Empire depends not only upon the strength of the center but upon compliant behavior in the periphery, and the nature of interactions between center and periphery. Each of these three variables is changing rapidly in the former Soviet empire.

The Republic of Buryatia, along with 12 other former Soviet states during the same year, had declared its sovereignty no later than 8 October 1990. This did not actually mean a declaration of independence. Rather, this step was taken to urge the central government to acknowledge Buryatia as a free and equal partner at the political level. Boris Yeltsin, during his time as Russian president, did much to support this claim by propagating a vision of a post-Soviet Russia as a union of free peoples with equal rights. The central government in Moscow therefore recognized the existence of relatively autonomous regions. This was also done to respond to the interests of the different ethnic groups, which became increasingly important in the political sphere.

For nearly a century, the contrast between a cultural and a political form of nationalism has been upheld. In the early twentieth century, Fredrich Meinecke made a distinction between the political nation, or Staatsnation, based on a common political history and a shared constitution, and the cultural nation, Kulturnation, based on a shared cultural heritage. The most important distinction between the two is that while membership in the former is voluntary, membership in the cultural nation is a matter not of choice, but of common objective identity. Meinecke maintained that political nationalism derived from the spirit of 1789, i.e. from the idea of the self-determination and sovereignty of the nation. Cultural nationalism, in contrast, was a striving for national individuality, characteristic of anti-Enlightenment German thought.

At the end of 1928 Matvyi Iavorskyi, head of historical studies in the Ukrainian Institute of Marxism-Leninism and hitherto considered a sort of court historian of Ukrainian communism, was attacked for allegedly committing “nationalistic deviations” in interpreting Ukrainian history. Iavorskyi was in no sense a “dissident” like Oleksander Shumskyi or Mykola Khvylovyi; he never, so far as is known, questioned the official Party line. Rather, he was a close associate of Mykola Skrypnyk, the political strongman of the Soviet Ukrainian regime, and the hue and cry raised against “Iavorskyism” in historial scholarship was actually an indirect attack upon Skrypnyk. It had the distinction of being the first such attack; it would not be the last.

Literature in many languages (documentary, monographic, memoir-like and periodical) is abundant on the sovietization of Czechoslovakia, as are the reasons advanced for it. Some observers have argued that the Soviet takeover of the country stemmed from an excessive preoccupation with Panslavism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by a few Czech and Slovak intellectuals, politicians, writers and poets and their uncritical affection and fascination for everything Russian and Soviet. Others have attributed the drawing of Czechoslovakia into the Soviet orbit to Franco-British appeasement of Hitler's imperial ambitions during the September 1938, Munich crisis. At Munich, Czechoslovakia lost its sovereignty and territory, France its honor, England its respect and trust; and the Soviet Union, by its abstract offer to aid Czechoslovakia (without detailing how or in what form the assistance would come) gained admiration. Still others have pinned the blame for the sovietization of Czechoslovakia on machinations by top leaders of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, who, as obedient tools of Moscow, supported Soviet geopolitical designs on Czechoslovakia, who sought and received political asylum in the USSR during World War II, and who returned to Czechoslovakia with the victorious Soviet armed forces at the end of World War II as high-ranking members of the Soviet establishment. Finally, there are some who maintain that the sovietization of Czechoslovakia commenced with the 25 February 1948, Communist coup, followed by the tragic death of Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk on 10 March 1948, and the replacement, on 7 June 1948, of President Eduard Beneš by the Moscow-trained, loyal Kremlin servant Klement Gottwald.

Since the end of World War II more than one million citizens of the USSR have emigrated to the West in a unique and unprecedented movement today called the “Third Soviet Emigration.” In contrast to two earlier flights of refugees from the Revolution and from World War II, the Third Emigration is a voluntary, legally-sanctioned process involving mainly three nationalities—Jews, ethnic Germans, and Armenians. The origin of the exodus goes back to the early postwar years, but the vast majority of the emigrants have left since 1971, when the Soviet government relaxed its historic antipathy to free movement by its citizens.

The determination of the Estonian people and the support of Russian democratic forces made Estonia's statehood possible again. But the crisis in society has not yet been overcome. Estonia's further development can go on undisturbed only when there is stability in national relations, taking into consideration the interests and rights of all the groups of society, and people's safety and domestic tranquility is secured. Today, Estonia's prime goal is to become integrated once again into Europe. Experience has already shown that it is possible to join Europe's current movement towards unity only with a modern, civilized, democratic and stable society. This is how EDLP sees the future Estonia, and it is why EDLP is against all political steps that might endanger democracy, political and economic rights and freedoms, restrict a person's or society's free development, or endanger the stability and domestic peace. EDLP is categorically against all kind of extremism in the political sphere and is intolerant of discrimination aimed against political views. Without opposition there is no democracy. The majority may be right, but the minority has the right to its views, the right to express and protect those views freely—this is the firm conviction of the EDLP.

