The Soviet discovery of the approach of postindustrial society is not an incidental one. Since converging trends are observed in both capitalist and communist economic systems, the inclusion of macroplanning and more significant activity of the public sector could not be left unnoticed by the Soviet authors. For if convergence is viewed as a “capitalist policy” toward integration, postindustrialism stresses behaviorism with an accent on the consumer demand whose outlook became subject to extended modernization and technical acceptance of societal transformation. Soviet observers claim that in the capitalist environment, objective economic principles are replaced by purely biological determinants, because technocracy and consumerism are the very functional representatives of oncoming social values. Parenthetically then, planning and welfare-state designs are modes to “socialize” capitalism, since the two systems, as western economists claim, possess common values in terms of dynamic growth with no particular doctrine of implementation. Therefore, capitalism not only enforced hybridization of two ideologies, it became a virtual variant of socialism, converging around an industrial nucleus with increased participation of the public sector. Thus, capitalist convergence and revisionism in certain socialist countries are inbred, because by recognizing certain Marxian truisms but by ignoring class struggle, western societies approximate reinterpretation of Marx in the eastern bloc. The latter is a direct contradiction of the Soviet aim of establishing a classless, community-oriented society.

Hungary was one of three Eastern European countries which, between the great wars, contained both large peasant and Jewish populations. The others were Poland and Rumania, and in both the record is clear enough: the peasants can be said to have disliked the Jews. In Hungary, however things were not so simple.

Although much attention has been paid to national construction in Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asia, the field of literary and cultural analysis of the origins of current national symbols and texts in this region is yet not fully acknowledged and discovered. This article tries to shed light onto the literary construction of an ethnic identity and its historical background in Soviet Kazakhstan and its influence on the post-Soviet ideology in this multicultural country. In doing so it investigates the ways and the time when most of the important historical epics were “re-written,” brought back by the Kazakh writers and intellectuals in the mid-twentieth century. The importance of investigating this period and this phenomenon is twofold. First, it provides further contribution to the Soviet creation of binary approaches to the formation of ethnic identities and the continuous attack on local nationalisms. Following the arguments of some scholars in the field (e.g. [Adams, Laura. 1999. “Invention, Institutionalization and Renewal in Uzbekistan's National Culture.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 2; Dave, Bhavna. 2007. Kazakhstan: Ethnicity and Power. London: Routledge]) this asserts that the local cultural elites found ways of bargaining and re-structuring such identity contributing to its “localization” through the usage of pre-Soviet and pre-Russian historical symbols. In a way, they were able to construct their own “imagined community” and resistance to the past and existing (according to them) colonialism within the given framework of Kazakh-Soviet literature. Secondly, the historicity that became a leitmotif of most important literary works and later on a main focus of national ideology in post-Soviet Kazakhstan must be viewed not just as an instrument of legitimation in this post-colonial state but also as a strong continuity of cultural and ethnic identity lines. The very fact that a detailed and continued genealogy of Kazakh medieval tribes and rulers was the main focus of major works by such famous Kazakh writers as Mukhtar Auezov or Ilyas Yessenberlin demonstrates the importance of the “continuity” and kinship and family lines for Kazakhs. The paper raises the questions of how national and elitist these movements were before the independence and how the further post-independent projects of using and re-establishing these links and continuity formed more questions than answers for the nation-builders in independent Kazakhstan.

The organizers of the international conference entitled “The Cultural Contexts of Kazakhstan: History and Contemporaneity,” held in Almaty between 7 and 10 September 1997, chose as the logo of their conference one of the stills from Rustam Khalfin's film Lazy Cinema (Lenivoe Kino). It was the still representing a handful of earth. The choice was far from whimsical, for, as the writer Auezkhan Kodar, one of the organizers of the conference noted, the intention was “to underline the amorphous state of contemporary culture which needs to acquire a precise shape, characteristic to Kazakhstan alone.”

