Post-Soviet transit and demodernization : introduction

Abstract

Development of post-Soviet societies was long seen equally by scholars and political and economic actors¾in terms of transit. It was a shared view that this transit meant a collective move from the totalitarian past to democratic society and market economy. New post-Soviet and Western modernities would be established and stabilized, creating One Big Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok. However, this optimistic assessment was soon blurred by unexpected deviations from the “transit” in many parts of Eastern Europe and Northern Eurasia. We use the concept of demodernization to describe the new and under-theorized realities of the 21st century. In this issue, we test this concept in the post-Soviet context. For our purposes, we define demodernization as a reverse development in a modern society, which borrows from the previous stages of modernization and creates a new, mixed and improvised order.