Europe-Asia Studies

• 1. Introduction

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  Europe-Asia Studies is a peer-reviewed academic journal that has been tracking political, economic, and social life across the former Soviet bloc for more than seven decades. It began in 1949 under a different name, survived the collapse of the empire it was built to study, and quietly reinvented itself in 1993 to follow the countries that emerged from that wreckage. The questions it raises are immediate: what does it take for a scholarly journal to outlast the political order that created its subject matter? And how do researchers today reach back through 76 volumes of that history?

• 2. From Soviet Studies to Europe-Asia

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  Soviet Studies launched in 1949, when the Cold War was still finding its shape. For 44 volumes across four decades, the journal tracked a superstate that most Western scholars could observe only from a distance. Then, in 1992, the Soviet Union dissolved. The journal had one volume left under its old name before Routledge and the Institute of Central and East European Studies at the University of Glasgow made a deliberate decision: rather than retire the publication, they renamed it. Beginning with volume 45 in 1993, Soviet Studies became Europe-Asia Studies. The new title signaled a wider ambition, following not just the ghost of the USSR but the dozen-plus successor states it left behind, along with the broader former Soviet bloc and their histories in the 20th century.

• 3. Who Publishes It and Why It Matters

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  Routledge publishes the journal 10 times a year, on behalf of the Institute of Central and East European Studies at the University of Glasgow. That institutional home gives the journal a specific academic anchor in British scholarship on post-Soviet affairs. The subject range is deliberately broad: political affairs, economic change, and social transformation across countries that were once satellites or republics of the Soviet system. Researchers drawing on those 76 volumes published between 1949 and 2024 have access to a continuous record that predates most living memory of the Soviet era.

• 4. Access and the Archive

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  JSTOR holds the full run from 1949 to 2016, available by subscription with a 7-year moving wall that updates annually. That moving wall means the most recent years stay off JSTOR as they roll forward, keeping recent scholarship behind a shorter paywall window. For the complete collection, Taylor & Francis provides access to all 76 volumes from 1949 through 2024. The existence of both Soviet Studies and Europe-Asia Studies as a unified online archive means that a researcher can trace a single theme, say the politics of Central Asia, from Cold War-era dispatches through the post-Soviet present without leaving the same publication's back issues.