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.

The Holodomor in Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 was a result of the collectivization policy of the Soviet government and took approximately 4 million lives. The Holodomor had a profound impact on the entire population of Ukraine. It badly affected the lives of Jews in Kyiv and Ukraine, and it damaged Jewish–gentile relations for many years. The famine occurred not only in rural areas, but also in the cities and towns of Ukraine. The Holodomor provoked a significant migration of Jews from shtetls to the large cities, particularly to Kyiv. Many desperate inhabitants of villages and towns fled to the large cities where they hoped to receive some aid. However, the overcrowded cities could not accommodate this flood of migrants. Anatolii Kuznetsov wrote in Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel that if not for the Holodomor in Ukraine and Stalin’s repressions of the 1930s, the attitude of the Kyiv gentile population toward the Holocaust would perhaps have been different. People had gotten so used to the suffering of others, victims of the famine and political repression, that they remained mainly passive, silent, and indifferent toward the mass execution of Jews in Babi Yar during the Holocaust.

This article raises questions about the relationship between theory and practice, legality and illegality in the late Soviet nationalities policy, and the role played by various branches of power. It focuses on the Veps, an indigenous ethnic minority in the northwest of Russia. In the Brezhnev era, quite a few officials and census takers refused to register the Veps nationality in personal identification documents and during censuses, claiming, incorrectly, that the Veps were not in the official list of nationalities or that they were a people (narodnost'), not a nationality (natsional'nost'), and hence could not be registered as one. The Veps were counted as Russians instead. These bureaucratic practices, widespread in Leningrad and Vologda oblasti, but not in Karelia, contradicted official nationalities policy, passport regulations, and census instructions. It seemed that the Soviet state no longer recognized the Veps as an ethnic community. The article claims that the mass refusal to register the Veps nationality was intentional and directed by the regional authorities. The goal was to accelerate the assimilation of the Veps, a policy that worked well. The official number of Veps decreased extremely rapidly in the 1970 and 1979 censuses, only to recover in 1989, after the manipulations had ended.

This article examines historical positions regarding the question of the small nation-(state) of Albania remaining “in” the larger Ottoman supranational entity and “out” as independent nation-state during the late 19th and early 20th century. It does so mainly, but not only, through the language of political economy (wealth creation and redistribution) as articulated in the thoughts and deeds of three founding intellectual and political figures of the Albanian nation-(state): Ismail Qemali, Fan Noli, and Luigj Gurakuqi. While lacking a clear political-economic perspective for this emerging nation in the late Ottoman period, all the three figures maintained that as an independent, small nation-state, Albania could survive and perhaps thrive if its wealth and national economic development remained anchored within a larger political and economic space. More than Qemali, Gurakuqi, and Noli envisaged a greater state role in the country’s “national economy-building” process. But while Gurakuqi was more of a “nationalist” on wealth creation, Noli sought to pursue a more “radical,” redistributive path to national development.

The article deals with Czech and German nationalist discourses and practices in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as they relate to tourism in the Krkonoše/Riesengebirge, the highest Central European mountain range between the Alps and Scandinavia. It will discuss the discourses developed in relation to mountain tourism and nationalism (metaphors of battlefields, wedges, walls, gates, and bastions), different symbolical cores of mountains, and practices of tourist and nationalist organizations (tourist trails and markings, excursions, the ownership of mountains huts, languages used, memorials, and the construction of roads). It will examine how these discourses and practices changed from the first Czech-German ethnic conflicts in the 1800s until the end of interwar Czechoslovakia. Finally, it will discuss the Czech culture of defeat in the shadow of the Munich Agreement, which meant the occupation of the Giant Mountains by Nazi Germany.

This article focuses on the privately created commemorative practice of getting the official portraits of three former socialist leaders as a tattoo: Nicolae Ceauşescu, Josip Broz Tito, and Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (Stalin). The mnemonic actors who have indulged in this practice after the 1990s contribute to a culture informed by vernacular memorials that conform to neither the official politics of remembrance and its aesthetics nor its content. Correspondingly, this article focuses on the aesthetic, political, and epistemic intricacies of remembering through the inked body. Unlike memorial tattoos that mark the recognition of a group that has suffered the same trauma, the commemorative tattoos analyzed in this article reflect a centrifugal set of identity concerns, ranging from Yugonostalgia to individualized spaces of self-healing and identity affirmation. The argument put forth is that tattoos can act as vernacular commemorations collected into a body archive of nostalgia for the ontological security of the past and “great leadership.” Thus, the overarching question is not how and why people materialize memories through their bodies but rather to what ends the inked body accommodates commemorative representations of former political leaders who are usually depicted in public memory as “unworthy” of commemoration.

