The Slavic and Baltic Division of the New York Public Library (NYPL) possesses a valuable collection of pamphlets, books and journals which numbers approximately three thousand items in various languages of the Eurasian nationalities. Bibliographical records of the collection were completed in the 1960s by Edward Allworth, Sakine Berengian, David Nissman and Azamat Altay. Each record contains bibliographic information in original script or in transliteration and a short annotation in English.

The literature on collective memories in the Baltic states often stresses the irreconcilable division between Russian and Baltic official interpretations of the Second World War. This paper seeks to challenge this popular notion of two polemic collective memories – “Latvian” and “Russian”. While there is evidence that Latvia's Russian-speakers are heavily influenced by Russian cultural and political discourses, I will argue that the actual positions taken up by Russian-speakers are more nuanced than a crude Latvian–Russian dichotomy would suggest.

Based on survey data collected at the site of the 2011 Victory Day celebrations in Riga, this paper points to the germane existence of a partial “democratization of history” among Latvia's Russian-speakers, typified by an increasing willingness to countenance and take stock of alternative views of history. Through an examination of the data it will be argued that such tentative steps towards a democratization of history are most visible among the younger cohort of Russian-speakers, whose collective memory-myths have been tempered by their dual habitation of the Latvian, as well as Russian, mythscapes. In order to more fully understand this process both bottom-up and top-down pressures will be examined.

The politics of language identity have figured heavily in the history of the people of the Republic of Moldova. Indeed the region's status as a province of Russia, Romania, and then the Soviet Union over the past 200 years has consistently been justified and, at least partially, manipulated on the basis of language issues. At the center of these struggles over language and power has been the linguistic and cultural identity of the region's autochthonous ethnicity and current demographic majority, the Moldovans. In dispute is the degree to which these Moldovans are culturally, historically, and linguistically related to the other Moldovans and Romanians across the Prut River in Romania. Under imperial Russia from 1812 to 1918 and Soviet Russia from 1944 to 1991, a proto-Moldovan identity that eschewed connections to Romania and emphasized contact with Slavic peoples was promoted in the region. Meanwhile, experts from Romania and the West have regularly argued that the eastern Moldovans are indistinguishable, historically, culturally, and linguistically, from their Romanian cousins.

It is estimated that, in 1913, less than 500,000 Muslims lived in the regions ruled by Greece and around 800,000 Muslims in those areas which were under the authority of the Bulgarian state. In the aftermath of the 1923 obligatory Greco-Turkish population exchange the number of Muslims in Greece reduced to approximately 200,000, of which around 180,000 lived in the region of Western Thrace and 20–25,000 Albanian-speaking Muslims, known as Çams, in Epirus and Greek South-West Macedonia. In the same period, the number of Muslims in Bulgaria was between 800,000 and one million people. Meanwhile, during the two Balkan and the First World Wars a hardly definable number of Muslims lost their lives due to starvation, disease, massacres and physical destruction caused by the military and paramilitary troops of the two Balkan states, as well as due to voluntary and forced migration to areas controlled by the Ottoman Empire.

The radical right in the Ukrainian political spectrum is dominated by three movements—the Nationalist Union Ukrainian State Independence (DSU), the Ukrainian National Assembly (UNA, formerly the Ukrainian Inter-Party Assembly, UMPA) and the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists (KUN). The UNA is dominated by the highly secretive Ukrainian Nationalist Union (UNS) which grew out of the nationalist wing of the Association of Independent Ukrainian Youth (SNUM). The KUN was launched in 1992 in Ukraine as the overt arm of the émigré Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists-Bandera faction (known commonly as OUN revolutionaries, or OUNr).

