Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the people of its former republics have witnessed their return to unpredictable future. The Soviet vision of a preordained future has been replaced by a feeling of limitlessness of individual and collective endeavors. The new societies faced tectonic transformations, and they needed to normalize political competition, also through finding new conceptual dictionary. One of such dictionary’s concepts was Transition. Borrowed from postcolonial studies of 1970-80ies, this term was applied for de- and pre-scription of the post-Soviet social reality. In many ways, this concept defined scholarly and political/ideological visions of these transformations, and it heavily influenced state- and nation-building strategies in early 1990ies. In my report I shall analyze how these scholarly and ideological visions, on one side, and socio-political realities, on the other side, were changing in the recent thirty years.