This paper examines the controversial music genre rabiz in relation to political and socioeconomic developments in post-Soviet Armenia. Rabiz, an urban folk-pop genre characterized by melismatic singing and “oriental” embellishments, is a ubiquitous soundtrack to everyday life in the country, with lyrics commonly covering romance, male friendship, and family ties. Ethnographic observations suggest that its popularity draws on the affective appeal with which it captures common hardships and aspirations of post-socialist transition. In spite of this, rabiz is almost universally denounced by nationalist intellectuals and liberal citizens for foreign influences, sentimentality, consumerism, and conservatism. While for the cultured classes, the rejection of rabiz as “un-Armenian” is often an integral part of the construction of a virtuous self, the alternative conceptions of performers and fans reveal the polysemy of Armenianness as a moral category.

The 20th century has been a century of political famines, that is, famines directly—and at times willfully—caused by human policies, in war1 and in peacetime. Scores of millions starved to death in times during which there was enough food to feed everyone and the means to transport it where needed.

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.

The first years of Communist rule in Poland profoundly shaped the 45 year political experience of the country until the 1989 democratic breakthrough. These formative years encompassed such historic developments as postwar reconstruction and central economic planning, the emergence of new and the disappearance of old political parties, the heretical notion of a Polish road to socialism but also the advent of high Stalinism. Even with the redrawing of Poland's postwar boundaries and with increasing Communist hegemony over political life, the period between 1945 and 1948 was characterized by considerably more political and ethnic heterogeneity than the decades that followed. A significant and, ultimately, controversial role in the shaping of postwar Poland - in its rebuilding, in its economic program, political configuration, national security organization, and in its minorities policies - was played by Jewish Communists.

One of the most immediate effects of the Russian war against Ukraine was the unprecedented influx of Ukrainian refugees in some countries. This article analyzes temporary protection for Ukrainian refugees in two countries—the Czech Republic and Poland, which represent the countries most exposed to immigration from Ukraine. The authors compare the political and legal response of both countries to the institute of temporary protection to reveal similarities and differences in the scope, tools, and nature of temporary protection, including causes and consequences. Both countries go beyond the minimum standards set in the EU Temporary Protection Directive and differ in their approach to its implementation. The authors claim that although the concept of temporary protection has expanded with the current situation, it allows significant benefits in allowing fast-track integration into the labor market, which aligns with the concept of refugees’ “deservingness.” However, the duration of temporary protection is a major limitation to refugees’ integration due to the emphasis on voluntary return to the country of origin.

Are referendum campaigns involving issues about sovereignty more likely to succeed if framed in a positive rather than a negative way? We ran a survey on a hypothetical referendum on a peace agreement between Serbia and Kosovo to answer this question, and we experimentally simulated both positive and negative frames. We found that the positive campaign frame, i.e. one that contains an invitation to support a lasting peace in the Balkans, economic prosperity, Serbia’s path to EU integration, and the protection of the Serbian population and cultural heritage in Kosovo, is more appealing than the negative one, which focuses on avoiding the risk of failure. Our finding contradicts previous works that relied on the prospect theory to argue that negatively framed messages can attract more attention because people try to avoid adverse outcomes. To explain our findings, we argue that positive referendum campaigns are more effective than negative ones when the reference point is low due to attributive framing.

This article explores the national identity argument in unsettled times by using the COVID-19 pandemic as a test case. It uses a longitudinal survey among Jewish Israelis to examine whether the pandemic influenced levels of national identity and solidarity and whether it altered their relationship. The findings indicate a clear reduction in levels of solidarity, national attachment, and national chauvinism over time. They also show that the positive connection between national attachment and solidarity grew stronger, while the connection between national chauvinism and solidarity became weaker and insignificant. These findings provide complex evidence for the national identity argument.