With 20,251 square kilometers, Slovenia has a little less than two million inhabitants. In the last thirty-five years, national productivity has risen on average by 5.2% annually (though it stagnated in the eighties and diminished fast in 1990 and 1991), and per inhabitant, rose 0.7% annually. At approximately 6,000 dollars, per capita productivity is twice as high as the Yugoslav average and eight times higher than per capita productivity in less developed Kosovo. With a 47% economically active population, 9% agricultural population, more than 99% literacy, 30% expenditure on food, and 0.28 vehicles and 0.32 telephones per inhabitant, Slovenia ranks among the rich Eastern European countries.

Gypsies are one of the most famous though least known national minorities, representatives of which can be found in many countries. Several works have been written about them but no analysis has yet been made of the interrelationship between Gypsies and the nationalities among whom they live. An analysis of this kind is timely in that it would give governments a means with which to alleviate ethnic tensions by amending their present faulty nationality minority policies.

The author of this article has recently made a detailed sociological study by means of a lengthy questionnaire of the attitudes of various nationality groups towards each other in Ukraine. Included in it are questions either directly or indirectly relating to the Gypsies. This ethnic group, despite its relatively small size, is well known throughout Ukraine. Gypsies stand out from the rest of the population by their way of life and by their appearance; as a rule, they speak their own language, even though they know the languages of other nationalities. Most of the population of Ukraine comes in contact with Gypsies, though most often with their worst representatives (swindlers, extortionists, etc.). They meet these Gypsies in the most populous places—at railroad stations, outside large stores, and in marketplaces.

In April 1994, the Croatian government of the late Franjo Tudjman demanded that all “non white” UN troops be removed from Croatia, claiming that only “first-world troops” were sufficiently sensitized to Croatia's problems. In Western circles, however, it was Tudjman's Serbian counterpart, Slobodan Milosevic, who was often portrayed as a racist. Ramet, for example, argues that “Milosevic built his power on a foundation of hatred and xenophobia …”; Zimmermann refers to “the ethnic hatred sown by Milosevic and his ilk …”; and Duncan and Holman compare Milosevic to Russia's Vladimir Zhirinovsky, claiming that the latter's “blatant appeals to racism bear a striking resemblance to those of Milosevic's Serbia.” For her part, Madeleine Albright, speaking on national television as US Secretary of State in February 2000, described Milosevic as a man “who decides that if you are not of his ethnic group, you don't have a right to exist.”

The final declaration of the Conference of Security and Cooperation in Europe has affirmed the duty of the various signatory states to observe the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief for all without distinction to race, language or religion.

Among the numerous relations between the rulers of the Imperial Russia and the USSR on the one hand, and Georgia on the other, the question of national self-determination deserves a position of a paramount importance. An adequate treatment of this perplexing topic requires a broader theoretical framework dealing with nationalism in general and its historical significance in particular.

Tackling the role of state symbols in negotiating national identity and political development, this research focuses on Belarus where the alternative white-red-white flag became instrumental in protests against the dominant political discourse. Since 1995, oppositional mass media have been reporting about cases of this tricolor being erected in hard-to-reach and/or politically sensitive places. These actions were mainly attributed to some “Miron,” whose identity remained concealed and served as a simulacrum of a national superhero in non-conformist discourse. The image of Miron immediately acquired multiple functions: condemning the Soviet colonial past, struggling for the European future, and creating a nation-state rather than the Russian-speaking civil-state of Belarus. Yet, first and foremost, Miron became a means for contesting the authority of the president who has been in power since 1994. Concentrating on the methods employed for the construction of the counter-hegemonic fakelore project of Miron and its aims, this article explores the vernacular response to its creation.

Popular protest, which repeatedly occurred in Communist regimes, turned into massive mobilizational waves in the late Communist period. Why did some protests result in state cooptation and particularist nationalism (Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union), and others in state-society polarization (Poland) and protest containment (China), when these states shared important historical, political, and institutional legacies? Political regimes with origins in indigenous popularly-based revolutionary movements are more resilient to popular protests and other major crises than other authoritarian regimes. Protracted ideological armed struggle largely overlaps with broader patriotic causes, such as liberation wars or struggles against foreign intervention. The revolutionary regimes thus acquire patriotic credentials, while boundaries between partisan and patriotic identities become blurred, which strengthens their elite unity and popular base. Popular protests thus facilitate a complex political game of old and new actors that may result in regime survival or transformation. In other regimes, popular unrest tends to produce state-society polarization and, ultimately, regime delegitimation and breakdown. Popular contention in complex multinational institutional settings, if there is no major external threat, highlights old and triggers new conflicts along these structural and institutional divides and, where dual political identities prevail, facilitates identity shifts in particularist direction.