This article argues that apart from a couple of cases, there were no situations where the Russian imperial government would have supported Lithuanian national culture as a counterbalance against Poles, and more generally, that the policy of “divide and rule” was in principle not applied on the empire's western periphery regarding other non-dominant ethnic groups. A more general reason for not implementing such a policy was related to many officials’ belief that the government should seek integration, acculturation, or even assimilation of non-Russian ethnicities. At the same time, on the Russian mental map, the Northwest Region was understood not just as part of the empire, but as part of Russian national territory. In such a territory, most of the government subscribed to a discourse of nationalism that permitted no means of support for the strengthening of non-Russian nationalisms. Finally, social radicalism of the Lithuanian, Latvian, or Estonian national movements was another obstacle for tsarist officials to support these “peasant” nationalities.

This article discusses the political trajectory of the Nizhnii Novgorod region from the beginning of the 1990s until the present; from the first democratic experiences to their repudiation. The author traces the main cycles of region's political developments and defines the specificity of its political system and relations with the federal center. The article looks at the evolution of the political landscape in the region from the first post-Soviet years to mature Putinism, and then explains how political controversies are reflected in the regional identity debate. It proposes an alternative to the binary vision of the 1990s as a struggle between liberal reformists and authoritarian retrogrades, rather approaching the 1990s, with Boris El'tsin's presidency and Boris Nemtsov's governorship in Nizhnii Novgorod, as a period that encompassed many of the non-democratic trends that under Vladimir Putin's regime became dominant.

1968 saw a wave of protests and student radicalism in India, some of the tactics and issues of which were reminiscent of those in Europe and North America. The anti-imperialist theme was similarly strident, and the student and youth movement posed serious challenges to the old established Left, sharing traits of a global New Left agenda. The upsurge of post-independence radicalism in India, however, drew on different historical legacies, and exhibited many specific features, all of which culminated in the student and youth upsurge of 1968–69. In order to demonstrate the complex history and legacy of 60s radicalism in India, this essay takes us back to  the sixties in Kolkata when the insurgent movement in West Bengal had developed the tactic of occupation, which helped the movement crystallize and caused, ironically, the undoing of the mobilization in the end. Occupy as a tactic thus has a history, and the radicals of today perhaps in their enthusiasm for the New Left ethos have ignored the history of the insurgent tactics of the past, especially tactics developed in the postcolonial context.