Russian publicists and scholars have always been concerned with the question of their country's cultural and political self-definition and development path. These discourses were played out even before the Soviet era, continued to smolder under the surface in the USSR, and emerged openly again with glasnost. For one thing, the Gorbachev and Yeltsin eras, often described in the press as a new "time of turmoil," were characterized by extensive civil liberties. On the other hand, the chaos of this period entailed a deep loss of identity, which prepared the ground for controversies about a political reorientation. In her study, Eva Zabka organizes and interprets the debates that took place in the Soviet and Russian print media during the liberalization and democratization phase between 1985 and 2000. The ed.