Post-Soviet Neo-Eurasianism, the Putin System, and the Contemporary European Extreme Right

Post-Soviet Neo-Eurasianism, the Putin System, and the Contemporary European Extreme Right

by Andreas Umland, the Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation in Kyiv

Cas Mudde recently observed that “populist radical right parties are the most studied party family in political science.” 2 While the interest of social researchers for ultra-nationalist political groups and networks—not only parties—in the West has indeed risen markedly during the last quarter of century, this cannot be said, to the same degree, about the East-Central European and especially post-Soviet far right. There exists, to be sure, a certain body of scholarly literature on these objects now too. 3 Yet many details and circumstances of the emergence and development of relevant extremely right-wing groupings in such countries as Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, and Romania, as well as especially Serbia and Ukraine, still remain to be explored, contextualized, and interpreted. 4 This is in spite of the fact that some of these parties were temporarily included in their countries’ coalition governments. 5

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Perspectives on Politics  /  Volume 15, Issue 2  /  June 2017, pp. 465-476