In October 2026, the PSCR program’s analytical reports dealt with the political and economic developments across the entire post-Soviet area, including Central Asia, the South Caucasus, the Baltics, and even the Russian-speaking repatriates residing in Israel.
Kiryl Kascian reflects on the 2026 elections to the Latvian parliament, especially regarding ethnic minority appeals and participation. The Harmony Center, a party that has long been associated with the demands of the Russophone voters, has not passed the electoral threshold, which, in the author’s assessment, “reflected both the erosion of its former support and the declining value of the political label under which Latvia’s minority electorate had been organized for more than a decade.” For Stability!, another party appealing to Russophone voters, also did not make it to parliament – which was likely caused, in part, by its personalized nature and the controversial conduct of its leader. Aleksejs Roslikovs, conducting most of the campaign from Belarus, facing detention upon return to Latvia, and presenting the election as a test of support for his own position, “was unlikely to strengthen trust among his former electorate.” Sovereign Power/Young Latvians managed to mobilize protest voters across ethnic lines and to bring separate political actors into a unified electoral project, and so improved their previous electoral results. Latvia First, a party “rooted mainly in the ethnic Latvian electorate but increasingly responsive to minority interests,” has successfully monetized economic populism and attracted popular figures from other parties, while also tailoring its campaign to the minority demands in the region of Latgale.
Moving southward, the PSCRP team experts review the recent controversy concerning the school uniform in Azerbaijan, which coincided with the Seventh Summit of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia attended, inter alia, by the President of Israel. The authors highlight the antisemitic character of many remarks concerning the ban on wearing hijab in Azerbaijani educational institutions, which allege that Israel stays behind “suppressing” the visual symbols of Islam in the Muslim countries with which it cooperates. Alongside the unofficial remarks and forged documents spread online, the negative reactions by the Turkish and Iranian media and state officials were analyzed. Beyond driving a wedge between Baku and Jerusalem, the antisemitic allegations might have sought to tarnish Azerbaijan’s reputation in the Islamic countries. However, the authors also note that some Turkish public figures expressed support for Baku and urged it not to “give in” to political Islamism.
The PSCRP team critically reviews the book “Perished Civilization” published in Kyiv by a Ukrainian historian under the pseudonym “Kuzari,” which focuses on the “fate of the predominantly Muslim Turkic population of territories that today form part of the Republic of Armenia.” The book’s pseudonymous author traces the processes that, as he (or she) interprets them, led to the gradual displacement of this community and the “destruction of its cultural environment.” “Kuzari” proposes “examining the tragic chapters in the history of the Caucasus’s Turkic population” as a result of “prolonged imperial policies under which relations between peoples became an instrument for consolidating the authority of the central state” and mechanisms of regional control. The review’s authors insist that some controversial claims of the book need further justification; specifically, they stress that “historical responsibility borne by specific political forces (…) must not be replaced by the notion of collective ethnic guilt.” However, the scale of the collected documentary materials and the book’s “attempt to connect demographic developments with transformations of the cultural landscape” still make it an interesting contribution to historical knowledge.
The material prepared by the PSCRP team experts reports on the US Secretary of State’s visit to Uzbekistan, accompanied by a representative business delegation. The authors stress the economic potential of cooperation between the US and the Central Asian states, while framing it against the backdrop of (presumably) fading direct Russian influence on these states’ economies and potential competition with China in the region. As the authors formulate it, “China holds the processing capacity and the proximity, and the United States brings capital, technology, and a stated willingness to underwrite new routes.”
PSCRP experts also provide their perspective on several symbolic gestures performed by the post-Soviet politicians that might potentially hint at their distancing from Moscow. The authors specifically highlight the Azerbaijani President’s speech at the congress of his party, where he said that there are only two superpowers (the US and the PRC), and the Kazakhstani President’s proposal to “freeze” the ongoing hostilities in Ukraine at a forum in Omsk. They also mention the contradictions that emerged between the Armenian and Russian leadership, especially after the Karabakh war. The authors connect the possibility of such developments, presumably perceived negatively by the Kremlin, to the partial loss of leverage the latter might have used to influence the neighboring states’ policies in recent years.
Gershon Kogan’s analysis sheds light on the contested sphere of Islam(s) in Central Asian societies. The regional governments try to control the religious domain, which results in an “officially sanctioned ‘traditional Islam’”; any “actor claiming religious authority from outside the state’s control is treated as a security problem.” The author lists the state-framed and administratively manageable national “traditional Islam,” “an autonomous Hanafi-Maturidi revival, Turkish institutional Islam, and transnational Salafi and Tablighi currents” as the potential competitors. This contested field also includes external actors, such as Turkey (supplying the state-sponsored forms that regional governments may absorb), China and Russia (supplying security cooperation), and transnational currents, such as Tablighi Jamaat, that the governments attempt to fight.
Andrei Kazantsev-Vaisman presents an overview of the economic changes in contemporary Kazakhstan. He points specifically to the growing economic diversification and the combination of the elements of a resource-based economy with those of an industrial model, leading to the country being forced to address both industrial and post-industrial transformations simultaneously – “deepening its industrial base while at the same time building the institutions, skills, and technologies required for a post-industrial economy.” The author also explains the apparent discrepancy between strong macroeconomic performance and continuing financial pressure on many households by the resource-intensive structure of the economy, the gap between average and typical wages, high food-price inflation, household size, territorial disparities, and household debt. Kazantsev-Vaisman concludes that Kazakhstan’s qualitative structural transformation has been facilitated “by a relatively liberal and open economic system, with foreign investment and the rapid expansion of SMEs emerging as two of its principal drivers,” although the “benefits of transformation are distributed unevenly across sectors, regions, social groups, and households.”
Finally, Alexander Shpunt provides a rigorous sociological and anthropological analysis of the heterogeneity of the Russian-speaking repatriation waves to Israel. He specifically focuses on the distinctions between the so-called “Sausage Aliyah” (which “arrived in Israel [in the early 1990s] to obtain what it had never had”) and the “Pumpkin Relocation” (that came [in the 2020s] to “preserve what it already possessed”). Shpunt argues that “Israeli political culture has systematically failed to recognize this distinction, continues to address both clusters as a single undifferentiated electorate, and, in doing so, has left a substantial and highly communicative segment of Israeli society (…) without meaningful political representation.” Beyond numbers and demographic differences, the author lists several systemic differentiators. The first is “Monolingualism vs. Multilingualism,” with the “Pumpkin” wave not being channeled by linguistic necessity into the “Russian street.” The second is “Aspiration vs. Preservation”: “if the sacrifice and humiliation of starting from zero were the foundational experience of the Sausage Aliyah’s Israeli identity, then the arrival of a cohort that refused to start from zero was (…) a challenge to the meaning of that sacrifice.” The third is about “Necessity vs. Choice,” since, unlike for the “Pumpkins,” for most of the “Sausage” Aliyah, Israel was the only available destination. The fourth differentiator is related to the absence of the Soviet biographical experience, which has shaped cognitive and affective frameworks through which the Israeli reality was and is processed. The fifth is built around the class dimension, with the “Sausage” cohort disproportionately composed of the intelligentsia having high formal status and low material capital – unlike the “Pumpkins” who are largely drawn from the metropolitan middle class, whose human capital is, in many cases, immediately applicable and does not require substantial adaptation. Shpunt attributes the “near-total failure of Israeli political culture to recognize the distinction” to such factors as institutional inertia, temporal lag, and the invisibility of the said heterogeneity to Israeli political forces.
We are going to provide up-to-date analytics on the developments in the post-Soviet part of the world in the upcoming months.