In this special issue, our contributors move the academic conversation beyond methodological nationalism and approaches that analyze far-right movements only within their respective state contexts by interrogating the circulation of ideologies, funds, and people across sociopolitical boundaries. Our goal is to scrutinize the far right in post-communist Eastern Europe by examining the multitudinous and multidirectional ties that exist between groups at the local, regional, national, and transnational levels. Attention, moreover, is paid not just to those factors that facilitate such linkages, but also to the obstacles that hamper these flows via various detours, omissions, and other forms of resistance. In this introduction, we offer a theoretical overview and discussion of contributors’ findings to argue that conduits for the dissemination of far-right discursive frames are hardly unidirectional in nature. As a result, the transitological narratives of progress and regress typically invoked to explain the emergence of the far right offer only a partial understanding of how it mobilizes, builds alliances, and circulates ideas. We unpack the conceptual pitfalls and fallacies of transitological narratives and instead foreground the concept of multidirectionality, which opens up new avenues through which to understand how far-right groups mobilize and disseminate their narratives.

This essay focuses on analyzing the history of the evolution of the nationalist memory narrative in recent memory politics in Ukraine. It observes the political rehabilitation of the radical nationalist movement and its leaders and organizations, followed by public recognition and glorification, and the evolution of this memory narrative since the beginning of the 1990s from local memory to the centerpiece of the state politics of memory. This article examines the memorialization and commemoration of the nationalist movement at regional and national levels (sites of memory, memorial dates, renaming of topographical objects, movies, TV series, etc.), policies aimed at the promotion of the nationalist historical myth, political controversies, roles of major actors, public debates on these issues, societal responses, and international disputes.

This study identifies the mnemonic strategies of the Slovak extreme-right Ľudová Strana Naše Slovensko (ĽSNS) / People’s Party Our Slovakia as a means of establishing a mnemonic alliance with Putin’s Russia. ĽSNS’s construction of mnemonic culture surrounding two critical events in Slovak history – the 1944 Slovak National Uprising and the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet army and its allies – is marked by an effort to overcome the ideological divide between its extreme-right ideology and Russia’s identity and memory politics rooted in its anti-fascist heritage. Those two events represent an uneasy terrain for building political and mnemonic alliances between ĽSNS and Putin’s Russia. Even though these two historical milestones represent a seemingly unmasterable past and an obstacle in an ĽSNS-Russia alliance, the party implemented several mnemonic strategies to reconfigure the place of these two key historical events in national memory and clear the path for a closer alliance with Putin’s Russia. We argue that ĽSNS’s memory construction is multidirectional rather than competitive or discordant. We unpack ĽSNS’s memory construction and identify multidirectional effects and trajectories as vectors for building a mnemonic alliance with Putin’s Russia.

Latvia’s far right has had a great deal of political influence since the late 1980s, when nativist movements played a key role in mobilizing political opposition to Soviet power. Far-right parties have been in 16 of the 22 government coalitions in Latvia between 1993 and 2023. Since 2010, the National Alliance (NA), a merger between an established far-right party and a more youthful political party, has come to dominate Latvia’s far right and has been a part of every government coalition from 2011-2023. This article begins with a discussion of Europeanization, the Europeanization of political parties, and the qualitative methodology used in the article to examine the impact of Latvia’s membership in the European Union on NA’s international links and program. The article then outlines the development and influence of Latvia’s far-right. The following sections examine links between Latvia’s far right and Europe’s far right and the impact of Europe on NA’s ideology and program. It finds little evidence of Europeanization of Latvia’s far right. Latvia’s far right is more hawkish toward Russia than the West European right and also enjoys greater domestic influence and respectability. “New nativist” anti-immigration and cultural Marxism themes have lower salience in Latvia where Russian-speakers are perceived as a bigger and more immediate threat than Muslims or “Woke” activists.

The goal of this exploratory article is to examine the specifics and networks within and between conservative organizations at the local, regional, and national levels in Poland. By investigating these connections in 2016 using social network analysis and interviews, we contribute to a better understanding of the growth and structure of these groups, which created the base for right-wing organizations as well as led to the success of right-wing parties in Poland and vice versa. We expect to find that the majority of far-right organization networks is vertically structured, linking those organizations at the local level with national organizations; those at the top sustain them financially and offer popularity, access to politics, and other opportunities. However, although right-wing organizations care more about the linkages with their national counterparts, we expect to find that those few local organizations that form links with like-minded local organizations emphasize grassroots activities unrelated to participation in political party activities and are less radical and more civil in their behavior and attitudes.