The leader of the Iranian Revolution Āyat Allāh Rūḥ Allāh Khumaynī has strongly condemned what he considers had been a slavish imitation of the West under the overthrown Pahlavī dynasty and coined the neologism Gharbzadagī (literally “Weststrickenness”). He has called for a cultural as well as political emancipation from Western dominance. So far this emancipation has not extended to a purification of the Persian language from the numerous French loanwords which had entered it during the last sixty years. Thus the newspaper Jumhūrī-i Islāmī (“Islamic Republic”) has the subtitle Urgān-i Ḥizb-i Jumhūrī-ī Islāmī (“Organ of the Islamic Republican Party”). Urgān is of course French organe. Even more striking is the use of the term kumītah or komiteh by the revolutionary committees, usually presided by Muslim clergy, which have taken over the functions of local government in Iran. Again, kumītah is the French comité. While not many Iranian mullahs know French, or any Western language, they cannot be unaware of the Western origin of these words. We should not be surprised therefore if in the near future we witness a movement to expel from the Persian language the Western loanwords, most of all from official terminology. Most likely they will be replaced by words of Arabic rather than pure Persian origin in view of the regime's identification with Islam rather than ancient Persian culture.

The northwestern flank of the Slavic expanse of settlement, the territory of today's Russian Karelia, constitutes an age-old site of Slavic-Baltic-Finnic contact. The Karelians and Vepsians, two Finno-Ugrian groups, are a part of the indigenous population of Karelia. The settlements of the former are found mainly in the western half of the present-day Karelian Republic. The Vepsians live on the southwestern coastal strip of Lake Onega, south of the capital of the republic, Petrozavodsk. Vepsian settlements are also found outside Karelia, in Vologda and Leningrad provinces. For several centuries, the Russians have formed a majority of the inhabitants both near Lake Onega and on the west coast of the White Sea. In contrast to the Karelians, Vepsians and Russians, Finns can be considered newcomers to Karelia.

When the editorial board of the bi-weekly current affairs journal Politika decided, in early 1932, to organize a congress of members of the so-called young Slovak generation, its intent was to find a solution to Slovakia's pressing political, economic, social, and cultural problems. Attended by approximately five hundred members of the intelligentsia, most of them in their late twenties or early thirties, the congress was held on June 25 and 26 in the health resort town of Trencianski Teplice in western Slovakia. The Congress of the Young Slovak Generation attracted the attention of its contemporaries for two reasons. First, it marked the first time since at least 1920 that Slovaks from across the political spectrum came together to discuss issues of mutual concern relating to Slovakia. Second, the congress provided an opportunity for observers of Slovak political life to gauge the mood and become acquainted with the ideas of Slovakia's future leaders, especially as far as the crucial question of relations between Czechs and Slovaks in the Czechoslovak Republic was concerned. From the vantage point of the present-day historian, a further factor enhances the congress's importance: as a manifestation of Slovak national discontent, it was a milestone on Slovakia's road to autonomy. An in-depth examination of the Trencianske Teplice Congress, its background, its course, and its consequences, will illustrate the congress's importance for Slovak national and political development.

Jean-Paul Sartre once observed that “contrary to a wide spread opinion, it is not the Jewish character that provokes anti-Semitism but, rather, that it is the anti-Semite who creates the New.” This statement seems to have particular validity in regard to communist Poland, where in the years 1967–1968 the authorities carried out a large-scale campaign against the small Jewish minority, numbering less than 30,000, most of whom had long been assimilated.

During the first years of the Bulgarian transition to democracy, all indicators seemed to point towards an impending explosion of interethnic hatred. Located at the crossroads of Islam and Christianity, this predominantly Orthodox country harbors a 13.1% strong Muslim minority, which was subjected to forcible assimilation under communist rule. The assimilation policy reached a climax in 1984–1985, when around 800,000 Bulgarian Turks were forced to renounce their Turkish-Arabic names in favor of Slavic patronyms within the framework of the so-called “Revival Process,” a campaign that aimed at precipitating the unification of the Bulgarian nation. Far from achieving the intended result, the authorities' move not only fostered a reassertion of distinct ethnic and religious identification among the Turks, but also succeeded in durably upsetting intercommunitarian relationships. Significantly, the Communist Party's announcement on 29 December 1989 that it would restore Muslim rights met with sharp resistance in mixed areas, where large-scale Bulgarian protests rapidly gathered momentum. Against this background, in 1990–1991, few analysts would have predicted that Bulgaria could avoid religious conflict, especially as the country was faced with growing regional instability and a belated shift to a market economy—two conditions often said to be conducive to the exacerbation of ethnic tensions.