The collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991 removed a decades-long system of successful control of potential ethnic and regional conflict . The result was the eruption of numerous conflicts over state-building, some of which degenerated into violence and some of which were resolved or prevented by strategies of accommodation. This volume explores the common trends and differences in the responses of the new post-Soviet states to the problems of state-building in ethnically and regionally divided societies, focusing on the impact of ethnic and regional conflicts on post-communist transition and...

This volume explores the common trends and differences in the responses of the new post-Soviet states to the problems of state-building in ethnically and regionally divided societies.

EU conditionality for membership is widely understood as having been a driving force for Europeanization, providing incentives and sanctions for compliance or noncompliance with EU norms, such as the "Copenhagen Criteria" and the adoption of the acquis communautaire. By taking regional policy and regionalization as a case study, this book provides a comparative analysis of the effects of conditionality on the Central and East European countries and explores the many paradoxes and weaknesses in the use of EU conditionality over time.

Stalinism in a Russian Province reexamines the agrarian policy pillars of Stalin's 'revolution from above' initiated in 1929-30, and is the first major study of its kind since the opening of Soviet archives. Through a pioneering application of the theoretical approaches of moral and political economy to Stalin's peasant policy, Hughes reevaluates the causes and processes involved in the great political, economic and social changes in the Soviet countryside. Rather than a bipolarized conflict between state and peasant, he profiles the socially variegated response of different peasant groups to...

This book makes an important contribution to the current re-evaluation of the origins of Stalinism. Hitherto, Western scholars have focused on leading personalities to analyze the crisis of the New Economic Policy. Dr. James Hughes, however, examines the processes at work under the NEP from the regional perspective of Siberia. He looks at party-peasant relations, the kulak question, Stalin's patron-client network in the provinces, the regional impact of the grain crisis of 1927-28 and the use of emergency measures to overcome it. He concludes that Stalin's experience of conditions that were...