The Soviet west, an arch of non-Russian republics extending from the Gulf of Finland in the north to the Black Sea in the south and separating Russia proper from other European states, came to the attention of scholars during the late 1960s and early 1970s. While Western sovietologists have long studied each individual country in the region – Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belorussia/ Belarus, Ukraine and Moldavia/Moldova – before the 1960s, they did not think of the Soviet west as an entity. But the region’s prominence in the dissident movement during the 1960s suggested that the western fringe of the USSR might become a catalyst of nationalist unrest and, possibly, a channel for the spillover of democratic ideas from Eastern Europe. The region was now seen as a place where the Soviet collapse might begin.

Yet, as North American scholars pioneered the use of the term ‘Soviet west’, they soon discovered the difficulties of defining this region in economic or social terms – which was at the time considered a clue for understanding nationality perseverance there. In his lead article in the 1975 collection The Soviet West: Interplay between Nationality and Social Organization, Ralph S. Clem proposed that the area was characterised by ‘high to moderate levels of economic development with relation to other areas of the USSR’, but had to qualify this generalisation by excluding the republic of Moldavia, as well as some areas of Ukraine, Belorussia and Lithuania.