Some of the most emotionally-charged discussions in the post-Soviet space have not been about economics or foreign policy but controversial historical problems.
History debates juxtapose countries like Poland and Ukraine as much as they do countries like Estonia and Russia. But in general, Russia has more problems with its neighbors than other post-Soviet states. This is in part because it inherited a long history of imperial and Soviet policies toward its neighbors, and in part because newly independent states found it overly tempting to build identities in opposition to their former patron. The Russian version of the national historical narrative has changed far less since the Soviet era than the versions taught in other post-Soviet republics. […]
