GCOE-SRC Border Studies summer school, August 2011

This paper focuses on the processes of institution of borders in post-Soviet Central Asia and offers highlights of how some of the local communities cope with the decisions made by the central governments in the region with respect to borders. In particular, this paper offers insights into the cases when certain decisions of the governments conflicted with preferences of the population residing in the bordering areas. This in turn resulted in the situations when local communities in the affected bordering areas decided to protest such decisions by rather untypical means such as declaring “independence” from their respective countries and annexing roads and water facilities which they believed were vital for sustaining their communcal life. Such examples exemplify the cases when interests of local communities do not necessarily fit into the plans of central governments resulting in inter-state border frictions.

Diogenes, 2017

Situation of post-Soviet societies remains quite difficult to conceptualize. Among other approaches some Belarussian authors (Pavel Tereshkovich, Igor Bobkov, Olga Breskaya, Oleg Breskiy and others) offered a concept of the Borderland for designation of post-Soviet societies. By the Borderland they mean situation of coexistence of borders of different nature on certain territory (region of Belarussia, Ukraine and Moldova). In the article this approach is considered and its applicability to public sphere is analyzed.

Political Geography, 1998

This paper examines how the republics of the Russian North (Karelia, Komi and Sakha-Yakutia) have begun to construct national development strategies as “sovereign” territorial sub-units within the post-Soviet Russian Federation. The paper highlights the important role that boundaries and peripheries have played in the institutionalisation of ethnicity in these former autonomous republics of the Russian Union republic of the USSR. It adopts a historical perspective on the construction of national-territoriality in the three republics and emphasises the importance of Soviet ethno-federalism in establishing a fundamental link between the titular groups' national-identities and their territorial “homelands”. Soviet disintegration and post-Soviet transformation have encouraged an even more intensive process of national-state formation in the republics of the Russian Federation and this paper highlights the importance of “territoriality” in that process of change. © 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved

Theoretical & Applied Science, 2018

ISRA (India) = 1.344 ISI (Dubai, UAE) = 0.829 GIF (Australia) = 0.564 JIF = 1.500 SIS (USA) = 0.912 РИНЦ (Russia) = 0.207 ESJI (KZ) = 4.102 SJIF (Morocco) = 2.031 ICV (Poland) = 6.630 PIF (India) = 1.940 IBI (India) = 4.260

Eurasia Border Review, 2013

The article is devoted to the high differentiation of the European and Asian parts of the Russian border regarding the level and rate of development of cross-border relations. In the author's opinion, the main reasons of such differentiation are related to typological features of the given parts of the border, which are caused by the history of their formation and development. The content and origin of the typological features of the European and Asian parts of the Russian border are studied in two representative segments-the Northwestern and Far Eastern-which have strong distinctions in terms of volumes of cross-border flows of people, goods and investments. Based on the developed typology of state borders, the author examines the process of historical development of the Northwestern and Far Eastern parts of the border of Russia from the end of the eighteenth to the beginning of the twenty-first century. These border segments are now at different stages of their typological evolution. The Northwestern border, during the post-Soviet period, has embarked on the road to becoming a transnational border type, but the Far Eastern border has not yet completed the process of forming the attributes of a linear border type. Considering the limits of any state, we usually imagine them as something uniform and homogeneous, the same in its nature as the object whose attributes they are. This approach is applied to the Russian border, which in many publications is presented as a certain indivisible, undifferentiated image or concept. However, Russia is a vast and extremely diverse state with the longest borders in the world. Therefore such simplified representations are a superficial and grossly distort reality. Careful researchers of the problems of history and theory of the Russian border, such as

The regime of Nursultan Nazarbayev has pursued two priorities in regard to its border regime since Kazakhstan became independent at the end of 1991: on the one hand maintaining an open border regime in respect to trade and other forms of economic activity, and on the other hand keeping control over the border in order to meet a variety of perceived security threats. The evident tensions between these two priorities have led to a shifting and unpredictable border regime, which is also conditioned by actions on the part of Kazakhstan’s neighbors. The article explores the two competing discourses of the border through examination of the 1992 Law on the Border and the documents of the Customs Agency of the Republic of Kazakhstan in the early 2000s. The competing discourses are historically conditioned and are derived from three main considerations: the conviction that Kazakhstan could only survive and prosper if it maintained a continuation of the close economic relations of the Soviet Union; the function of the border in the nation-state building project; and perceived security threats which increased in influence at the end of the 1990s and in the early 2000s.

ZMO Working Papers 34, 2022

This paper offers a broad historical and comparative analysis of territorial organisation and autonomy in Russia from the early modern age to the present. To what degree, when, and why did the Russian and Soviet authorities accommodate and even promote regional and national autonomies on their expanding territory? The paper reviews efforts at decentralisation (and in some cases federalisation) as a set of imagined, proposed, and (partially) implemented measures. In so doing, it identifies historical 'moments' at which autonomous solutions became particularly important. It also highlights commonalities and differences, continuities and ruptures in longterm perspective while tracing the specificities of the Russian case. While different forms of territorial autonomy coexisted throughout Russian history, most were shortlived or heavily constrained.