Post-Soviet transit and demodernization

Published on 19/11/2018Development of post-Soviet societies was long seen equally by scholars and political and economic actors¾in terms of transit. It was a shared view that this transit meant a collective move from the totalitarian past to democratic society and market economy. New post-Soviet and Western modernities would be established and stabilized, creating One Big Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok. However, this optimistic assessment was soon blurred by unexpected deviations from the “transit” in many parts of Eastern Europe and Northern Eurasia. We use the concept of demodernization to describe the new and under-theorized realities of the 21st century. In this issue, we test this concept in the post-Soviet context. For our purposes, we define demodernization as a reverse development in a modern society, which borrows from the previous stages of modernization and creates a new, mixed and improvised order.-- Alexander Etkind and Mikhail Minakov: Post-Soviet Transit and Demodernization -- Yuriy Savelyev: Antinomies of Late Modernity: Eastern Europe in Peril of Demodernization -- Svetlana Shcherbak: Demodernization or internal tensions of modernity? -- Leonid Luks: Reflections on “Conservative Revolution” in Germany and Russo-German Parallels -- Viktor Koziuk and Oleksandr Dluhopolskyi Resource Curse: The Role of Weak Institutions and Crony-Sectors -- Chris Monday: From the Communist Party to Family Organization -- Anton Avksentiev and Valentyna Kyselova: Calculated versus Ideological Motives: The Logic of National and Regional Coalition Formation in Ukraine -- Oleksandr Zabirko: The Magic Spell of Revanchism: Geopolitical Visions in Post-Soviet Speculative Fiction (Fantastika) -- Maria Engström: Against the New Middle Ages: Imperial Remodernism in Contemporary Russian Visual Cultur