ABSTRACT
Twenty-five years have passed since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when the new independent states of Eurasia started the process of regime transition and state- and nation-building. All of the former Soviet republics have the same departure point – the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. While to some extent, it can be speculated that certain differences existed in terms of political regimes within the USSR (which reflects the powerful status of some subnational elites in the southern republics), these differences were only marginal. However, 20 years later one can clearly confirm the existence of an enormous variation in the outcomes of regime transition across post-Soviet Eurasia. The region includes relatively stable polities and fragile states, consolidated autocracies and nascent democracies. As the Ukrainian crisis of 2014 shows, both political regimes and national borders in Eurasia are still in the state of flux; large changes may happen unexpectedly for observers, both associate with progress towards democracy and with resurgence of autocracies. Thus, this experience of post-Soviet Eurasian states requires development of new theoretical approaches that would allow for better understanding of rapid dynamics in this part of the world and of the phenomenon of external dimension of regime transition in general.
