This article examines aspects of the history of socialist Yugoslavia’s contribution to creating a transnational Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) culture. It does so by analyzing cultural diplomacy on the Yugoslav cultural and political scene between the 1950s and 1980s. The cultural diplomacy of Yugoslavia and its nonaligned partners is seen as a form of political agency, paralleling and supplementing larger activities of forming economic and political cooperation in the Global South. Yugoslavia’s role in building NAM culture was instrumental in nurturing nascent transnationalism, which was born out of anti-colonial movements following World War II. Cultural events, bilateral agreements, and cultural institutions were used to complement Yugoslav participation in an anti-colonial, anti-capitalist struggle; they promoted NAM ideals and sought to create transcultural networks that would counter Western cultural hegemony. Such examples of solidarity were based in a modernist cultural ethos, but espoused political, social, and cultural forms that were indigenous to various NAM countries. For Yugoslavia, nonaligned modernism and transnationalism solidified the country’s transition from a hardline, Soviet-style state to a more open, humanist-socialist one. The history of transnational collaboration, examined through the narrative of cultural work, is an example of Yugoslav attempts at building political agency and international cooperation through the promotion of nonaligned ideals.

In February 1944, as the victorious Red Army was preparing to clear the Nazi German forces from the rest of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, a surprise official announcement stunned the population. The radio and the newspapers announced amendments to the Soviet constitution, which would enable the union republics to establish their own armies and maintain diplomatic relations with foreign states. While the Kremlin did not elaborate on the reasons for such a reform, Radianska Ukraina, the republic's official newspaper, proceeded to hail the announcement as “a new step in Ukrainian state building.” Waxing lyrical, the paper wrote that “every son and every daughter of Ukraine” swelled with national pride upon learning of the new rights that had been granted to their republic. In reality, the public was confused. In Ukraine's capital, Kiev, the secret police recorded details of rumors to the effect that the USA and Great Britain had forced this reform on Stalin and that Russians living in Ukraine would be forced to assimilate or to leave the republic. Even some party-appointed propagandists erred in explaining that the change was necessitated by the fact that Ukraine's “borders have widened and [it] will become an independent state.”

Romanian historiography since 1944 has accurately reflected the political realities that have faced the Romanian Communist Party both its relations with the Soviet Union and its plans for the “socialist transformation” of Romania. Since the Romanian communists have based their claims to legitimacy on historical rather than on ideological considerations from as early as the “liberation of Romania from fascism,” which occurred on August 23, 1944, the essential task of Romanian historiography has been to provide a “scientific basis” for validating the varying claims advanced by leaders of the Romanian communist movement in search of legitimacy.

A year ago it was still possible to review events within the regional confines of Transcaucasia. The three republics constituted a logical sub-unit of the Soviet Union. Subsequent events, however, no longer permit such a tidy delineation. A revolution is taking place: the Raspad, or Great Collapse, of which the dissolution of the USSR was but the beginning of a major political reshufflement throughout Eurasia, a continuing process that is still playing itself out in the entire Caucasian region. The demise of the trans-continental Soviet empire has left the three Transcaucasian successor states separated by international borders from the Russian Federation, Iran, and Turkey as well as from one another. Nevertheless, the dynamics of ethnic-fueled fragmentation, which initially helped bring down the power of Moscow, continues to gnaw away in defiance of any artificial frontiers, most of which cut through ethnic communities. Revisionist ethnic activities thrive on either sides of frontiers, especially those shared by Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Iran, and the Russian Federation, thereby forcing one to consider the whole of Caucasia as the proper area of evaluation for the crucial year 1991-2. North and south of the mountainous divide, ethnic-driven politics proves all too clearly that the energies of the Raspad are anything but spent.

The Selkups, a linguistic community known as Ostyak Samoyeds until the middle of the twentieth century, currently exist in two separate territorial groups in the regions of west-central and northwestern Siberia. In all, 3,612 people identified themselves as Selkups in the last Soviet census of 1989. Since there is great divergence in dialects among the various groups, some specialists suggest classifying them as three different languages: Northern, Central, and Southern Selkup. Here the Selkups of Tomsk province, who speak the central and southern dialects, will be referred to collectively as Southern Selkups.

