Many scholarly studies of the Ukrainian conflict look at its origins, focusing either on the international level (external interference) or the domestic one (including ethnic, linguistic, economic, and regional tensions) (Pikulicka-Wilczewska and Sakwa 2015). The international level of analysis draws attention to external factors, namely Russia’s conscious decision to fragment Ukraine and make it a “failed state” in order to avoid its moving closer to the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Even though Moscow denies playing any role in the conflict, several international and independent Russian sources have confirmed the direct involvement of Russian regular troops (Urban 2015; Sutyagin 2015; Yashin and Shorina 2015). For scholars who emphasize the primacy of the international aspect of the conflict, the current war in Donetsk and Luhansk is not a civil war but a war orchestrated and directed from Moscow against Ukraine via Russian proxies (Motyl 2014; Kuzio 2015).

How to cope with the end of utopia? How to move from making history on a day-to-day basis to capitalizing on a legend? That is the dilemma Russian veterans of the Donbas insurgency have faced since the exalting atmosphere of Novorossiya faded away. In this article, I trace the transformations of the Novorossiya utopia from the point at which Russian volunteer fighters began to return to Russia and found themselves compelled to reinvent themselves in a new context. I first look at the difficult reconversion from war to politics of Donbas heroes such as Igor Strelkov and Aleksandr Borodai and how their efforts to launch new structures based on their war legitimacy have succeeded or failed. I then turn to investigate the birth of new heroes, such as the writer Zakhar Prilepin, who wave the metaphorical flag of Donbas at a time when exaltation of the war has declined. After that, I explore how Novorossiya has become a literature genre that occupies the shelves of Russian bookstores, spanning from Novorossievedenie—the “science of Novorossiya”—to the rich subgenre of war memoirs and veteran diaries.

Among the Russian citizens who fought in eastern Ukraine on the side of the separatists are representatives of Russian nationalist groups and organizations. After briefly reviewing the details of their participation in the war, this article looks at the various paths open to former militants upon their return from the war. This article identifies such options as continued military training and organization of military camps, participation in the war in Syria, participation in attacks on political opponents in Russia, racially tinged vigilantism, and attempts to return to political activities. Nationalist fighters who have returned from the war found themselves with limited options given the current decline of the radical far-right in Russia. The following three important conclusions can be made: (1) the return of deeply disappointed militants from the Donbas, especially those who had previously participated in radical groups, was perceived as a significant threat, but this threat has not yet materialized; (2) their return had no significant effect on the nationalist movement as a whole; and (3) some groups of former militants nevertheless remain potentially dangerous in the event of political destabilization.

The leaked email accounts of Putin’s aide on Ukraine, Vladislav Surkov, are vast primary source collections that shed light on the backstage happenings of the Kremlin’s politics in the Donbas war. Surkov is an excellent dramaturg; he writes scripts, casts actors, analyzes their performance and narratives, runs promotions, and puts the repertoire into motion to achieve intended reactions of the target audience. Methods and resources employed against Ukraine have much in common with political technology that helps the Kremlin to manipulate public opinion as well as election systems using pseudo-experts, technical parties, fake civic organizations and youth movement such as Nashi, and covert media techniques. Moscow tactically promoted the myth of “Novorossiya”—later the circumstances forced Surkov to replace it with “Donbas.” These tactics gave false credibility to “separatists” who would voice Moscow’s objections to any attempts of Ukraine to drift westward, creating an illusion in the domestic and international audience: the separatists are not puppets of Moscow but desperately fight against Kyiv junta for their localized identity, and Russia is just there to offer them a helping hand. The Russian policy toward Ukraine after the 2013 fall is an extension of its “virtual” domestic politics, but not traditional diplomacy at all.

This article explores the rise of the Azov movement and explains the process through the political opportunity structure theory. We argue that a loosely coherent winning coalition of the post-Euromaidan ruling elites enabled Azov’s participation in conventional politics. As a result, Azov launched the ongoing institutionalization process which is largely responsible for Azov’s success as compared to other far-right movements. We show that two movement entrepreneurs’ profiles, namely political activist and radical, dominated the Azov leadership structure and managed to promote their strategic vision on cooperation with state officials effectively combined with contentious action. We find that political activist entrepreneurs tend to push institutionalization alongside particular institutionalization axes, namely adaptability, reification, and systemness, whereas radical entrepreneurs are responsible for Azov’s transformation into an intense policy demander.

This article examines the effect of shared group membership on civilian attitudes regarding insurgent forces during an armed conflict. We rely on the original survey conducted in eight towns of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in May–June 2015. Based on the bivariate and multivariate analysis of the survey results, this article finds that a sense of shared identity with rebel forces at the start of the armed conflict in Donbas had a strong independent effect on civilian views of insurgents. Those respondents who identified themselves as residents of the region were more likely to attribute ideational motives to insurgents, report no knowledge of civilian victimization caused by rebel forces, and feel secure in their presence. By contrast, respondents identifying themselves as Ukrainian citizens were more likely to attribute material motives to insurgents, indicate their responsibility for attacks against civilians, and feel intimidated during direct encounters with rebels. These findings point to broader significance of identity cleavages in explaining the Donbas conflict.

