The regional stratification of political space in the context of the USSR’s collapse. Conceptual paradoxes and conceptual decisions

Abstract

Author of the article has studied the situation with the USSR collapse in the aspect of analysing theoretical and methodological sources that were applied for these particular studies. There is a paradoxical mix of theoretical approaches from domestic regional political studies and concepts from typical international political studies. Noting a rather deep conceptual difference between the theories of domestic political regionalism and the theories of international relations the author shows that in the context of the USSR breakup, when domestic political relations between republics of the USSR were changed to international political relations between post-Soviet independent states, conceptual sources of those both sub-disciplines of political science reveal signs of theoretical and methodological convergence. In particular, the study of the text of the Sovietologist G. Zimon shows that it is possible to identify the conceptual similarity of the two mentioned sub-disciplines. Common approaches include multilevel consistency, when the object of research is considered as a system staying within a meta-system and including some sub-systems: the concepts of “vertical” and “horizontal” dimensions of political space; as well as concepts of “hard power” and “soft power”. The author concludes that the future elaboration on these aspects can give a roadmap toward a more complete politological theory of regional stratification of the political space in the modern society.