Introduction

The two communities in Cyprus, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, lived relatively peacefully on the island for centuries. Even after the Greek revolution in 1821 against the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of the ‘Enosis’ ambition (annexation of Cyprus to Greece) among the Greek Cypriots, the two communities continued to live in harmony.

Political developments of the 20th century, such as British colonialism and the hostilities between Greece and Turkey, were crucial in generating a Greek–Turkish conflict in Cyprus. Greek Cypriots considered their community as the historical inhabitants of the island and thus sought the annexation of the island to the newly founded Greek state. On the other side, Turkish Cypriots considered that ‘Enosis’ would degrade their rights and wanted to divide the island into two parts. After a four-year anti-colonial armed struggle (1955–9), Greek Cypriots failed to achieve ‘Enosis’, and the two communities compromised on the foundation of an independent state. The foundation of the Republic of Cyprus (RoC) was not the priority for either of the two communities, so bi-communal conflicts continued. In 1974, after a failed coup d’état orchestrated by the Greek junta against the legitimately elected president of the RoC, Turkey invaded the northern part of the island. The Turkish invasion forced hundreds of thousands of Cypriots to leave their homes and migrate to the north or south. Since then, Turkey has deployed a large military force in the northern part of Cyprus, while, according to international law, an illegal state was founded, which is solely recognized as a sovereign state by Turkey. After 1977, the five parties involved in the Cyprus Problem (Greek Cypriots, Turkish Cypriots, Greece, Turkey and the UK) sat at the negotiating table several times to find a mutually acceptable solution, which has not yet been achieved.

The two communities had lived in complete isolation for many years, as until 2003, the regime in the north did not allow anyone to cross to the other side of the island. In 2003, the opening of some checkpoints allowed inter-communal contact for the first time in almost 30 years. Nevertheless, to this day, the relations and the contacts between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots are still considered marginal.

Introduction

Before the Second World War, about one-third of the population of Poland were members of national minorities, including Ukrainians, Jews, Belarusians and Germans. However, as a result of the Nazi and Soviet invasion of Poland, the Holocaust, the expulsion of Germans and the resettlement of Ukrainians, the post-1945 Poland became an ethnically homogeneous nation-state. It is estimated that about 5.7 million Polish citizens lost their lives during the German occupation and about 150,000 Polish citizens lost their lives during the Soviet occupation. In the aftermath of the war, Poland was a state with reduced sovereignty. The communist Polish United Workers’ Party gained firm control over domestic politics, which nonetheless remained under the Soviet influence.

In the period 1945–89, the country's memory politics was fully dependent on the narrative dictated by the state and influenced by the pro-Soviet optics. However, the collective memory, the acts of oppositional memory, and oppositional commemorative acts recurred in this period and re-emerged in the early 1990s. This is when many troubled past issues entered the public sphere from various vantage points and in various ways, including the Holocaust, the Roma genocide, forced sexual labour of women and rape as a war crime, the Polish–Ukrainian conflicts, the Polish anti-Semitism and the role of Poles in the Nazi genocide, the participation of Poles in the communist regime and in oppositional movement against the regime. These and many other elements of the Polish troubled past have been used and abused in public debates, in which participate politicians, cultural and artistic institutions, writers and artists, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and academics.

Although in post-1989 Poland this conversation has been multidimensional, two dominant competing trends/narratives can be distinguished: the so-called ‘pedagogy of shame’ versus the so-called ‘patriotic pride’. The former one is associated with European integration, modernization, emancipation and equality within the European Union (EU), where Poland features as a partner who has worked through its historical traumas, recompensated for the guilt and so on. It was called the ‘pedagogy of shame’ by right-wing historians and journalists. On the other hand, ‘patriotic pride’ is associated with nationalistic, Catholic, conservative and anti-European positions.

