The ghost of Trianon continues to haunt Central Europe. The consequences of the unmaking of the Habsburg Kingdom of Hungary still confront diplomats, even more so now in the aftermath of communism and the demise of Soviet hegemony. The plight of Hungarian minorities in Hungary's neighboring states is a constant concern to diplomats as satisfactory accommodation of ethnic minorities fails throughout post-communist Eastern Europe. Specifically, a fear of destabilization on account of a crisis related to the several Hungarian minorities scattered in half a dozen adjacent states is never far from the surface.

This article attempts to reconstruct the khod myshleniia (thought process) of the ultra-nationalist, ultra-conservative camp, not just because it is interesting in and of itself but also because of the way that some of their ideas, concerns, and ways of seeing Russia and the world are shared by a growing number of people in the middle of the political spectrum. The extremists' ideas about russifikatsiia may not spread very far, but russkost' is a powerful and attractive concept.

The fate of Hungarian minorities in East Central Europe has been one of the most neglected subjects in the Western scholarly world. For the past fifty years the subject—at least prior to the late 1980s—was taboo in the successor states (except Yugoslavia), while in Hungary itself relatively few scholars dared to publish anything about this issue till the early 1980s. In the West, it was just not faddish, since most East European and Russian Area studies centers at American, French and English universities tended to think of the territorial status quo as “politically correct.” The Hungarian minorities, on the other hand, were a frustrating reminder that indeed the Entente after World War I, and the Allies after World War II, made major mistakes and significantly contributed to the pain and anguish of the peoples living in this region of the “shatter zone.”

Although a number of commentaries exist on the citizenship question in Estonia and Latvia, there is as yet no study that develops a conceptual framework which considers the particularity of these citizen-state formations and the implications that follow for ethnic relations. Based on a series of decrees culminating in their respective citizenship laws of 1992 and 1994, both Estonia and Latvia opted to exclude a third of their permanent residents, made up mostly of the Russian-speaking population, from being granted an automatic right to membership of the citizenpolity. This differed from the other post-Soviet states who granted citizenship to all those permanently residing within their bounded territory at the moment the declaration of statehood. This article, therefore, aims to redress this blank spot in conceptual theorizing by considering Estonia and Latvia as polities that come close to resembling ethnic democracies.

While it is true that many nations and nationalities have come to be identified with a particular language group, linguistic homogeneity is by no means a sufficient or necessary marker of a nation or nationality. And yet, language is often used as a marker, not only to define a people or a nation, but, perhaps more importantly, is used by a people to set themselves apart from others. “Groups tend to define themselves not by reference to their own characteristics but by exclusion, that is, by comparison to ‘strangers’.” The use of language allows for a clear-cut division between “natives” and “aliens.”

This article seeks to analyze the ideology of the RNE as represented by its undisputed leader Barkashov and by the RNE Council which he dominates. Particular attention is paid to RNE's relation to Russian ethnicity. The first part discusses Barkashov and his organization's policies with regard to the russkii (ethnic Russian) nation and to Russian nationalism. Then follows a critical review of the RNE's relation to nazism and fascism. The article then considers the RNE's ideas about how the new Russian state should be shaped, i.e., its political and economic program. Finally, the RNE is placed in the wider Russian political landscape by means of a discussion of its political friends and foes.

Western experts claim that the end of the Warsaw Pact and the artificial stability it provided, together with what are routinely called “traditional ethnic animosities,” are the causes of continual and inevitable clashes between states in East Central Europe. This area, a triangle formed by the Adriatic, Baltic, and Black Seas, covers the Western border area of the former Soviet Union, and all of Poland, ex-Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, ex-Czechoslovakia and the eastern territories of Germany. This issue of Nationalities Papers is dedicated to the Hungarian ethnic minorities of East Central Europe, in part to examine the validity of the “traditional ethnic animosity” thesis. Spread among seven states, roughly three and a half to four million souls, they constitute the largest diaspora in Europe, and, in relative terms, are more numerous in states around Hungary than the ethnic Russians outside of the Russian Federation on the territory of the former Soviet Union.

The collapse of the three great multi-national and multi-ethnic empires—the Czarist Russian, the Ottoman Turkish and the Austro-Hungarian—was an immediate consequence of World War I and the ensuing revolutions. Of these three, only the empire of the Habsburgs was really considered to be an integral part of nineteenth-century European developments. Although historians and contemporaries may have questioned its modernity and viability, few would have challenged its credentials as part of Europe. Yet its demise was rooted—as for the other empires—in the unresolved nationality questions which still bedevil the region in our own time.

Late Imperial Russian society experienced a time of profound social and cultural change in spite of the fact that aristocratic privilege and monarchical power endured until 1917. Contemporary writers bear witness to an emerging working-class consciousness in the cities, a peasant culture increasingly in contact with the wider world of the city and beyond, and a literary culture shaped by the latest currents in the experimental modernism of the West.1 Scholars have long explored the Russian variant of interest group politics that emerged in the wake of the Great Reforms, such as technological innovation and the Russian Navy, the development of a legal consciousness, new cultural expectations about the city and the process of urbanization, the modern aspirations and ambitions of a thriving popular culture, and even an emerging modern set of assumptions about individual sexual autonomy.2

The Gulag Handbook states that in 1936 “the entire native populations of Finns, Estonians, Letts, Lithuanians, Poles, and Romanians…were transported” from the border zone of the USSR. Many such peoples began to appear unreliable through Stalinist eyes because they “had relatives across the border,” and “might undermine [propaganda that people] abroad were suffering and that no better life existed than that in the USSR.” Several former officers of the security police confirm that the 1930s saw purges of “unreliable elements” from border regions, including not only “class aliens” and political malcontents, but also minorities whose kinship with populations of neighboring states facilitated the movement of people and of information across borders. More importantly, numerous personal accounts gave rise to the perception in the contemporary Finnish government and popular circles that their brethren were being systematically eliminated from the Soviet borders with Finland and Estonia.