The recent history of the Ukrainian authoritarian far right is one of paradoxes. If one looks at the polls, it has performed poorly; its modest successes have been regional and short-lived. On the other hand, it has been highly successful in terms of shaping memory politics in the country. It has had a disproportional influence on history writing, having invested significant efforts into building an effective structure in the field of memory management. Radical nationalists have also come to staff senior positions as deans and vice chancellors at Ukraine’s top universities, the ministry of education, the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UINP), and the archives of the Ukrainian Security Service (HDA SBU). The hard right has gained a disproportionate influence on “soft issues” of identity and the shaping of “national memory” – not only by running the governmental memory institutes, but also by hands-on drafting of memory laws outlawing “disrespect” for the OUN, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), and other historical far-right groups. This study seeks to trace and contextualize the repatriation of the ethnonationalist hard right from emigration and its role in shaping an infrastructure of memory production – in particular, under presidents Yushchenko (2005–2010) and Poroshenko (2014–2019).

Over the years, China’s nationality policy tended to imitate the Soviet Union while also retaining its uniqueness. Existing scholarship has described three deviations the CCP made vis-à-vis the Soviet model: denying national self-determination, rejecting the supra-national union of nation-states, and undertaking constructivist classification of ethnicity. These features took shape around 1949. In this article, I survey China’s observations on Soviet nationality affairs from 1949 to 1991 and provide a perspective for understanding how these deviations from the Soviet nationality model both crystallized and varied. My findings show that after 1949, Soviet studies in China lacked a coherent agenda for studying the nationality question. The experts gathered rich materials but subordinated nationality questions to themes such as revolution, a centrally planned economy, border disputes, geopolitics, and ideological indoctrination. They also tended to reduce ethnopolitics to class struggle and economic modernization. Such systematic evasion of nationality questions persisted until the collapse of the Soviet Union. The USSR’s disintegration caused China to recognize the resilience of ethnicity and nationality, while before 1991, Soviet studies in China had lacked any systematic reflection on the Soviet nationality model.

The Bosniak and Albanian minorities in postcommunist Montenegro have supported and been represented by mainstream Montenegrin parties more than by their ethnic parties. This stands in striking contrast to the situation in neighboring Serbia and North Macedonia where the Bosniak and Albanian minorities vote almost exclusively for their ethnic parties. The Montenegrin case stands out as deviant also when one considers a number of extant explanations, all of which would predict a different outcome. Montenegrin Bosniaks and Albanians constitute two native, sizeable and geographically concentrated minority groups inhabiting a country with an institutional framework and several special electoral arrangements favoring minority parties. Drawing on original data on Bosniak and Albanian legislators elected across 12 parliamentary elections in Montenegro (1990–2023), municipality and country-level parliamentary election results and 12 semi-structured elite interviews, I argue that what explains the deviance in the Montenegrin case is the peculiar nature of Montenegrin identity, specifically the fact that it does not pit the majority against minority, but rather it pits the Montenegrin and Serbian components of the Orthodox majority against each other and in such a context the non-Orthodox minorities become critical political allies of the Montenegrin bloc against the Serbian one.

The objective of the article is to establish why a financial bonus for Slovenian–Italian bilingualism was introduced in the District of Koper (comprising today’s Slovenian municipalities of Ankaran, Koper, Izola and Piran), which came under Yugoslav rule after 1954. Using Brubaker’s triadic nexus concept and analysis of newly discovered archival sources, the authors found that (a) on the federal level, Yugoslavia only focused on minority protection as much as it was required to by international agreements and treaties, (b) the Italian minority itself was not a relevant actor in the Yugoslav system of minority protection, (c) Italy had a marginal role in the process of protecting the Italian minority in Yugoslavia, and (d) the political elite in Yugoslavia introduced the bilingualism bonus to encourage the integration of the Italian minority when building a new (socialist) sociopolitical order. The Slovenian-Italian bilingualism bonus was therefore not an altruist measure directed at minority protection, but rather a self-serving measure by the authorities to reinforce their power.

The article analyzes the role of Ukrainian associations on construction of immigrant identity in Turkey at the intersection of diaspora politics and diaspora-lived experiences. Ukrainian immigrant associations – whose numbers and members rapidly increased after Russia’s annexation of Crimea – became critical players in immigrants’ ethno-national identity construction. This aligned with the Ukrainian government’s changing diaspora policy and shaped immigrants’ relationship with the homeland. The associations, therefore, facilitated diaspora activism from above and below. These associations are mainly engaged in activities related to the teaching of Ukrainian language, history, and culture so that immigrants can distinguish themselves from Russians and discover their own uniqueness. They also consider the migrant status of Ukrainians in Turkey and develop an awareness of ethno-national identity by negotiating transnational identities.