Since the 5 October revolution that formally ushered Serbia into a democratic era, political commentators, scholars, civic activists and others have watched the country for signs of resurgent nationalism. Many perceived the primary threat to the new democratic order as the persistence of nationalism, particularly in the years after the 2003 assassination of Zoran Djindjić. Such nationalism, forged in the 1980s and 1990s, was subject to eruptions among unsavory politicians, pensioners, Mafiosi and denizens of Belgrade's suburbs and Serbia's “backward” countryside. The problem underlying this model of resurgent nationalism is that it assumes, and simultaneously constructs, nationalism as a static and unchanging arrangement of ideological and social factors that flare up and die down in response to political stimuli—the arrest of indicted war criminals, the outrageous rhetoric of populist politicians, negotiations over the status of Kosovo, or high-stakes sporting events. While there is no question that such events create discursive space for nationalist, sexist and racist agendas, the flare-up model presents a dangerous simplification of how nationalisms work.

The dispute between Greece and the newly formed state referred to as the “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” that emerged out of the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991 was a major source of instability in the Western Balkans for more than 25 years. It was resolved through negotiations between Athens and Skopje, mediated by the United Nations, resulting in the Prespa (or Prespes) Agreement, which was signed on June 17, 2018, and ratified by both parliaments amid controversy in their countries. The underlying issues involved deeply held and differing views relating to national identity, history, and the future of the region, which were resolved through a change in the name of the new state and various agreements as to identity issues. The author, the United Nations mediator in the dispute for 20 years and previously the United States presidential envoy with reference to the dispute, describes the basis of the dispute, the positions of the parties, and the factors that led to a successful resolution.

The Pussy Riot story is clearly a story the West wanted to hear. Western journalists, politicians, and celebrities were unanimously inspired by the youthfulness and rebellion of courageous Russian feminists. Their life experience perfectly resonates with the core of these young women's messages. For Russians, however, even for those who share the most liberal values, it is not so simple. Public polls and several months of heated debates have shown that virtually everyone in this deeply conservative country has struggled to make sense of the Pussy Riot performance. So, what do Westerners not understand about Russia and what are the problems of translating feminism(s) into different cultural contexts? How does feminist protest deprived of its roots function here, and why do women in Russia not understand that Pussy Riot's story personally concerns all of them? This essay outlines the difference between Russian and Western readings of the Pussy Riot performance and, using the case of public response in Russia, contemplates the reasons for the failure of feminism in this part of the world.

The centenary year of the Armenian genocide witnessed an escalation in cultural production and both political and academic focus. This paper looks at some of the sites and spaces, physical and discursive, in which the centenary was marked. In particular, it seeks to assess how the centenary has challenged and possibly altered the context within which we approach the genocide and its continuing legacies. The paper is positioned in the diasporic space – while recognizing that this is fluid and embodies transnational sites between “homelands” in the form of Armenia and Turkey, and “host states” where diaspora communities have resided (at least) since the genocide, in effect their homes. This paper attempts to pick out some of the themes apparent in the discourse and in the activities during 2015, from the perspective of Armenian diasporan actors, and is based on the author's observations and participation in centenary events in the USA, Lebanon, Turkey, Switzerland, and the UK, as well as interviews with participants and organizers.

Parties of ethnic minorities are flourishing in a large number of ethnically divided democracies. While academic research has studied their emergence and success, we know little about intra-group party competition. This paper discusses the reasons for intra-group political plurality, with a focus on intra-party conflict and intra-group party competition: it explains the political orientation of ethnic minority parties and their intra-group challengers as a consequence of the inclusion of minority parties into government. The inclusion of minority parties into national governments produces an inherent conflict between pragmatic office-seekers and radical partisans. In minority parties that have governmental responsibilities, the pragmatist view overwhelms, while in those parties in opposition, radical voices dominate. The formation of two intra-Hungarian challenger parties in Romania and in Slovakia in 2007 and 2009 represents two very similar cases, which appear to be in line with our hypotheses.

