In March 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). By 1985 relations between the Soviet Union and Cuba had been in existence for over 25 years and were extremely close in both ideological and trade terms. Soon after coming to power, Gorbachev implemented the policies of perestroika and glasnost while Fidel Castro introduced the campaign for rectification of errors in Cuba. There were great differences in these campaigns since the Cuban one was much more ideologically driven than its Soviet counterparts. This study is an examination of the period from March 1985 to the end of 1991. This is done in three broad areas: official Soviet policy towards Cuba; the unofficial Soviet policy towards Cuba (an examination of academics and social/political commentators work on Cuba) and the Cuban perception and reaction to the events in the Soviet Union. This study also attempts to establish whether a rethinking, with the benefit of hindsight, has taken place in the years since 1991. In 1985 official and unofficial Soviet policy towards Cuba were identical but as the Gorbachev period continued this began to change. Official policy began to become contradictory in style since Moscow started "veiled" attacks against aspects of its relationship with Cuba while at the same time still defended the island in the face of continuing US hostility. Moscow also stated that the differences in Soviet and Cuban policies were because each campaign was designed for conditions specific to each country but that both had the same goal: the improvement of socialism. Although official policy became more outspoken, at no point during the Gorbachev era did it call for the termination of relations with Cuba. Unofficial Soviet policy started to change as the effects of glasnost permeated Soviet society. This became noticeable from 1987 onwards and reached the point that an open debate on the relationship was taking place. By 1991 unofficial policy was vastly different from the official Soviet line towards Cuba. The Cuban government also stated that the programmes were for situations specific to each country but that both had the same goal, that being the improvement of socialism. The unofficial Cuban line mirrored the official one but by 1990 this started to change as it started to criticise Soviet policies. In 1991 the Cuban government also started to do this. Due to the difficult situation in the socialist world the Cuban government from 1989 had been trying to increase its hard currency markets. A general re-thinking with the benefit of hindsight has not taken place on either side but an examination of participants' memoirs is still a valuable study to conduct. Although it offers very little new evidence for this period it does, however, give more credence to the events that took place between March 1985 and December 1991.

This thesis deals with the exporting performance of Ukraine. Focusing on the reorientation of merchandise exports, both in terms of geography – from East to West – and in terms of commodity composition, it explores the multi-level determinants of the observed picture. While until 2003-2004 reorientation from East to West appeared to be a steady trend, in 2005 this trend reversed and CIS re-emerged as a leading destination market for Ukraine’s exports. The commodity composition in trade with the EU has also hardly improved, and was more positive in trade with the CIS. Marginal improvements were observed on a more disaggregated level. These findings were confirmed in the macro-level analysis – Ukraine tends to under-trade with the external trade blocs – EU-15 and the then CEFTA, and over trade with the internal trade bloc of CIS. On a micro-level, the analysis has not revealed that trade with the EU has been associated with firm-level industrial upgrading, although FDI does increase the likelihood to export to the EU. Trade with the CIS has been associated with higher commodity diversification, which in turn is known to be associated with higher growth potential. On the level of policy lobbying, on the other hand, business elites have shown an increasing interest in the Western vector of integration.

