Selecting an overarching frame for the academic works we chose for the December issue of our monitoring bulletin, we noticed that all of them, in one way or another, touch upon the civilizational influence of the Soviet Union—an influence that has not ended even today, 34 years after the USSR ceased to exist, in December. The post-Soviet space—and, more broadly, the post-Soviet perimeter of geopolitical influence—is not merely a historical shorthand for the past. It remains an operative category, a geopolitical reality today—already, in just a few days, in the second quarter of the twenty-first century.