Introduction

Since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) in April 1998, Northern Ireland (NI) has experienced a degree of transformation and has made substantial progress in many areas in terms of peacebuilding, community cooperation, enhanced economic growth, inward migration and outward engagement with the international community. While the Troubles may have officially ended more than 20 years ago, the legacy of the conflict remains to this day. Collective and individual traumas are still present along with continued community divisions. Unionist and republican communities have yet to find consensus on a range of issues, including the release of political prisoners and parades, as well as annual issues stoking cross community tensions such as the 12 July bonfires commemorating the victory of Protestant King William of Orange over the Catholic King James in 1690. The emergence of a new Irish Republican Army (IRA) paramilitary and the political party Saoradh, perceived to be their political wing, has been a new factor raising tensions. Communities face new challenges such as the decision for the UK to leave the European Union (EU), despite the North largely voting to remain. The need for peacebuilding initiatives within NI and cross-border cooperation between the North and South of Ireland is ongoing. As well as concerns about the potential for the reintroduction of the border creating high level political tensions at a state level, the Brexit referendum highlighted continued divisions within NI. The resurgence of nationalism among the loyalist and republican communities and the expression of their allegiance to the UK and the Republic of Ireland respectively are seen in the continued debates between the place of NI in the UK and the calls for a border poll to vote for a reunification with Ireland. There are concerns that the political divisions could percolate down through the population and provoke an increased division at a community level, that if unaddressed could result in a return of inter-community violence.

Our research into the challenges faced by organizations in NI and Ireland as they deal with the legacy of the Troubles revealed a number of initiatives in place. These seek to identify opportunities for further cooperation, integration, social and economic justice, healing from wounds and inter-state cooperation.

To start, we need to understand why and how the Soviet Union collapsed and how the trauma of collapse shaped how Putin, his allies and millions of Russians came to view the world. Putin described Soviet collapse as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”. “Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory”. An “epidemic of collapse” as he called it, spilled into Russia, threatening its very existence. The 1990s are remembered as a traumatic time for most Russians in which quality of life and rule of law fell apart. Savings and job security evaporated. Rates of poverty, alcoholism and mortality increased. Average life expectancy fell by nearly five years. Russia's population declined. Putin came to power as prime minister at the end of that turbulent decade in 1999 and became president the following year. His presidency was defined by that backdrop; Putinism was all about reversing that catastrophe and restoring Russian pride by rebuilding the state to its former glory. What that meant exactly evolved over time, but Putinism always held Russia of the 1990s as its antithesis. Humiliation, decay, poverty and death are indelibly connected to state weakness, liberalism, democracy, and all things “Western” in the Putinist view of politics.

The collapse of communism sparked violent conflict and Russia used war, and proxies, to protect its interests. The collapse of the USSR unleashed powerful centrifugal forces that Moscow struggled to contain. Even then, Soviet and then Russian governments exhibited an interest in holding onto as much of the USSR as possible, especially those areas where Russians, Russian-speakers, and Russian allies lived, under Moscow's influence. They used force where they could, force moderated principally not by morality or political intent but by crippling incapacity. A will to fight unmatched by the capacity to do so was a recurrent theme, which stretched from Lithuania to the failed August 1991 coup, to Chechnya. Only against the unarmed, the very lightly armed, or other elements of its own enormous military institution did the Soviet and then Russian armies enjoy much success in the 1990s. But it was not for want of trying.

The moment of Putin's failure was caught on a phone's camera. It was Friday 25 February 2022. The phone belonged to Volodymyr Zelensky, president of Ukraine. Rumours that he and his government had fled Kyiv were swirling, fanned by Russian propaganda and trolls, but standing in the lamp-lit street outside his presidential office, Zelensky issued a simple message of defiance. “The PM is here, the Party leader is here, the President is here. We are all here”. He continued, “our military is here. Citizens in society are here. We’re all here defending our country, our independence, and it will stay that way”.

In that moment it was evident that Putin had failed to topple Ukraine's government and replace it with one more subservient to Moscow. In the months and years that followed, Russia also failed to win a decisive military victory capable of coercing Kyiv back into the Eurasian sphere. Russia's naked aggression and Ukraine's heroic defence finally spurred an appalled West into action. Ukrainian forces pushed the Russian army back from Kyiv, Mykolaiv and Kharkiv. The war continues but as I write, Ukraine has conducted a successful counter-offensive in Kharkiv, has retaken the one major city Russian forces did manage to take in its initial advance, Kherson, and has fought Russia's much vaunted spring offensive to a bloody standstill in Bakhmut. Russian losses are colossal. The US estimates that Russia has sustained more than 200,000 casualties. It has lost thousands of tanks, APCs and drones, dozens of helicopters and aircraft. Things have got so bad that in September 2022, Putin was forced to order a general mobilization of men of fighting age, pouring badly trained civilians into the grinder to replace the professional troops eliminated by Ukraine's defenders. Wagner recruited prisoners to send to the front and provided the vanguard for the assault on Bakhmut in spring 2023, its cavalier attitude to the welfare of its soldiers resulting in appalling losses. When Ukraine started to turn the tide there too, Prigozhin launched an excoriating public tirade against Putin and the Russian army, who he blamed for the failure – a telling sign that the Putinist alliance is fracturing under the weight of its own war.