This thesis explores the ways in which the factory workers of Petrograd struggled between February 1917 and June 1918 to improve their position as workers and to democratise relations within the factories. It begins by examining the sociology of the factory workforce and posits the centrality of the division between a fully proletarianised minority of skilled, literate, male workers and the majority of low-paid, unskilled, peasant and women workers. These two groups had a different relationship to the labour movement during the revolution of 1917. Chapter 2 examines the position of workers within the tsarist factory, and chapter 3 the ways in which this position changed as a result of the overthrow of the autocracy in February 1917. Chapter 4 looks at the creation of the factory committees, their political complexion, and their activities in spheres as diverse as law and order, labour discipline and the campaign against drunkenness. Chapters 5 and 6 examine the political coloration of the trade unions, and the extent to which the two organisations were genuinely democratic. Chapters 7 and 8 analyse the battle by the factory committees for workers' control of production, challenging the Western interpretation of this battle as being inspired by anarcho-syndicalism, and interpreting it instead as an attempt to stem disorder in the economy and to preserve jobs. The debates about workers' control are surveyed, and chapter 10 shows how the terms of the debate about the roles of the factory committees and trade unions changed as a result of the Bolshevik seizure of power. Within the space of a few weeks, the movement for workers' control of production developed into a movement for workers' self-management and for the nationalisation of industry. In a context of mounting economic chaos, mammoth redundancies and plummeting labour discipline, the Bolshevik government decided that workers' self-management conflicted with the priority of raising productivity in industry. June 1918 saw a move to nationalise industry, but the end of the democratic experiment in workers' management.

The thesis explores the 'return' migration and resettlement experience of members of ethnic Russian and Russian speaking migrant populations who over the period 1991-2000 left their homes in the former republics of the Soviet Union to resettle on the territory of the Russian Federation, their 'historical homeland'. The study focuses upon individual experiences of resettlement in two regions of the Russian Federation, but locates these experiences within the context of the wider regional, national and global migration regimes. The thesis traces the development of the institutions and legislation of the Russian federal and regional migration regimes over the period 1995-2001. The study demonstrates that the way in which the migration process (the migration movement and subsequent resettlement) and the space of 'return' are constructed, through political and non-political discourse and practice, often conflicts with migrant experiences of the same process and their expectations of 'return'. It charts how migrants, despite displacement and the often constraining features of the surrounding migration environment, begin to re-construct their own sense of 'home' at the site of settlement. The study concludes that rather than the migration process of the Russian populations from the former republics being a 'return' to a 'homeland', for the individual migrant the process represents an attempt to re-create an immediate 'home', that is primarily achieved through a reliance upon personal networks of family and friends.

This thesis explores the continuities and change in the conduct of Russian foreign policy in the Caspian region in the period 1991-2008 with the central focus set on the inclusion of energy both as a tool and one of the main targets of Russian foreign policy during the Putin administration. More specifically it looks at the impact that the choice to establish Russia as an energy superpower based mainly on its oil and gas sectors during this period had on the conduct of Russian foreign policy in the Caspian region. The central research question is how Russian oil and gas companies are used as foreign policy tools in the conduct of Russian foreign energy policy within the current foreign energy policy framework and to what end. The argument of this thesis is based on the hypothesis that the Russian state uses its oil and gas companies in order to infiltrate the Central Asian energy markets and assert its economic hegemony in the region through a web of legal and contractual monopolies aiming at maintaining Russia’s economic hegemony in the Caspian and contributing to one of Russia’s main energy policy priority of becoming an influential player in the global energy markets.

Set in the context of the evolving political tapestry of the Caspian region, encompassing the five riparian states of Azerbaijan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Russia, and their immediate neighbours in the South Caucasus (Armenia and Georgia) and Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) this PhD presents an analysis of Iranian foreign policy in the first six years following the Soviet break-up (1991-1997), an era that overlapped with the administration of President Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani (1989-1997). This thesis aims to build upon two distinct areas of current scholarship creating linkages between Tehran’s domestic and external environment between 1988 and 1991 which resulted in the comprehensive pragmatist alliance and the emergence of opportunities in the Caspian after the Cold War. The crux is that Rafsanjani’s material interests were aligned with the changing geopolitics of its northern region, inducing an Iranian policy driven by a pragmatic construction of strategic concerns.