In the eighteenth century, prior to the partitioning of the Polish Commonwealth by its neighbors, the Polish szlachta or gentry constituted the Polish “nation.” Then, of course, the term did not have an ethnic connotation but rather a political one: the gentry alone had all the rights that came with full citizenship in the Polish state. The existence of such a privileged ruling class or estate was not uncommon in Europe. The szlachta, however, differed in two important respects from the gentry of most other European states. First of all, the Polish gentry included an unusually large portion of the total population: 9–10 per cent (25 per cent of the Polish-speaking population). Secondly, in theory all members of the szlachta had equal political rights whether they were magnates or completely landless. Consequently, when in the nineteenth century economic forces gradually transformed Polish society from a feudal social structure into a more modern one, individuals of gentry origin acted as a leaven bringing their consciousness of membership in the nation to the new classes of society that they joined. Some of the szlachta, influenced by the Enlightenment and the “Democratic Revolution” as well as by the obvious need for internal reform, sought to broaden the concept of the nation to include the other social classes even before Poland lost its independence. They, however, still conceived of the nation in terms of citizenship in the state. It is therefore ironic that this social broadening of the concept of the Polish nation actually occurred in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the Polish state did not exist.

In world history, parts of Western Central Asia (see the previous map) remained colonies of an imperialist Russia and political system for nearly two centuries before the 1990s. Eastern Central Asia, long dominated by Chinese overlords, continues in deep subordination today. These political realities color and underpin much of the writing and publication that appears in the present Annotated Bibliography.

The conventional approach to describing ethno-cultural relations in a particular nation-state is in terms of the majority/minority dichotomy, that is, a representation of a society as consisting of the core nation and a minority or number of minorities alongside it. The minorities are usually of different ethnic origin, possess distinct linguistic-cultural characteristics and tend to be represented as groups that, owing to their minority status, are discriminated against. This approach has been adopted in Ukraine where in official discourse and state documents the core nation co-exists with national minorities. Ethno-cultural diversity is addressed by policy makers and the academic community, most often in terms of “national minorities,” “protection of minority rights,” “provision of schooling for minorities” and so forth. Ukrainian scholars and policy makers tend to use the same concepts as their counterparts in the West, albeit often modifying them to Ukrainian circumstances. However, as will be argued, this dichotomous treatment of the titular majority and the minority is ill-suited to Ukraine's circumstances as even the very concept of “minority” is unclear owing to the blurred sense of identity amongst many Ukrainians and Russians.

The genesis of “National Communism” is often traced to the Yugoslav dictator Tito, but in reality the only novel aspect about Titoism is that it has succeeded. The ideology of National Communism was manifested in Ukraine in the early 1920's and its pre-eminent leader was Mykola O. Skrypnyk. It was a reaction to the strong centrist policies of the Bolshevik Party, which had many leaders who were committed to a belief in Russian superiority, a belief which was carried over from the Tsarist regime. At the Eighth Party Congress in 1919, Lenin remarked: “Scratch many a Communist and you will find a Great Russian chauvinist.” The traditionalist utterances made by several highly placed Bolsheviks during the first years of the Revolution were certainly indiscrete. Thus did George Piatakov, a Russian Communist, tell a meeting of the Party held in Kyiv on June 17, 1917:

The multi-national composition of the interwar Polish state was one of its most serious domestic problems. The established supremacy of the Poles in all phases of national life provoked bitter resentment from most of the country's non-Polish inhabitants, who compromised over one-third of its total population. When the Polish government consistently obstructed the attempts of these ethno-religious minorities to preserve and develop their cultural identities, assure their economic well-being, and participate fully in political life, the affected groups responded with a resistance to state authority that intensified with the passing of the two decades of Polish independence. The relationship of the government to a substantial proportion of its citizens had so deteriorated that, on the eve of World War II, a virtual condition of “undeclared warfare” existed betwen the Polish state and the leading minorities. Consequently, Warsaw could not count on any meaningful support from the Ukrainians, Belorussians, or Germans residing within its borders when the Nazi attack fell on September 1, 1939, and the Soviet assault followed on September 17. Unfortunately for these three peoples, the war brought them monumental suffering and an even crueler fate than they had endured under the Polish Republic.

From the historical and scholarly perspective, Russian-Ukrainian relations occupy a unique niche in inter-ethnic relations, as they are framed by long-standing “fraternal rivalry,” imperial and colonial experience, and a complex understanding of identity, which are still at work today. Although the phenomenon has been the subject of numerous studies, little has been done to explore their encounter in emigration. The scope of these works has been limited to examining the relations between these two groups in the familiar territory of their homelands (i.e. either in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, or in the period following the dissolution of the Soviet Union), and scholars have usually not made a strict delimitation between the concepts of the homeland and hostland. But certainly, the Russian–Ukrainian encounter in emigration in the interwar period created its own discourse, which differed from the pre-revolutionary and Soviet discourses. Its main features are (1) further alienation and a feeling of difference between the two groups; (2) a growing metaphysical view of the homeland, accompanied by ethno-symbolic manifestations of national identity; and (3) a sense of mission to preserve their culture and identity from erosion engineered by the Bolsheviks.

Basically this question comes down to asking: Will the economy or the economic situation be of any help in salvaging the Union? Along the way to answering that, I want to address the question of what is the relationship between economic reform and republican integration from the perspective of the Center and from the perspective of economics.