This presentation investigates how the concept of "civil war" was weaponized to navigate the market transformations and social ruptures of the "Long Perestroika" period in Russia. Drawing on the periodical press, memoirs, political documentation, and interviews, I trace the evolution of this idiom from a Marxist-Leninist historical framework into a pejorative signifier of systemic disintegration. During the Glasnost era, conservative elites used "civil war" as a defensive shield against the erosion of their ideological monopoly, while reformist intellectuals redefined the Soviet project as a "permanent civil war" initiated by the Bolsheviks. As market shock reforms and national separatism accelerated, the term shifted from an abstract academic debate into a literal, apocalyptic warning of social collapse. The research identifies a pattern of political instrumentalization during the 1991 August Putsch and the 1993 constitutional crisis, where opposing factions simultaneously deployed the civil war ideologeme to justify extraordinary measures — one side to seize power, the other to resist "dictatorship". The study tracks this sensory shift in discourse, moving from the "war of laws" to the literal "smell of gunpowder" in the streets of Moscow in October 1993. By analyzing these linguistic and cultural frames, this study demonstrates how the memory of the historical civil war was repurposed as a tool of political struggle to contain the era's centrifugal forces. Ultimately, this intellectual genealogy reveals that the fear of civil war functioned as a primary rhetorical mechanism for managing the profound instability of the 1990s, exerting a more paralyzing influence on political development than the concept of revolution itself.

In 2025, Kazakhstan adopted a Law on Aquaculture, presenting fish farming as a promising sector for economic growth and investment. Does it build on a forgotten record of success, or does it represent a recent economic enthusiasm around fish farming? This paper examines the historical development of aquaculture in Kazakhstan, tracing how fish farming emerged as a sector of profitable opportunity. It analyzes the rapid expansion of aquaculture after 1985, enabled by the Law on Cooperatives and late-Soviet market experiments, its collapse after 1992 following the disintegration of Soviet economic structures, and its recent revival. The paper argues that while current government policies seek to revive the earlier success of aquaculture in Soviet Kazakhstan, transformed market logics and institutional conditions have produced a fundamentally different model of fish farming.

When it became a mass commodity in the late 1970s, the microcomputer was laden with multiple promises: an entry point into the information age, a common man’s ticket to escape deindustrialization, and, last but not least, a tool for individual material success. Be it in Margaret Thatcher’s political statements, in the writings of the proponents of post-Fordist work relations, or in the countless “get-rich-quick”-books published all over the Western hemisphere: The microcomputer and the opportunities of individual entrepreneurship around it held a central spot. From the mid-1980s onwards, microcomputerisation began to unfold in the Soviet Union as well. The strong political support for promoting knowledge of and experience with computers to the population in order to save socialism through digital optimization contrasted with the weak practical means and opportunities: the domestically produced models lagged behind international standards and were built in far too low quantities. Nevertheless, these shortcomings were increasingly compensated by private initiative such as individual imports of Western hardware and domestic programming cultures. Already during late Perestroika, and even more so after 1991, the field of activity around microcomputers and their usage offered manifold opportunities for individual and small entrepreneurship. The whole area of activity was new and unregulated, microcomputers were a symbol of technical progress and capitalism, the borders between hobbyism and commerce were blurry. Thus, the field attracted many individuals who wanted to try their luck as individual entrepreneurs in the face of economic and social collapse. At the same time, transnational IT corporations from very early on tried to intervene into this “wild” field and replace these unregulated activities with a “proper” version of capitalist relations. Based on contemporary press and other sources as well as oral history interviews, the paper explores the microcomputer as an entrepreneurial machine in early post-Soviet Russia, the practices and pitfalls of such commercial activities, and the debates surrounding them.