SUMMARY:

The author addresses the situation in humanities and social sciences in the former Soviet Union and Slavic studies in Japan. According to the author, in both cases one can discern the impact of relative self-isolation of scholarly communities. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union new vistas opened for Slavic Studies in Japan due to new economic opportunities and political conditions in the former Soviet republics and a relatively equal starting positions of different Slavic studies schools (especially in political sciences). At the same time, contacts among scholars in the US, Japan and Western Europe have been weakened; the same fate befell contacts among scholars in different CIS republics. As a result, only segments of the former USSR scholarly community have ties with segments of international scholarly communities. The future, according to the author, lies in the desirable and unavoidable emergence of multipolar networks among researchers across national boundaries.