The Post-Soviet Human

The post-Soviet Human attempted to establish free politics and economy, as well as to gain collective emancipation and personal freedom between 1989 and 2022.

The post-Soviet period (19892022) was, in its own way, an unprecedented era in human history. Its uniqueness lied not only in the fact that the USSR's dissolution had opened opportunities for the people and nations of Eastern Europe and northern Eurasia to experience freedom and test their creative powers, but also in the fact that these opportunities did not extract a price comparable to the cost in human lives and suffering during the Russian Revolution and Civil War of 191724. The post-Soviet Human attempted to establish free politics and economy, as well as to gain collective emancipation and personal freedom during this era. Even though these attempts failed in most cases, the post-Soviet Human's political creativitywith its democratic and autocratic achievementswas an intriguing phenomenon worth deeper study and understanding. Without learning the lessons of post-Soviet history, the East European and north Eurasian peoples are doomed to perpetually repeat its vicious cycles of tragedy and destruction.

The Post-Soviet Human is a three decades-long testimony of creation of the post-Soviet Uebermensch who had been involved in constant effort of overcoming the Soviet Last Man. Sharply denoting post-Soviet as period from 1991 to 2022, the author shows under which organizing principles of the existence new essence had been formed in Eastern Europe and Northern Eurasia. The book would be a perfect source for those who are searching for multidimensional understanding of diverse and often mutually exclusive developments in socioeconomic, political and cultural domains that citizens of newly established states were facing after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Mariam Pipia, General Staff College, Tbilisi

Autorentext
Dr. Mikhail (Mykhailo) Minakov has been a Senior Advisor at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, since 2017. He is a prominent Ukrainian philosopher and empirical investigator who taught and researched, for over twenty years, at various universities in Ukraine, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and the United States. Working between Kyiv, Washington and Milan, Minakov specializes in political and social theory, international development, as well as the history of modernity. He is editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed Ideology and Politics Journal published by the Good Politics Foundation in Kyiv. He also edits the Kennan Focus Ukraine blog, and philosophical web portal Koinè. Minakov is the author or co-author of twelve books as well as numerous articles in philosophy, politics, and history.

Zusammenfassung

The first thorough and provocative account of a new stage of human evolution: the Homo Post-Soveticus-either a bitter irony or a warning. In any case, this is a must-read for those who still want to understand why the post-Soviet space, after the caesura of 1989-91, was not where optimists expected it to be, and why utopia became dystopia.

-Georgiy Kasianov, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin