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Since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, questions of identity have dominated the culture not only of Russia, but of all the countries of the former Soviet bloc. This timely collection examines the ways in which cultural activities such as fiction, TV, cinema, architecture and exhibitions have addressed these questions and also describes other cultural flashpoints, from attitudes to language to the use of passports. It discusses definitions of political and cultural nationalism, as well as the myths, institutions and practices that moulded and expressed national identity. From post-Soviet recollections of food shortages to the attempts by officials to control popular religion, it analyses a variety of unexpected and compelling topics to offer fresh insights about this key area of world culture. Illustrated with numerous photographs, it presents the results of recent research in an accessible and lively way.

Post-Soviet nostalgia, generally understood as a sentimental longing forthe Soviet past, has penetrated deep into many branches of Russian popular culture in the post-1989 period. The present study investigates how the Soviet past has been mediated in the period between 1991 and 2012 as one element of a prominent structure of feeling in present-day Russian culture. The Soviet past is represented through different mediating arenas – cultural domains and communicative platforms in which meanings are created and circulated. The mediating arenas examined in this study include television, the Internet, fashion, restaurants, museums and theatre. The study of these arenas has identified common ingredients which are elements of a structure of feeling of the period in question. At the same time, the research shows that the representations of the past vary with the nature of the medium and the genre. The analysis of mediations of the Soviet past in Russian contemporary culture reveals that there has been a change in the representations of the Soviet past during the past twenty years, which roughly correspond to the two decades marked by the presidencies of Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s and of Vladimir Putin in the 2000s (including Dmitrii Medvedev's term, 2008–2012). The critical and reflective component that was present in representations of the Soviet past in the 1990s has slowly faded away, making room first for more commercial and then for political exploitations of the past. Building on Svetlana Boym's conceptual framework of reflective and restorative nostalgia, the present study provides an illustration of how reflective nostalgia is being gradually supplanted by restorative nostalgia. Academic research has provided many definitions of nostalgia, from strictly medical explanations to more psychological and socio-cultural perspectives. The present study offers examples of how nostalgia functions as a label in ascribing political and cultural identities to oneself and to others, creating confusion about the term and about what and who can rightly be called nostalgic.

Presented at the ICMME (International Conference on Multilingualism and Multilingual Education) May 2017 in Braga, Portugal. The spread of foreign languages and local people's motivation and resistance to learn them are not new phenomena in Uzbekistan. In fact, as a result of various political, social, and economic changes, the language reform in Uzbekistan has gone through several major changes within the last hundred years, including Romanization of Arabic-based alphabet in 1923 (Mehmet, 2009), dissemination of the Russian language in the Uzbek lexicon in the early 1900s (Fierman, 1991), adoption of the Cyrillic script in 1940, replacement of the Cyrillic alphabet with modified Latin script in 1993, disempowerment of the Russian language after the collapse of the Soviet Union (Hasanova, 2007), and the wide spread of the English language in the educational system in the late 1990s. This study, the first of its kind, uses qualitative methods to investigate the linguistic landscape of pre and post Soviet Uzbekistan. The study specifically examines the social, political, and educational contexts to illustrate the rise and fall of the Russian, Uzbek, and English languages before and after Uzbekistan declared its independence. The study also looks into local people's attitude toward Uzbek, Russian, and English languages after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The study was specifically provoked by the linguistic chaos that happened in formerly Soviet republics, including Uzbekistan, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the downfall of the Iron Curtain in 1991, Russian, the lingua franca of the Soviet people and one of the dominant languages of the 20th century lost its influence and status as the language of power and prestige, and Uzbek, the abandoned language with ambiguous role during the soviet time became the one and only official language of power and politics. Moreover, English, once considered the language of western capitalism and bourgeoisie (Dushku, 1998) became the most popular foreign language in the educational sectors. References Dushku, Silvana. 1998. 'English in Albania: Contact and convergence.' In World Englishes 17(3), pp. 369–379. Fireman, W. 1991. Language Planning and National Development: The Uzbek Experience. Mouton de Gruyter. Berlin- New York. Hasanova, D. 2007. Teaching and learning English in Uzbekistan. English Today 23(1). 3-9. Mehmet, U. 2009. Romanization in Uzbekistan past and present. JRAS (3). 1-12. ; Not peer reviewed ; Conference presentation ; Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

"Russia's current foreign policy is both post-imperial and post-Soviet. The prefix 'post' does not mean impotence or uncertainty. It means that the present is predetermined by the past, it is the inheritor of the past. The inheritor is dissimilar from what it inherits and as long as the inheritor remains dissimilar and not fully aware of its own identity, it continues to be 'post'."

The Cuban (post)-Soviet diaspora is the human collective comprising the persons coming from the territories of the (former) Soviet Union, who immigrated to Cuba and nowadays live in this Archipelago – as well as their descendants. This migration occurred during the period of close ties between Cuba and the USSR, that is, 1960–91. Compared with the other overseas ethnic communities now living in Cuba, the (post)-Soviet diaspora is the largest one, surpassed only by the Spanish immigration, which – however – is not usually perceived by Cubans as a diaspora, because Spain is a major contributor to the 'mainstream' Cuban culture. So, the (post)-Soviet diaspora may legitimately be considered as the largest 'clearly foreign' human contribution to the Cuban population in recent times. The most important character of this collectivity is that its first generation (i.e., the immigrants from the [post]Soviet countries) is overwhelmingly female, constituted by women from the USSR who in the period between ca. 1961 and ca. 1991 married to Cuban students affiliated to Soviet government's scholarship programmes. This 'romantic' stance makes this diaspora very unusual when compared with the standard causes making people migrate. The numeric strength of the (post)-Soviet diaspora contrasts with its very low visibility in the Cuban cultural, media and academic discourse, especially comparing with that of the relatively minor – in the numeric sense – diasporic constituents of the Cuban population: the Chinese, Arab, Jewish, etc. We analyse the main demographic, gender, ethnographic, historical, cultural and political aspects of the (post)-Soviet diaspora in Cuba.