This article examines the symbolic politics of three pro-state movements that emerged from the “preventive counterrevolution” launched by the Kremlin in response to Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. In 2005, youth movement Nashi played upon war memory at its rallies and branded the opposition “fascist”; in 2012, the Anti-Orange Committee countered opposition protests with mass gatherings at Moscow’s war commemoration sites; in 2015, Antimaidan brought thousands onto Russia’s streets to denounce US-backed regime change and alleged neo-Nazism in Kiev. I show how evocation of the enemy image, through reference to the war experience, played a key role in the symbolism of the preventive counterrevolution. Interviews with activists in these movements discussing their symbolic politics reveal an opposing victim/victor narrative based on an interplay of two World War II myths—the “Great Victory” and the “fascist threat.” Moving beyond approaches that view the Soviet and Russian World War II cult as a triumphalist narrative of the Great Victory over fascism, I conclude that its threat component is an understudied element.

Use of the Slovak literary language was central to the Slovak nationalist political movement in the Kingdom of Hungary before 1918. Yet beyond a Slovak nationalist intelligentsia of just 1,000 or so individuals, this idea had little purchase among the claimed nation of two million Slovak-speakers living in “Upper Hungary”—who Slovak nationalists typically understood as lacking sufficient “national consciousness” to support their political aims. As mass, transatlantic migration led to nearly half a million Slovak-speakers leaving Upper Hungary for the United States between 1870 and 1914, these linked issues of language use and “national consciousness” were carried over to the migrant colony. Rather than being a widely held sentiment among migrants from Upper Hungary, this article shows how Slovak national consciousness was generated within the Slovak American community in the final decades of the 19th century. This case study shows how a small group of nationalist leaders consciously promoted literary Slovak as the “print language” of the migrant colony to instill the idea of a common, Slovak nationhood among migrants living on the other side of the Atlantic—a project that helped in turn to create a Slovak national homeland in central Europe after the First World War.

This article focuses on the nature of Japan’s foreign policy formulation and legitimization through a study of its interaction with Central Asian countries. The article examines foreign policy discourse that constructs Japan’s “self” vis-à-vis Central Asian “other.” It reveals the textual mechanism through which reality, objects, and subjects are constructed, and it interprets the official statements contained in several foreign policy initiatives, in particular, the “Eurasian (Silk Road) Diplomacy,” the “Central Asia plus Japan,” and the “Arc of Freedom and Prosperity,” as an attempt to understand the intersubjective knowledge and analytical lens through which Japanese foreign policy makers conceive and interpret the constructed “reality,” produce foreign policy choices, and choose among identified alternatives.

In his autobiographical writings, the Russian-Jewish author and the founder of Zionist Revisionism Vladimir Jabotinsky constructed a retrospective self-image, according to which ever since becoming a Zionist early in the 20th century he exclusively clung to a Jewish national identity. This one-dimensional image was adopted by the early historiography of the Revisionist movement in Zionism. Contrary to this trend, much of the recent historiography on Jabotinsky has taken a different direction, describing him, particularly as a young man during the period of his early Zionism in Tsarist Russia, as a Russian-European cosmopolitan intellectual. Both these polarized positions are somewhat unbalanced and simplistic, whereas the figure of Jabotinsky and his worldview that emerge from reading his rich publicist writing in late Tsarist Russia present a far more complex picture of interplay between his deep ethnic-national primordial Jewish affinity, on the one hand, and an array of his different attachments to his non-Jewish surroundings including local, cultural, and civil identities, on the other. Focusing on Jabotinsky’s unexplored journalist writings that address the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–1905, the article discovers a previously unknown identity pattern of the young Jabotinsky—his Russian state patriotism—and traces its relationship to his Jewish nationalism.

This article discusses the ways in which the spread and the overwhelming popularity of Turkish television series in Southeastern Europe influence the change in perception of Turks and Turkey, as well as how the serials are transforming the image of the Balkans and the Ottoman legacy in Turkey. Television serials significantly contributed to the shifting popular image of the “other,” and initiated interactions unimaginable even a decade ago. These exchanges are both following and encouraging the breakdown of geohistorical boundaries that were set by the nationalist narratives in these regions at the turn of the 20th century, toward a more nuanced understanding of a shared past and a postnational future.

The article is a comparative inquiry into the roles of Ilia Chavchavadze (1837–1907) and Taras Shevchenko (1818–1861) as national poets and anti-tsarist intellectuals within the context of their respective national traditions (in Georgia and Ukraine). During the period of their activity (19th and the beginning of 20th century), both Ukraine and Georgia were under tsarist imperial rule (albeit the two poets lived in different periods of Russian imperial history). Through their major works, each called for their communities to awaken and revolt against oppression, rejected social apathy caused by tsarist subjugation, and raised awareness about the historical past of their nations. By comparing the works and activities of the two poets and examining their impact on national mobilization in tsarist Ukraine and Georgia, this article argues that (lyric) poetry rather than prose (novel) constituted the agency of common national imagining. It was lyric and not epic poetry or novel, this article shows, that laid the foundation of nationalist mobilization as it framed the revolt of the “I” against colonialism as a revolt of the “I” against an oppressive society under which the cultural grounds for common imagining had been constructed.