Is an imagined democracy more important than actual democracy for nation-building purposes? After 20 years of independence, Central Asian countries present a mixed bag of strong and weak states, consolidated and fragmented nations. The equation of nation and state and the construction of genuine nation states remains an elusive goal in all of post-Soviet Central Asia. This paper examines the role that electoral politics has played in nation-state formation. We argue that electoral processes have been central to attempted nation-state building processes as part of efforts to legitimize authoritarian regimes; paradoxically in those few countries where (for brief periods) partial democratization actually occurred, elections contributed, at least in the short term, to nation-state fragmentation.

This article presents a study of Islamic religious symbols involved in maintaining the special status of the Tatars in post-Soviet Tatarstan. It explores how regional ethnic elites in Tatarstan use Islam (the discourse of the history of Islam in the region and Islamic symbols in the representation of the region) as a tool for legitimizing their privileged positions in the region. In addition, the article examines how Islamic culture enters into the everyday life and public space of the region, thereby, in a sense enforcing social borders between different ethnic groups. This study has two aims: a theoretical analysis of religious symbols’ role in the struggle for status in the ethnic hierarchy and the practical application of the developed theoretical framework to the case of post-Soviet Tatarstan. The author concludes that after the system of ethnic federalism was abolished in Russia, Tatars have retained their special status by appealing to Islam.

The article explores the “fear of Islam” through a specific series of political debates about Islam and the future of the Greek-Orthodox national identity. The analysis is based on the method of qualitative content analysis, which makes use of thematic categories and draws on the proceedings of the Greek parliament. The main questions the article will try to address are: How have Greek political parties reacted to public demand for the construction of a mosque? What have been the rhetorical tropes they use? How have they capitalized on current and old fears about Islam? What have been the implications of this discourse on state policies toward Islam? Have there been any differences in this discourse over time? The analysis highlights the role of historical interpretations of Greek national identity and contemporary problems related to new waves of migration due to Greece's place on the border with Turkey and with the broader Islamic world.

In September 1989, speaking to the Republican Strike Committee of the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR), Erkin Nurzhanovich Auel'bekov, assistant chairman of the All-Union Soviet of Nationalities, asked a question of great importance to Soviet citizens in the increasingly fragile union: “Is there such a thing as a Soviet narod (people), or is this just an empty fiction?” For Auel'bekov and the assembled strike committee, the answer was not in doubt. “Certainly for all of us here,” he continued, “there is such a narod. There is a passport, there are Soviet people (sovetskie liudi) and, moreover, there is justification for thinking that this is the most important achievement of the past seventy years of Soviet power.” Soviet patriots, they agreed, needed to protect this narod from the process of “nationalization” that threatened the Soviet Union and its constituent people both locally in Moldova and more broadly in the union in general. The protection of this achievement in Soviet nation building became the mission of an “internationalist' ” movement as it moved from a strike campaign to stop language laws in 1989 to an election campaign in 1990. The political strike of 1989 had achieved none of its immediate goals and as internationalist activists moved into the second phase of the conflict over the future of Moldova they invoked imperiled Soviet achievements as they first attempted to take the Moldovan government through the ballot box, and failing at that, to take the eastern region of Transnistria out of Moldova.

This article assesses the analytical value of the “Kohn dichotomy” – the notion that there are two types of nationalism, resting on civic values in the West and on ethnic values outside the West. It begins by outlining the intellectual history of this dichotomy since its origin in the 1860s and by analyzing its main features. It contrasts the state traditions of Central and Eastern Europe and Western Europe in three areas: the geopolitical evolution of the state, the state's perspective on its own population as reflected in efforts to measure “ethnic nationality” through such instruments as the population census, and divergences in citizenship law. It shows that data from recent programs of comparative survey research, and analysis of nationalist ideology, highlight the variety of forms that nationalism may take in the two parts of Europe. The article concludes that the “ethnic–civic” dichotomy is valuable as an ideal type with the capacity to shed light on the nature of ethnic affiliation, not as a categorical classification system. Different ethnonational groups comprise mixtures of people who use a combination of “ethnic” and “civic” reference points; they do not coincide with global territorial zones that may be identified with any level of clarity.

