Since 1991, throughout the former Soviet Union marketization has increased, and much of the social safety net has disappeared. Compared with other former Soviet republics, Estonia has fared well. In this paper, we examine the salience and seriousness of various social issues for groups in Estonia in 1996, and we compare the 1996 results with those of a survey that took place in Estonia in 1991 shortly before the coup. We also reflect on the findings in light of opportunities and challenges for Estonia.

Development in Estonia during the last decade has been very rapid and impressive. Changes that started at the end of 1980s and increased in intensity after Estonia reclaimed its independence in 1991 have completely transformed the face of the country. This rapid political and economic development has been accompanied by several worrying trends. The social cost of the reforms has been high: a decline in living standards, falling birth rates, increasing crime rates, and uneven regional development. Major declines in many other social indicators have occurred as well.

If the destruction of the Berlin Wall came to symbolize freedom in Central Europe, for the republics of the former Soviet Union it was the construction and recognition of new walls in the form of national borders that represented liberation. In the case of Estonia, the end of what was considered illegal Soviet occupation marked a return to the country's republic's rightful place as an independent, European nation. In demographic respects, however, Estonia could not easily escape the legacies of Soviet rule, due in part to the migration of hundreds of thousands of non-ethnic Estonians to the Estonian SSR. Far from completing a clean break with the past, Estonian independence has replaced legal distinctions between nationalities with social and symbolic boundaries between ethnic groups.

Because of the historic separation of western and eastern Ukraine under Polish and Russian spheres of influence, respectively, regional subpopulations have been seen as an important factor in Ukrainian politics. Arel and Wilson argue that the division on the all-important “Russian question” in Ukraine (relations with Russia and with the Russian-speaking minority) is increasingly regional: east and south versus the center and west. Hesli calculated the level of russification and industrialization in the various regions of Ukraine and concluded that both, together with geographic location, although interrelated, have their own bearing on variation in public opinion. Markus, however, has argued that despite economic, political and ethnic differences among Ukraine's regions, these differences pose less of a threat to reform than has sometimes been suggested. She further points out that speculation that the Donbass wants to unite with Russia “stems more from Russian claims to the area than from genuine indigenous sentiment.” Miller and colleagues, on the other hand, dispute the notion of regional differences independent of the socio-demographic characteristics of the local populations, challenging the conventional wisdom that there are regional political cultures that supersede any underlying demographic differences. They argue that national, political, economic and class identities represent the important cleavages in post-communist societies. The regional divide in Ukraine is thus not a foregone conclusion but a factor that bears closer examination.

This paper is about the life experiences of selected individuals who, five years after Ukrainian independence, had emerged as key leaders in post-Soviet Ukraine, a society undergoing deep social and political transformations. In this paper, I argue that under these circumstances, these individuals became both the “children” and “agents” of change. In exploring this idea, I will focus on the moment in their life stories when each narrator identifies the moment when he or she began to act as an “agent” of change. More specifically, I will examine circumstances that transformed these individuals into new leaders at this unique social and political juncture in Ukraine's history. My working hypothesis is that, in addition to direct factors and a certain element of chance, other factors in their earlier biographies, during the Soviet period, have had lasting importance on these leaders' development.

This paper combines two sources of qualitative data, focus group interviews and ethnographic research, to discuss gender as a factor in changes to work and identity in a rural Ukrainian village. Analyzing data from focus groups I conducted in the winter and fall of 1997 at my dissertation field site in Transcarpathia, I argue that in this community gender differences are as important as generational differences in shaping participants' evaluation of work opportunities before, during and in particular after the Soviet period. The important relationship between gender and work opportunities in this village stems both from traditional divisions of labor and the loss of professional jobs, such as teaching and administrative positions, available to women during the Soviet period.

In Uzbekistan, the 1990s brought significant and sometimes drastic change in employment and income security and in earning opportunities. In focus groups conducted in 1996 and 1997 with citizens of Uzbekistan from various ethnicities, regions and social classes, it was within the context of discussion of work and income that the idea of “transition” came through most clearly: life was once normal, and will be normal again sometime, but meanwhile nothing is certain. In these focus groups there was a pervasive sense that “the transition” is an aberration; this was expressed most succinctly in criticisms of those women who transgressed gender norms in order to earn an income in the “shuttle” trade.

This study concerns how people throughout Uzbekistan were making sense of the tremendous socioeconomic changes taking place in their Central Asian republic during their first decade of independence from Soviet rule in 1991. This paper analyzes talk about the daily struggles of Uzbekistanis in order to arrive at ground-level insight about the kind of postsocialist state Uzbekistan was becoming in the 1990s, and how its citizens envisioned it. The extent to which people felt empowered to understand and potentially act on social issues, I argue, depended on geographical location. Looking at a series of focus group interviews conducted in three Uzbekistani cities in 1996, I identify spatial inflections in talk about social problems. The results of the study allow us to think about the Uzbekistani state's changing bases of legitimation since the late 1990s.