Russian Realities
Soviet Russia and Hybrid Warfare Against Romania between WW I and WW II
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ioan Codrut Lucinescu
World War I determined changes both on a European and a global level. Romania is a significant case/example considering the fact that in 1918, after the fall of the multinational empires, it achieved the goal of national unity. In the following years, the Romanian state promoted the peace in order to strengthen its territorial integrity and alliances. The institutions of the national security system worked, since the end of the military actions, to fulfill this strategic objective. Both the army and the national secret services were confronted with complex threats. The Great Romania had at the time three neighbouring countries with an obvious revisionist foreign policy and territorial claims – Hungary, Bulgaria, and Soviet Russia. The most dangerous enemy was the Soviet Union which never accepted the territorial losses of the Tsarist Empire and the loss of Bessarabia. Lenin’s Russia and then the Stalin’s Soviet Union have attempted, in the two decades that separated WW I and WW II, to destabilize the Romanian state through means and methods that echo the modern "Hybrid warfare” – from propaganda performed by the communist movement to aimed at changing the constitutional order, to various attempts to ignite peasant revolutions (as a pretext for the Red Army intervention), and factory strikes, to an intensive espionage activity. The paper analyses the ample subversive actions of the soviet secret services on the one hand, and, on the other, countermeasures that the Romanian intelligence structures adopted for their annihilation.
Globalization and the End of Soviet Sociology
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Andrea Grant Friedman
The sociological study of the Soviet sphere was a focus of Western scholarship for decades. Debates over the nature of Soviet society—what is the USSR?--garnered the attention of many of the discipline’s leading scholars. Even when the Soviet sphere was not the immediate research topic, the USSR’s existence had to be accounted for across many areas of theoretical and practical study—social class, the state, power, elites, ideology, nationalism, ethnicity, revolution, development and underdevelopment, welfare states, etc. The sociological analysis of modern capitalist society could not occur without a consideration of the Soviet experiment. As global capitalism began to take on new features in the 1970s and 1980s, sociologists responded by initiating an intensive study of globalization. Interestingly, however, the consequences of globalization for the USSR received relatively little consideration. When “history ended” in 1991 with the triumph of the new global capitalism—a development unanticipated by sociologists--decades worth of research on the Soviet sphere was left by the wayside. While new scholarship appeared in the form “transition studies,” the question of what the dissolution of the USSR revealed about the nature of Soviet society rarely got attention. Nor was there much consideration of the implications of the twentieth century’s socialist experiment for the new global capitalism. This paper documents and seeks to explain why this lacunae exists. It also examines the implications of globalization and the collapse of the Soviet sphere for two of the major theories of the Soviet state—state socialism and state capitalism.
Russia's Food Revolution in the 2000s: Food Security and Urban Population Access to Food
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Irina Trotsuk
Russia's contemporary food revolution is not just an increase in caloric intake but also changes in where urbanites eat and where they buy food (private retail food chains and supermarkets, private restaurants and cafes, fast food chains, and traditional farmer markets). The bimodal Soviet system of food distribution left consumers vulnerable, which was not recognized until the system started to break down in 1990-1991. Russia's urban consumers today are food secure not just owing to access and availability, but also because the food delivery system has moved beyond bimodal distribution and has multiple ways to deliver food. Russia's food revolution is mainly an urban phenomenon (and the urban population accounts for about 75% of Russia's population) and is most pronounced in large cities. Russia's food revolution has changed cultural perceptions of food, lead to an emancipation of women from the kitchen, transformed social contexts of food consumption, and has discernible economic impacts. Despite a small downturn in foot traffic to traditional restaurants in 2016 due to economic recession, fast food and fast casual continue to experience growth in revenue and foot traffic. Such a food revolution can spread to medium and small towns, and eventually to rural areas provided income growth, entrepreneurship, and opportunities.
Data Problem and Methodological Challenge in the Age of Hybrid Warfare
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Marzenna James
Russia’s longstanding conflict with Ukraine shows little sign of abating. The undeclared war in eastern Ukraine claims new victims every month. In a recent escalation of the Russian pressure on Ukraine, the residents of the two rebel held “republics” have been granted a three-month track to obtain Russian passports. Officials and academics on both sides of this crisis blame their opponents. Can we evaluate the truth of these claims? This study takes stock of the arguments in the existing scholarly debate, including the concepts of power, hybrid warfare, political technology, realism, Marxism, liberalism, rational choice, and theories of domestic politics as well as analysis of individual leaders; identifies the main problems with obtaining reliable data; and concludes with an analysis of methodological challenges facing IR scholars and policymakers working on this momentous global conflict.
