New publication on Soviet Caucasus

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A new publication is out, edited by Märta-Lisa Magnusson and Karina Vamling. Publisher Universus Academic Press, Lund (Sweden), 2026. Publisher’s webpage: https://universus.se/arkiv/book/we-witnessed-the-soviet-break-up. With numerous illustrations from the authors’ visits to the Caucasus in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Abstract

The authors recount their experiences of conducting fieldwork and traveling as researchers in the Caucasus region in the final years of the Soviet Union. This period, from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, is crucial for the understanding of current developments not only in the Caucasus but in all countries that were once part of the Soviet Union. They report on political processes in the Caucasus, including the emergence of new movements for independence, increasing tensions with Moscow, the breakdown of Soviet structures at different levels, and the growing importance of national cultures. They describe how premodern traditions still play a role, despite Soviet modernization, account for specific cultural features and similarities, and witness deepening ethnic antagonism. The authors are political scientist Ib Faurby, cultural geographer Lars Funch Hansen, slavicist Märta-Lisa Magnusson, historian and Iranologist Søren Theisen, and linguist and Caucasologist Karina Vamling.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction, 9
  2. A Soviet people, did it exist? Impressions from Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Märta-Lisa Magnusson, 14
  3. The fall of an Empire, Ib Faurby, 44
  4. Four years that changed Georgia’s identity, Karina Vamling, 65
  5. A little trip down memory lane. Travel in Armenia in the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Søren Theisen, 91
  6. When the mountains wept. Spitak, December 1989. A story in pictures from a visit in snow and frost in Armenia on the one-year anniversary of the earthquake 1988, Lars Funch Hansen, 105
  7. How I “conquered” the North Caucasian stronghold Maykop, Karina Vamling, 113
  8. “He’s a conflictologist” Fieldwork in the North Caucasus in the time around the collapse of the Soviet Union, Lars Funch Hansen, 127
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