Researching In The Former Soviet Union

Written for early-career scholars still in the planning stages of their research, this book explores some of the challenges researchers face when conducting fieldwork in the former Soviet region. It addresses key questions, including: What difficulties do scholars, especially females, encounter when researching in the region? How does an early-career scholars' positionality - especially their nationality, ethnicity, and sexuality - contribute to their experiences of inclusion, exclusion and access while conducting fieldwork? How do early-career scholars navigate issues of personal safety in the field? How do junior academics successfully conduct high-risk research? The book includes contributors from both the region and Western countries, paying particular attention to the ways researchers' subjectivities shape how they are received in the region, which, in turn, influences how they write about and disseminate their research. The book also explores ways to continue research away from the field through the use of digital methods when physical access is not possible.

Written for early-career scholars still in the planning stages of their research, this book explores some of the challenges researchers face when conducting fieldwork in the former Soviet region. It addresses key questions, including: What difficulties do scholars, especially females, encounter when researching in the region? How does an early-career scholars’ positionality – especially their nationality, ethnicity, and sexuality – contribute to their experiences of inclusion, exclusion, and access while conducting fieldwork? How do early-career scholars navigate issues of personal safety in the field? How do junior academics successfully conduct high-risk research? The book includes contributors from both the region and Western countries, paying particular attention to the ways researchers’ subjectivities shape how they are received in the region, which, in turn, influence how they write about and disseminate their research. The book also explores ways to continue research away from the field through the use of digital methods when physical access is not possible.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This open access book is a result of the first ever study of the transformations of the higher education institutional landscape in fifteen former USSR countries after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. It explores how the single Soviet model that developed across the vast and diverse territory of the Soviet Union over several decades has evolved into fifteen unique national systems, systems that have responded to national and global developments while still bearing some traces of the past. The book is distinctive as it presents a comprehensive analysis of the reforms and transformations in the region in the last 25 years; and it focuses on institutional landscape through the evolution of the institutional types established and developed in Pre-Soviet, Soviet and Post-Soviet time. It also embraces all fifteen countries of the former USSR, and provides a comparative analysis of transformations of institutional landscape across Post-Soviet systems. It will be highly relevant for students and researchers in the fields of higher education and and sociology, particularly those with an interest in historical and comparative studies.

This monograph describes the structures, access, and declassification procedures for Soviet-era civil and military archives located in Moscow. Although there are numerous holdings within former Soviet territory housing materials dated between 1917 and 1991, only those associated with the top leadership bodies (the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) Politburo, Secretariat, and Central Committee); the diplomatic, security, and intelligence services (the NKVD, KGB, and GRU); and the former Soviet military are examined in this paper. The author gathered most of the information for this document through interviews with Russian archive officials during a visit to Moscow between May 23 and May 31, 1992. The information cutoff is October 1992. This monograph is a part of the ongoing RAND project on World War II, the early Cold War, and Korean War POW-MIA issues. Research for this paper was sponsored by the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and undertaken within the International Security and Defense Strategy Program of RAND's National Defense Research Institute, a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Staff. The monograph is expected to be of interest to officials and specialists seeking information on the organization of the post-Soviet archives.