After the USSR
Subtitle: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Politics in the Commonwealth of Independent States
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press; The University of Wisconsin Press
Published: January 1, 1996
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 240
ISBN-13: 9780299148904
Subjects: Anthropology; Colonization & independence; Contemporary Politics - Former Soviet Republics; Race And Ethnic Relations; Politics / Current Events; History: World; Former Soviet Union, USSR (Europe); Anthropology - Cultural; Europe - Russia & the Former Soviet Union; General; Ethnic relations; Ethnology; Former Soviet republics; Minorities; Nationalism; Politics and government
Description: Khazanov's astute assessments of ethnic and political strife in Russia, in Chechnia, in Central Asia, in Kazakhstan, among the Meskhetian Turks, and among the Yakut of Eastern Siberia illuminate the interconnections between nationalism, ethnic relations, social structures, and political process in the waning days of the USSR and in the new independent states.

Exploring the Soviet nationality policy and its failure to satisfy national aspirations, Khazanov demonstrates the fatal flaws of totalitarian rule and the impossibility of reforming it.

Khazanov cautions that the liberal democratic direction of current transformations in the former Soviet Union should not be taken for granted. For most of the independent states, he points out, departing from totalitarianism requires creation of a civil society for the first time in their history. The state's partial retreat from the public sphere leaves a dangerous institutional vacuum, in which nationalism is emerging as the dominant ideology.

He warns that this new, post-totalitarian society is still a far cry from a genuine liberal democracy and, despite its inherent instability, may turn out to be a long-lasting phenomenon.