Die Stadt Lublin war in den letzten Jahren das Objekt umfassenderer Arbeiten. Wenn aber selbst die allgemeine Geschichte Lublins in der Zwischenkriegszeit im Unterschied zur historiographischen Würdigung der Zeit bis zum Eersten Weltkrieg ein “unbeschriebenes Blatt” ist, dann gilt dies umso mehr für die Geschichte der Lubliner Juden und ihr Verhältnis zur nicht-jüdischen Bevölkerung. Regionalbezogene Untersuchungen fehlen völlig. Dies liegt an der Komplexität des Themas, aber auch an der lange Zeit ungenügenden Bereitschaft polnischer amtlicher Stellen, Archivalien frei zugänglich zu machen.

In attempting to provide a framework for the study of linguistic minorities within Yugoslavia and peripheral areas, I shall proceed along conceptual lines suggested by economic theory. Although the terms “ethnic minority” and “linguistic minority” are often used interchangeably, the focus is on linguistic minorities since in terms of economic significance the linguistic attribute generally outweighs other attributes which define ethnic groups. After all, communications involve substantial costs, and it is precisely the distribution of these costs between linguistic groups which gives the minority status its economic dimension. The subsequent discussion hinges in part on these costs.

Since the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, an increasing number of Czech voices have suggested that the nation would have been better off in a federalized Austria-Hungary. While the Czechs would have survived and, most likely, prospered in such an arrangement, it was necessary for the Slovak national survival to severe the nation's ties with Hungary. As it happened, the Czechoslovak Republic, proclaimed on October 28, 1918, lasted for merely twenty years — a short span in the life of both nations. The collapse of the Republic has been blamed by various writers on France and England, the national minorities, the rise of Nazism in Germany and others. But, in the last analysis, the responsibility has to be placed on the shoulders of the leaders who did not have the foresight to secure the state externally and internally and/or were unwilling to fight for its territorial integrity in the fall of 1938.

On the eve of the October revolution most of Central Asia was a tsarist colony with the exception of the Amaret of Bukhara. Islam as a religion and a way of life had become more and more ibadah (religious ritual) and less and less as a program of action for the ummah. The tsarist functionaries deprived its religious and educational institutions from their major sources of income (the auqāf) and encouraged instead a program of russification through the schools, specially the Russian-Native schools (russkotuzamnaya shkola) and active conversion of the Muslims of Turkestan to Orthodox Christianity through organizations such as the Anti-Muslim Missionary Division (protivo-musul'manskoe missionerskoe otdelenie), of the Kazan Ecclesiastical Academy. Aside from these and settlements of the Slav immigrants on the Turkestanis lands by force and without compensation the Tsarist government interfered very little in the Central Asian way of life. Almost all of the religious laws (Shariah) dealing with the domestic matters, and the customary laws of the land (adāt) were kept intact.

By the end of 1920 the Soviet government achieved victories over all its external enemies. The white Russian armies were pushed out of their stronghold — Crimea. The Ukrainian army, in war against Soviet Russia, was also interned by its former ally — Poland. While external enemies ceased to represent any real menace to the Soviet government the situation on the internal front was far from satisfactory. Disillusioned workers and dissatisfied peasants presented quite a problem for the victorious but weak Soviet government. But an even worse situation existed in Ukraine which, it was hoped, would provide food for the major Russian cities. Although Ukraine was conquered by the Russian Red Army, it was not entirely subdued. It was aflame through numerous uprisings of nationally conscious elements who struggled for Ukrainian independence. The forcible requisition of food products in Ukrainian villages alienated the Ukrainian peasantry and turned its sympathies to the Ukrainian guerillas. Many of the young and able-bodied men joined the underground forces hoping that the tide may yet turn in their favor.

For most North Americans demography is an esoteric subject more often tied to marketing than to social and political changes. In Latvia, as in most of Eastern Europe and the USSR, demography has long been placed on the forefront of public attention. This wave of attention in the case of Latvia is not a fad of short duration which will be readily displaced by other popular topics. On the contrary, demography has had, is having and will have a tremendous impact on a very broad range of policies and on the long term survival of the Latvian nation. Thus, in order to understand the social and ethnic tensions, the labour squeeze, and the welfare burden of Latvia, it is necessary to understand the multifaceted demographic processes: the real matrix of the political and social environment. This paper reviews the pivotal demographic role of the First and Second World Wars and analyzes population size, sex balance, age structure, urban-rural residence, nuptiality, birth and death rates, migration patterns and ethnic balance.

The genesis of “National Communism” is often traced to the Yugoslav dictator Tito, but in reality the only novel aspect about Titoism is that it has succeeded. The ideology of National Communism was manifested in Ukraine in the early 1920's and its pre-eminent leader was Mykola O. Skrypnyk. It was a reaction to the strong centrist policies of the Bolshevik Party, which had many leaders who were committed to a belief in Russian superiority, a belief which was carried over from the Tsarist regime. At the Eighth Party Congress in 1919, Lenin remarked: “Scratch many a Communist and you will find a Great Russian chauvinist.” The traditionalist utterances made by several highly placed Bolsheviks during the first years of the Revolution were certainly indiscrete. Thus did George Piatakov, a Russian Communist, tell a meeting of the Party held in Kyiv on June 17, 1917:

The Soviet Union's decision to force Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to accept its mutual assistance proposals in the fall of 1939 was one of the most dramatic events in modern Baltic history. The new Soviet-Baltic relationship signalled the return of this region to Russia's sphere-of-influence and ended with the total absorption of the Baltic states into the U.S.S.R. the following year. A great deal has been written about the political-diplomatic discussions that led to the Soviet-Baltic mutual assistance pacts. Scholars, however, have paid far less attention to the impact of these new relationships on the various political institutions in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, Particularly efforts of these systems to adapt to their new status vis á vis Moscow.

Reaction and revolution, so much a part of the reign of Nicholas II, became even more prevalent in the opening years of the twentieth century. The foundation of the Russian Empire had begun its erosion process which would topple the autocracy by 1917. Nicholas and his ministers had to act decisively and aggressively if they hoped to stem the process. To fight the wave of revolution and popular discontent in April of 1902, Nicholas appointed Viacheslav Pleve as Minister of the Interior. Pleve was a careerist who was devoutly loyal to the autocracy. In contemporary terms he might be described as an ‘aparatchick,‘ a party man who towed, and at times shaped, the party line. V. I. Gurko, a colleague, characterized him as “a legal clerk … a very superior clerk it is true, but a clerk nevertheless.” Pleve had also earned the dubious honor of being the autocracy's “most famous policeman,” a reflection of fourteen years of service as Director of the Police Department and Assistant Minister of the Interior.