The seminar series this autumn focuses on the history of the USSR’s non-Russian republics and successor states. It explores political reforms, socio-economic transformations, and cultural upheavals which shaped Soviet borderlands between the 1950s and the 1990s. As the collapse of the USSR remains under-studied and politicised, the series bridges the 1991 chronological divide to recover diverse experiences of systemic transformation, state collapse, and nation building which still affect international relations and mental geographies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.