Armenia may choose to draw on the legacy of its own long history, as opposed to the Soviet legacy narratives. Doing so will help the country through institutional development and reforms.

After the revolution, Armenia needs to take advantage of the available civil society expertise to provide informed conceptualisations of reform actions, and the institutional platforms that facilitate public oversight of reforms.

The 9th edition of the Genealogies of Memory conference entitled “Myths, Memories and Economies: Post-socialist Transformations in Comparison” focused on the transformation from state socialism to market economies and liberal democracy in the former Eastern Bloc.

Belarus is the host of next month's European Games. This is bad news for the country's many homeless. Already facing a hostile bureaucracy and lacking decent shelters, the homeless will be targeted for 'street cleaning' by the authorities.

An anti-intellectual and anti-globalist campaign has been picked up by the Russian state and segments of society to “defend” Kaliningrad. Fortunately some Russian voices are disagreeing, though power is this minority’s hands.

The news of Nursultan Nazarbayev’s resignation as president of Kazakhstan announced on March 19th 2019 sent shockwaves across Eurasia. No post-Soviet leader has attempted a similar transition since 1991.

Because para states are unlikely to disappear any time soon, we have to see if they are able to sustain themselves and how to include them without any recognition. Non-recognition is a major geopolitical issue. Respect of human rights is another one, and this too directly concerns states without international recognition and outside the jurisdiction of international law.

While Putin’s Russia is proud of the big achievements of the Soviet era and views the collapse of the USSR as “the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”, it has failed to form a clear view of its past, including the Bolshevik Revolution. As long as that is the case, the country will hardly build a vision for the future.

Homo post-Sovieticus is a permanent fixture of the post-communist landscape: resentful, frustrated, angry – and retroactively clairvoyant. As long as HPS exists, communism endures: it is the ancient regime that provides the interpretative templates which many citizens of post-communist countries use to interpret the world that surrounds them.

Dear Pen Pal,

My name is Slavko. I am eleven years old and I live in Eastern Europe. My English teacher told me to write to you and tell you about my home. For some time now, there is no more Russian in schools, but English. In the student's book, there were a lot of useless expressions like tiles or local community. I had to look up in the dictionary to see how to say blokowisko in English. I found: “residential district consisting of large blocks of flats.” Mom said she wasn't sure that was it and maybe you don't have such a word.