This article concerns the endurance of political traditions brought to Palestine at the turn of the 20th century from the revolutionary milieu in Imperial Russia. The Russian Empire and its neighbors, which form most of today’s Eastern Europe and large swaths of Central Europe, was the homeland of most early Zionist settlers. They had acquired experience in a range of clandestine political organizations in the Russian Empire. It is this revolutionary experience that constitutes the bedrock of Russian Zionists’ influence on the political culture of the pre-state Palestine and Israel. Later, those who found themselves in Poland after Versailles became familiar with parliamentary rituals, even though the Polish state did not enjoy democracy for long. We suggest that this seemingly distant history continues to manifest itself in the political culture of contemporary Israel. We consider epistemology, tradition, ideology, and political action while looking at Israeli politics through the lens of its Russian roots.

In Estate Origins, Tomila Lankina sheds new light on the logic of persistence and resilience in the Russian social structure that shapes political possibilities in Russia to the present day. It is a wonderful and rewarding read on the historical origins of social requisites of democracy, such as greater civic activism and more pluralistic political competition. To understand variation in attitudinal and behavioral support for democracy in contemporary Russia, according to Lankina, we must go back to tsarist Russia’s estate institutions. A set of institutions that codified the rights and privileges of different social groups, the estates system created incentives for an eclectic and growing stratum of urban dwellers known as meshchane to invest in education while simultaneously fostering the creation of institutional “infrastructures”—professions, educational institutions, charitable, civic, and local governance bodies—that retained during the communist period a degree of autonomy vis-à-vis the state. This, Lankina argues, allowed the meshchane’s distinct value orientations to persist over time.

Tomila Lankina’s The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia, published by Cambridge University Press in 2021, is a very powerful and thought-provoking book. It contains a bold argument, exhibiting the author’s erudition across several disciplines, as well as an unusual richness of empirical evidence and an exquisite prose style. The book delves into the intricacies of social resilience in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Contrary to the notion that the Bolshevik Revolution served as “the great leveler,” Lankina demonstrates the enduring presence of Tsarist-era estates within the social fabric throughout the Soviet era and even into the post-Soviet period. The estates encompassed a system of legal classifications that stratified Russian imperial society into distinct categories: aristocracy, clergy, merchants, and meshchane (petty bourgeoisie), as well as peasants. Lankina’s primary focus lies upon the meshchane, an estate that, by the twilight of the tsarist regime, accounted for approximately 10 percent of the empire’s total population.1 Within Lankina’s narrative, the meshchane emerged as an imperial middle class – comprising individuals such as small shopkeepers, rentiers, doctors, teachers, engineers – who mostly resided in urban centers and towns. Many among this group hailed from ethnic and religious minority backgrounds, including Jewish, Polish, German, Old Believers, and others.

Tomila Lankina has written a pathbreaking book. Impressively combining theoretical ambition, sensitive attention to historical detail, and the skillful use of multiple quantitative and qualitative methods, The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia brings the study of Soviet history squarely back onto the agenda of contemporary comparative social science. For those of us who have spent much of our careers trying to explain to academics and policy makers alike why the story of the rise and fall of the USSR still matters for understanding our contemporary world, Lankina’s book is both welcome vindication and a reason for real optimism about the future of social-scientific inquiry. This is, simply put, the best book I’ve read about the Soviet system and its legacies in many years.

An original, empirically rich, and analytically multilayered and provocative statement by Tomila Lankina, The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia (2022) is a meticulous work of sociology focused on the exploration and elaboration of social mechanisms of resilience in a transforming polity and society. It is also an attempt to link the past, the 19th-century reform of the estate system in Russia, to the present, Russia’s failed democratization, by arguing that the social basis for democracy in postcommunist Russia was associated with the thin stratum of the more privileged, educated, and politically engaged members of the middle class who were able to build on the intergenerational capital and became “the silent custodian of institutions and values that nurtured the democratic promise of post-communism” (391). As such, it is a passionate statement against Soviet historiography that has been influential in shaping the mainstream Western understanding about the socially transformative nature of communism. The book goes against the received wisdom about the degree to which the Soviet society has been modernized and transformed through communist experience: “the narratives of grand revolutionary rupture,” as Lankina phrases it (394). Excavating specific family histories, Lankina shines light “on the ‘tectonic’ layers of skills, values, and occupational complexity” that underlay wealth-supporting strategies along with the pursuit of better education and the acquisition of better-paid jobs in the Soviet Union. The already privileged social groups—the urban and rural meshchane—were better “connected, networked and engaged” and therefore better-equipped “with the skills, tools, and capital” (393). The Soviet regime reincorporated these privileged professional groups into an elite layer (prosloyka) of the Soviet society, commonly known as Soviet intelligentsia.

I would like to offer heartfelt thanks to Professors Stephen Hanson, Egor Lazarev, Bryn Rosenfeld, and Gulnaz Sharafutdinova for taking the time to read the book carefully and for offering their thoughtful comments and critique. I am also grateful to the editors of Nationalities Papers for providing a forum for and facilitating the symposium.