremely rapidly in the 1970 and 1979 censuses, only to recover in 1989, after the manipulations had ended.

Late Imperial Russian society experienced a time of profound social and cultural change in spite of the fact that aristocratic privilege and monarchical power endured until 1917. Contemporary writers bear witness to an emerging working-class consciousness in the cities, a peasant culture increasingly in contact with the wider world of the city and beyond, and a literary culture shaped by the latest currents in the experimental modernism of the West.1 Scholars have long explored the Russian variant of interest group politics that emerged in the wake of the Great Reforms, such as technological innovation and the Russian Navy, the development of a legal consciousness, new cultural expectations about the city and the process of urbanization, the modern aspirations and ambitions of a thriving popular culture, and even an emerging modern set of assumptions about individual sexual autonomy.2

The migration and settlement of Russians throughout the former Soviet Union in combination with rising nationalism have resulted in a set of conditions that will probably result in considerable national conflict. From an operational perspective, the subjective definition of a nation is the most useful. A nation is a self-defining community whose members claim a common ancestry and a common destiny. They also claim a common geographic origin, the national homeland, over which they claim an exclusive, proprietary right. In fact, nations seek to ensure their destiny by controlling the national homeland for the benefit of their nation, and by promoting the indigeneous nation to a dominant, preferential position. A primordial connection between nation and homeland—blood and soil—is claimed, which results in a geographic or spatial identity, imbued with great emotion as the sacred ancestral land. The national homeland is delimited and justified by either history, demography, or both. Although demographic dominance can generally be claimed by only one nation, the historical claim can be made by more than one, and frequently the demographic claim is reinforced by the historical argument. Most national and ethnic conflict is provoked by conflicting claims to the homeland or aliens residing in the national homeland. Thus, as a rule, the more ethnically homogeneous the homeland, the less the conflict among nations. Of course, this is not always the case. A major national goal is ethnic homogeneity in the national homeland, as various restrictive language, citizenship, and immigration laws demonstrate. Yet this aim will not be sought at the expense of control over ancestral territory.

As the post-1989 outlines of historical evolution come into focus, two fundamental and ancient forces help shape post-communist societies, both in the countries of the former Soviet bloc and in the territorium of the once Soviet Union: one is dynamic cultural and political ethnicity; the other is potent revivals of religious activity. These phenomena are interrelated, perhaps inextricably intertwined, though conceptually distinct.

Just as Mikhail Gorbachev, in announcing the goals of perestroika and setting the spirit of glasnost', had no program in his scheme to resuscitate the Soviet Union to accommodate the explosion of republican separatism and the tidal wave of ethno-politics, neither had he given any thought to the potential of grassroots revitalization of religious life. To his surprise, spiritual and social religious activities forcefully entered onto the stage of post-Brezhnev civic society throughout the USSR.

Getting a fix on Estonians’ state of mind was difficult in the years before and after September 1991. The runup and aftermath of independence produced what an observer in Estonian Life called a “psychic rollercoaster”—euphoric hopes, long periods of boredom, and moments of sheer terror as Soviet agents struck hard at Baltic independence. Earlier years of collective obedience training had produced the effect of psychic numbing. In the 1990s Estonians dared to think and feel.

In the aftermath of the June 2010 violence in southern Kyrgyzstan, much scholarly attention has focused on its causes. However, observers have taken little notice of the fact that while such urban areas as Osh, Jalal-Abad, and Bazar-Korgon were caught up in violence, some towns in southern Kyrgyzstan that were close to the conflict sites and had considerable conflict potential had managed to avoid the violence. Thus, while the question, “What were the causes of the June 2010 violence?” is important, we have few answers to the question, “Why did the conflict break out in some places but not others with similar conflict potential?” Located in the theoretical literature on “the local turn” within peacekeeping studies, this article is based on extensive empirical fieldwork to explore the local and micro-level dimensions of peacekeeping. It seeks to understand why and how local leaders and residents in some places in southern Kyrgyzstan managed to prevent the deadly clashes associated with Osh, Jalal-Abad, and Bazar-Korgon. The main focus of the project is on Aravan, a town with a mixed ethnic population where residents managed to avert interethnic clashes during the June 2010 unrest. The answers to the question of why violence did not occur can yield important lessons for conflict management not only for southern Kyrgyzstan, but also for the entire Central Asian region.