The results of the first free elections in Yugoslavia since World War II, held in 1990, set the stage for the civil war that broke out in summer and fall 1991. In those elections, strongly nationalist parties or coalitions won in each of the republics. In Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and to some extent in Macedonia, nationalists asserted anticommunism in order to bolster their appeal and their legitimacy internationally, while the new Socialist Party of Serbia (nee the League of Communists of Serbia) and the League of Communists in Montenegro effected Ceausescu-like transformations by turning nominally socialist parties into openly nationalist ones.

At the turn of the twentieth century most Polish political activists dreamed of recreating the Polish state, although they disagreed about where the new Poland should be located and whom it should include. In the years before 1905 the National Democratic movement—the “Endecja,” as it was commonly called—envisioned an expansive Poland stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and from the Dnieper to the Oder. How could a movement which came to be known for its pragmatism and tactical flexibility espouse such an unrealistic, if not absurd, ambition? How could nationalists who insisted upon cultural unity desire a nation which would include millions who neither spoke the Polish language nor considered themselves to be Poles? This article will argue that these questions can be illuminated by examining the Endecja's definition of that enigmatic Polish term, naród (nation).

The March 1990 elections to republican and local Soviets in the USSR resulted in the transfer of power from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) to the nascent democratic movement in a number of republics and localities. Among these was the Moscow City Soviet (Mossoviet). Of the 472 people's deputies elected to the Mossoviet, the clear majority were elected under the umbrella of the political bloc Democratic Russia. Running on a platform calling for the rejection of continued CPSU control of political life in the Soviet Union and Moscow, Democratic Russia's candidates won decisively in a majority of the electoral districts.

In October 1853 war broke out between Russia and Turkey. The following March Britain and France joined the war on the side of the Turks. In the first seven months of the war, the Russian government announced three regular recruit levies, several appeals for volunteers and the formation of a temporary naval militia. News of these measures filtered down to seignorial peasants (pomeshchich'i krest'iane) through official channels and as rumors that went beyond the contents of the government measures and that contained various distortions, in particular that the government was offering privileges, including freedom from serfdom and the regular recruit obligation, to volunteers. In the spring and early summer of 1854, thousands of seignorial peasants left their villages to volunteer for military service. Many descended on Moscow. Seignorial peasants, however, had to have permission from their owners to volunteer, and the would-be volunteers were returned to their villages. Usually Russian peasants loathed military service in the regular army and did everything in their power to avoid being drafted. Why did so many peasants try to volunteer in the spring and early summer of 1854?

As social and cultural historians have known for some time now, court records can yield rich rewards. Judicial proceedings, particularly those involving defendants with a good story to tell, can illuminate issues and mentalities—indeed whole cosmologies—that otherwise are beyond the purview of later generations. The more irreconcilable the narratives of prosecution and defense, the better, for their very irreconcilability is what provides historians with the opportunity for intervention and partial, albeit posthumous, vindication of the accused. But while the Soviet juridical system has been the subject of considerable scholarly attention, almost all of it has been animated by political- or legal-historical questions. Little use has been made of trial proceedings and related materials to explore what they might reveal about other dimensions of Soviet life.

In an 1881 letter to his would-be Russian translator, Walt Whitman described his sense of a mystical resemblance—improbable yet undeniable—between Russian and America, two nations traditionally regarded as not merely geographically but also culturally marginal to the great nations of Europe:

The scholarly world has little noted nor long remembered the interesting fact that the emancipation proclamation of a culturally separate African-American literature was accompanied by a generous acknowledgment of Russian precedent. In 1925 Alain Locke issued the first manifesto of the modern Black Arts movement, The New Negro. There could not have been a clearer call for the free expression of a suppressed native voice: “we have lately had an art that was stiltedly selfconscious, and racially rhetorical rather than racially expressive. Our poets have now stopped speaking for the Negro—they speak as Negroes.“ Even so, this liberating word of the Harlem Renaissance was uttered with a sideward glance at the prior success of nineteenth century Russia's soulful literature and music. Locke himself cited the testimony of his brilliant contemporary, the author of Cane, a poetic distillation of the pungent essence of slavery's culture of oppression: “for vital originality of substance, the young Negro writers dig deep into the racy peasant undersoil of the race life.

On 21 February 1854 Aleksandr Herzen met the future fifteenth president, James Buchanan, at a dinner given by the American consul in London for notable European revolutionary exiles. As Herzen's careerlong interest in the United States never led him to visit its shores and but rarely encompassed face-to-face meetings with its citizens, his published version of the encounter, in Part VI of Byloe i dumy (My Past and Thoughts), provides an intriguing testing ground for his theories about and images of the “Trans-Atlantic Republic,” theories and images that received wide currency among the Russian intellegentsia of the midnineteenth century.