In early 2011, three years before Euromaidan, the Middle East was convulsed by popular uprisings, the Arab Spring. First, Tunisia's long-serving president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was driven from power. Then, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, another long-serving authoritarian, was ousted by protestors. The uprising convulsed Libya too, but Muammar Gaddafi turned his guns on peaceful protestors. When the protestors fought back, the country slid into civil war. Prompted by pressure from the Arab world and Europe, the UN Security Council authorized a NATO-led intervention to protect Libyan civilians. Russia abstained in that vote, a bone of contention between its president, Dmitry Medvedev, and prime minister, Putin. Oman, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain and Yemen also experienced mass uprisings. The first three used limited political reform and economic incentives to mollify the crowds; the government in Bahrain restored order violently with the help of Saudi military intervention; Yemen careered into civil war.

It was Syria, however, that loomed largest. The uprising there led to a bloody civil war, the rise of the radical jihadist Islamic State (IS), and drew in Iran, Hezbollah, the US, the UK, France, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Turkey and Russia.

Before Crimea, Medvedev and then Putin had steered a course focused on preventing Bashar al-Assad's violent overthrow without direct military intervention. In autumn 2015, however, Putin ordered the Russian military into Syria to prop-up Assad's flagging regime, his position hardened by three considerations: Western timidity which created a vacuum he was happy to fill; fear that Assad faced imminent defeat; and confidence in the capacity of Russian military force to achieve its political goals of defending Assad, extending Russian influence into the Middle East, and forcing the West to acknowledge Russia's great power status by making itself indispensable to peace in Syria. Taking advantage of Western timidity, disunity and confusion, Putin ended Russia's brief post-Crimea diplomatic isolation by positioning itself as the great and indispensable power necessary for peace in Syria. But victory in Syria came at a terrible price: a civil war that consumed more than half a million lives and displaced more than half Syria's pre-war population. The Syrian government and its allies were responsible for around 90 per cent of all civilian deaths, Russian forces alone killed at least 7,000 Syria civilians.

Putin got his small and victorious war. But it came in Georgia, not Chechnya. Russia's August 2008 war in Georgia proved immensely popular at home. With only a modest display of its military might, Russia seemingly achieved all its political objectives. It is ironic, then, that this triumph arrived only after Putin had stepped down as president.

Russia's war with Georgia remains mired in controversy centred on the question of who fired the first shot. The Georgians insist Russia conducted a campaign of destabilization aimed at a creeping annexation of Georgian territories in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. This campaign had its roots in the politics of Soviet collapse but accelerated under Putin. They argue that in the spring and summer of 2008, Russian-backed South Ossetian separatists attacked Georgian villages and security forces and that Russia deployed troops into the disputed territories to support them. Faced with the actualization of creeping annexation, they say, Georgia had little choice but to send its own troops into South Ossetia to hold the country together. The Kremlin claims it intervened to protect the South Ossetians from genocide only after Georgian forces attacked.

To understand what happened and why we need to trace two stories that conjoined. The first is a Georgian story: of its tumultuous separation from the Soviet Union, civil war and authoritarian government. The second is a Russian story: of how the Kremlin attempted to preserve what it called a “zone of privileged interest” in the former-Soviet space, a “liberal empire” to use the terminology employed by Anatoly Chubais, arguably the chief architect of the Yeltsin government's economic reform. Russia's first efforts to control the newly independent governments on its borders were chaotic, but over time they morphed into something more coherent and substantial, a core of Putin's political project. The two stories conjoined in 2003 when Georgia's “Rose Revolution” upended the rule of Eduard Shevardnadze (Gorbachev's long-serving foreign minister turned president of Georgia) and replaced it with that of Mikheil Saakashvili: a democrat (initially), reformist and nationalist. Saakashvili wanted to do two things: drag Georgia out of Russia's sphere and into closer partnership with the West and establish the state's authority over all the country's territory. That put Saakashvili on a collision course with Putin.