Beyond the half-lives, Exclusions Zones, and official imaginaries of nuclear risk, exists an informal geography of Chernobyl. This thesis explores what it is like to live with nuclear disaster. It reveals how people have developed informal coping tactics and local risk understandings that defy formal constructions of nuclear space, and help resist de facto state abandonment. This project involved in-depth ethnographic research with marginalised communities who live in the contaminated landscapes around the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine. Qualitative approaches including participant observation, photographic methods and semi-structured interviews were conducted with participants including liquidators (cleanup workers), border guards, evacuees, returnees, ‘Chernobyl widows’, farmers and many other people impacted by the disaster’s contested nuclear geography. The thesis reveals how Chernobyl’s constructed landscape is produced through a negotiated process of ‘nuclearity’ (Hecht 2012). The research posits that alongside formal spatialisations of Chernobyl – such as its ‘Exclusion Zones’ - are a spectrum of unofficial understandings of space and risk that contest this top-down and ‘strategic’ geography of nuclear disaster (de Certeau 1984). It demonstrates that these alternative nuclear understandings help people assert agency and oppose the status of post-atomic ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998). Utilising theorisations of power and resistance offered by de Certeau (1984), the thesis uncovers the hidden geography of informality, local knowledge and place attachment that allow people to resist the ‘stealthy violence’ (Li 2009, 67) of abandonment and perform their own alternative narratives of nuclear space. This thesis contributes to discussions of Agamben within geographical discourses, and advances understandings of informality in the context of post-socialist marginalisation and landscapes of risk.

This thesis presents a critique of the Copenhagen School's conceptualisation of security via an exploration of the socio-political situation in post-Akaev Kyrgyzstan. Centrally, I consider how different forms of knowledge can inform our interpretations of security. I argue that it is vital to challenge the underlying normative assumptions of the securitization and societal security, which manifest as a disciplinary "Westphalian straitjacket", if we are to produce accounts of places such as Kyrgyzstan that are not founded on stereotypes and untested assumptions. I argue that it is necessary to prioritise context when using theoretical concepts in order to fully situate our research. Adopting an interpretive approach not only in relation to Kyrgyzstan, but also securitization theory, I highlight the pluralities and contradictions of how security means in different settings and on different analytical levels. The issues raised are explored via the reflexive consideration of a number of protests in Bishkek, as well as discussion of the wider socio-cultural and political setting of post-Akaev Kyrgyzstan. I conclude that loosening the Westphalian straitjacket that currently restricts the normative and empirical utility of the Copenhagen School, and IR more generally, is a crucial step towards a more complex and nuanced understanding of security.

This thesis investigates relations between five Russian energy companies – RAO UES/Inter RAO (electricity), Minatom/Rosatom (nuclear energy), Lukoil (oil), Transneft (oil pipelines) and Gazprom (gas) – and the Russian state from 1992 to 2012, with particular regard to state-company interaction over Russian foreign policy and companies’ activities in the post-Soviet region. The argument is that, due to the institutional legacies of the Soviet system, state-company interaction over foreign policy and energy operations abroad was part of their interaction over the Russian state’s institutional development. The study is based on the conceptual framework of social orders developed by North, Wallis and Weingast (NWW). State-company relations are seen to vary according to their informality and formality, and how closely the companies, and their rent streams, are tied to the state and the ruling coalition, or regime. The thesis concludes that the institutions that structure companies’ relations with the Russian state at home make them more or less available as foreign policy tools. In particular, domestic state-company relations influence the companies’ role in maintaining post-Soviet energy dependence on Russia. The thesis highlights the energy companies’ importance for state infrastructural power, and for the durability of Russia’s authoritarian regime.

The thesis is divided into ten chapters and 3 parts. Following an introductory chapter on the literature on the main issues of the period, Part I opens with a chapter on the social and economic transformation of the city of Moscow during war communism, and its second chapter analyses the role of the trade unions and the pattern of labour relations in this period. Part II is concerned with the internal transformation of the party and the development of its relationship with society; and discusses recruitment, organisation, the nature of militarisation during the civil war, the party's ideological work, and its relationship to mass bodies. It ends with a study of the Moscow soviet and the development of bureaucracy. In Part III the debates at the end of war communism are considered in the light of the foregoing economic and political developments. The conclusion assesses the nature of war communism in Moscow.