The article dwells upon the use of the symbol of the “Motherland” in the legitimation and delegitimation of power. The Motherland symbolizes the matters that are essential for legitimacy-seeking: the unity of Russia, its territory and sacredness of its borders, the most important events of its history, the “authentic Russianness,” and multi-ethnic peace in the country. The author argues that the Motherland serves as an important factor of the legitimation of power in contemporary Russia, which allows the authorities to have high popularity both in domestic and foreign policies. This symbol is also actively exploited by the opposition; one mode of the delegitimation of power through using the symbol of Motherland (the “populist” mode) implies the symbolic struggle for possessing this symbol, or for the right to speak on behalf of the Motherland, while another one (the “liberal” mode) implies the desacralization of the “Motherland” and deconstruction of the practices of employing the symbol by the authorities.

This article proposes to look afresh at the legacies of communism in urban spaces in post-1989 Poland. Specifically, it investigates the fate of Red Army monuments and explores how these public spaces have been used in the multifaceted and multileveled process of post-communist identity formation. The article suggests that Red Army monuments constitute sites for the articulation of new narratives about the country's past and future which are no longer grounded in the fundamental division between “us” (the nation) and “them” (the supporters of communism) and which are far from being fixed in the binary opposition of the banished and the embraced past. The reorganization of public memory space does not only involve contesting the Soviet past or affirming independence traditions but is rather the outcome of multilayered processes rooted in particularities of time and space. Moreover, the article argues that the dichotomy “liberator versus occupier,” often employed as a viable analytical tool by scholars investigating the post-communist memorial landscape, impedes our understanding of the role played by Soviet war memorials in the process of re-imagining national and local communities in post-1989 Eastern Europe.

Since the Rose Revolution (2003), Georgia has encountered an unprecedented scale of institutional reforms concomitant with the rise of American and European involvement in the “democratization” process. Various scholars have suggested that Georgian nationalism developed from an ethno-cultural basis to a more civic/liberal orientation after the Rose Revolution. This paper analyzes Georgian nationalism under President Mikheil Saakashvili to demonstrate the significant divergence between political rhetoric on national identity, the selection of symbols, and state policy toward the Georgian Orthodox Church versus state policy toward ethnic minorities. The aim of this article is to examine the at times conflicting conceptions of national identity as reflected in the public policies of Saakashvili's government since the Rose Revolution. It attempts to problematize the typologies of nationalism when applied to the Georgian context and suggests conceptualizing the state-driven nationalism of the post-Rose Revolution government as “hybrid nationalism” as opposed to civic or ethno-cultural.

Kazakhstan has experienced more powerful pressures of migration unlike any other republic of the former Soviet Union. An especially great number of immigrants came to Kazakhstan during the Soviet period. Many peoples of the former Soviet Union, often against their wishes, took up residence in the republic. The recent situation in Kazakhstan is characterized by a further intensification of migratory processes. Their complicated character, both in the past and today, has, in many aspects, influenced the present-day problems of the republic.

Among the most pressing tasks confronting leaders of the Central Asian states is the reconciliation of their desire to expedite legitimation of rule by reifying titular cultural paradigms with the need to construct inclusive civic modes of national self-conception. Kazakhstan is perhaps the best example from the region wherein the construction of a multicultural, inclusive homeland concept is essential to the future of the state. The poignancy of Kazakhstan's situation relates to the fact that its population consists of nearly equal numbers of titular and non-titular peoples, often living compactly in different regions of the state. Large-scale migration of predominately European ethnic minorities from Kazakhstan's territory since the late Soviet period has coupled with high birth rates among ethnic Kazakhs and the “return migration” of diasporic Kazakhs to elevate the titular community to a 53.4% majority (from 40.1 in 1989).