Soviet Studies, Russian Studies, Ukrainian Studies... Politics, war, and ‘horizons’

This article looks at the development of Soviet, Russian and Ukrainian Studies as academic disciplines in the English-speaking world, and considers how the collapse of the USSR at the end of 1991 affected their approaches, conceptual horizons, and reception within the former Soviet space. It argues that the distinct ‘Western’ schools of area studies looking at the former USSR and its constituent republics have not simply merged with their counterparts in the areas under study, as might have been expected once the political and institutional barriers to international scholarly cooperation had been removed following the end of communist rule. On the contrary, they have survived and retained their vitality for a combination of economic and political reasons, and the narrowing scope for free academic enquiry in both Russia and Ukraine means that they are unlikely to lose their relevance any time soon.