If Vladimir Putin did indeed come from a family with ties to the Soviet nomenklatura, that would illuminate the role of personal connections in an allegedly egalitarian and meritocratic society. It also resonates with recent research emphasizing the continuities in Russia’s ruling elite across the 1917 and 1991 regime transitions, due to the persistence of networks of favors and “human capital” across the generations.

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It is symbolic that the most enduring legacy of the Soviet Union on the African continent is the Kalashnikov pattern rifle.

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Written in 1995, Ludmila Ulitskaya’s “Medea and Her Children” merges “byt” and “bytie” by portraying the spiritual satisfaction found in the everyday.

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As the sole example of early Soviet supernatural horror (or perhaps even horror as such), “The Bear’s Wedding” offers insight into the shape of the dreadful in the early Soviet Union.

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In today’s Russia, where government propaganda consistently denies society’s inherent complexity, Project 1917 offers a space that supports civil discourse and challenges official narratives. Only when history belongs to the people and authentically reflects how they lived can societies hope to move forward.

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To understand how and why certain tech companies come to be seen as “harbingers of freedom” and how this reputation impacts their role as actors in contentious politics, we examine Telegram’s practices during the 2020 Belarus protests against presidential election fraud.

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Ivan Bakaidov describes himself as a “web activist with cerebral palsy.” In March 2020, as Covid-19 lockdown measures were announced in his hometown of Saint Petersburg, Bakaidov launched the hashtag campaign #ButWeAreAlwaysAtHome (#AMyVsegdaDoma) on Facebook, VKontakte, and Instagram.

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While inveighing against Western colonialism, Putin wants the world to forget that Russia is the only European state that has engaged in a reconquest of its former imperial dominions.

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Taken together, Khersonskii’s posts imagine a future multilingual society that recognizes the civic obligation of understanding and speaking Ukrainian. His own bilingualism, meanwhile, helps mitigate language conflict by modeling flexibility within individual linguistic practice.

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Immediately after Euromaidan, Khersonskii began to reflect on his own precarious position as a Russophone patriot of Ukraine who had published his poetry primarily in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

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