A second war in Chechnya made Vladimir Putin, transforming him from anonymous apparatchik supported by just 2 per cent of Russians into an immensely popular president. It allowed him to renegotiate the state's social contract with the people as the media, oligarchs, regional governments and political opposition were brought under the Kremlin's sway in return for the promise of stability. Chechnya convinced Putin and his allies that war could solve political problems. It taught them the power of nationalist mobilization and demonstrated the capacity of military force to reassert Russia's lost authority and re-establish a sense of pride. It reaffirmed the Russian military's belief in the offensive value of overwhelming and indiscriminate firepower. But whilst the rallying around the flag – and the president – was real enough, some effects were mere mirages. Victory in Chechnya was not as decisive as it seemed. Nor was it achieved by Russian military prowess alone. It was Chechnya's Kadyrov clan that finally won the Chechen war, not the Russian army. Chechnya today may be firmly a part of the Russian Federation but it is Ramzan Kadyrov's word that is law there. His is an autonomous Chechen regime – the sort of thing the separatists wanted – propped up by eye-watering amounts of Russian money.

Operation successor

Vladimir Putin left Dresden at the beginning of 1990, apparently gifted an old washing machine by East Germans grateful for his service. Still on the KGB's books as a member of the active reserve, he returned to Leningrad's university where he renewed his friendship with his old professor, Anatoly Sobchak. The city he returned to was very different to the dormant but safe one he had left a few years before. It wasn't just that its name had reverted back to Saint Petersburg. Gorbachev's reforms had brought freedom and a lawless capitalism. Many of the city's first entrepreneurs were violent criminals. As the economy crashed, food became a prized commodity. Hunger was common. Into the void strode criminal gangs, peddling the essentials of life as well as drugs, alcohol, corruption, prostitution and violence. The old Soviet command system was dead but there weren't yet any laws or institutions to govern the new capitalist system. As the weapons of the Red Army followed demobilized soldiers into the marketplace, AK-47s were readily available from car-boots and street stalls.

Vladimir Putin insists Ukraine is not a real country. That its people are really Russians. That its state is not fully sovereign. That its boundaries are historical accidents. Russia's president has said this often. His reasoning evokes such an unadulterated imperialism of earlier centuries it is hard to see how a modern leader could be more overtly imperialist. But it is not just Putin. From what we can tell, many Russians think the same way. When, in the 1990s, Boris Yeltsin's reform-minded foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, talked of reintegrating Russia with former Soviet republics, it was Ukraine and Belarus he had in mind. For Kozyrev as for Putin, it was axiomatic that Russia's identity as a great power hinged on a hierarchical relationship with its post-Soviet neighbours, typically referred to as the “near abroad” by Russians to denote that these states were not properly “foreign” or sovereign. Russian control of Ukraine is an article of faith for many Russians, rooted in the idea that Russians and Ukrainians are one people. Held by nationalists, communists, and many liberals, this attitude towards Ukraine plainly exhibits Russia's imperial sense of self.

In the ninth century, adventurous Vikings calling themselves the “Rus” established riverine trade routes between Scandinavia and Byzantium. One of their greatest was on the mighty Dnieper River. A staging post, Kyiv evolved into the centre of a prosperous warrior kingdom. Kyivan Rus expanded over the next couple of centuries, at its peak extending from the Black Sea to the Baltic. In the late tenth century, its ruler, Prince Volodymyr (Vladimir in Russian) converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. Under the leadership of Prince Yaroslav “the Wise”, Kyiv erected its own Santa Sofia cathedral in the eleventh century. Yaroslav's children were less than wise, however. They squabbled and fought internecine wars that divided the territory and weakened themselves.

The end came at the hands of the Mongols in the thirteenth century and it was here that the Rus became two or perhaps three peoples. Russian nationalists claim that when Kyiv fell, the Rus fled north to Muscovy and established there the successor to the Kyivan Rus. Ukrainian nationalists tell a different story, that the Rus remained in Kyiv and founded Ukraine. The truth is lost to history, but most likely some fled, and some stayed. More important was the fact that for the next 400 years, Kyivans and Muscovites lived in different political orbits.