Russia Before the Full-Scale War

Dr. Felix Riefer studied Politics at Cologne and Paris. He is an independent analyst in Bonn, the Book Reviews Editor of the Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society, and the author of Russlands Außenpolitik unter Putin 2000–2018 (Springer / Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften 2020).

Dr. Leonid Luks studied History at Jerusalem and Munich. He is Professor Emeritus of Central and East European History at The Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, author of many books, and the General Editor of the Forum für osteuropäische Ideen- und Zeitgeschichte and Forum noveishei vostochnoevropeiskoi istorii i kul’tury.

Julie Fedor is Associate Professor in Modern European History at the University of Melbourne.

Alexander J. Motyl (PhD, Columbia University 1984) is Professor of Political Sci¬ence at Rutgers University – Newark, New Jersey. He served as Associate Director of The Harriman Institute at Columbia University in 1992–1998. He is author of Ukraine vs. Russia (Westphalia Press 2017), Pidsumky imperiy (Krytyka 2009), Puti imperii (Moskovskaia shkola politicheskikh issledovanii 2004), Imperial Ends (Columbia University Press 2001), Revolutions, Nations, Empires (Columbia University Press 1999), Dilemmas of Independence (Council on Foreign Relations 1993), Sovietology, Rationality, Nationality (Columbia University Press 1990), Will the Non-Russians Rebel? (Cornell University Press 1987), and The Turn to the Right (East European Monographs 1980); as well as the editor of over ten volumes, including The Encyclopedia of Nationalism (Elsevier 2000). Motyl is co-editor, together with Bohdan Klid, of The Holodomor Reader (CIUS Press 2012) and, together with Ksenya Kiebuzinski, of The Great West Ukrainian Prison Massacre of 1941 (Amsterdam University Press 2016). His articles have been published in, among other outlets, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Comparative Politics, Slavic Review, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Nationalities Papers, Problems of Post-Communism, Internationale Politik, and Osteuropa. Motyl was the 2019 Laureate of the Omelian and Tatiana Antonovych Foundation Award. In 2020, the website AcademicInfluence.com ranked Motyl sixth among the world-wide “Top Ten Most Influential Political Scientists Today.”

Mikhail Suslov, Cand. Sc., Ph. D., is Assistant Professor of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen. His papers have appeared in Acta Slavica Iaponica, Eurasian Geography and Economics, The Russian Review, Europe-Asia Studies, Geopolitics, Global Affairs, Kritika, Ab Imperio, Revolutionary Russia, Russian History, Demokratizatsiya, Voprosy filosofii, Voprosy kul’turologii, and Forum noveishei vostochnoevropeiskoi istorii i kul’tury. His recent publications include The Post-Soviet Politics of Utopia: Language, Fiction and Fantasy in Modern Russia (I.B. Tauris 2019), co-edited with Per-Arne Bodin, and Contemporary Russian Conservatism: Problems, Paradoxes, and Perspectives (Brill 2019), co-edited with Dmitry Uzlaner.

Håvard Bækken is professor of Russian Area Studies at the Norwegian Defence University College. His recent research focuses on patriotic education and militarized identity policy in Russia and he has published numerous articles on this topic. More recently, he has also done research on the situation in the occupied territories of Ukraine, with particular attention to Russia’s strategies and practices targeting children. Bækken is also the author of several publications on quasi-legal practices in Russia.