The east European communist regimes, in contrast to their frequently repeated claims, not only did not weed out nationalism in their domains but in some cases attempted to manipulate and exploit it for their own purposes. Nonetheless, since the collapse of communism the region has experienced a robust resurgence of at times violent ethnic conflicts and racism explained by the simultaneous occurrence of several factors accompanying the postcommunist transition process

Not since the early eighteenth century, when the Moldovan prince Dimitrie Cantemir was the toast of salon society from Berlin to St. Petersburg, has the existence of a Moldovan state been as widely recognized by the international community.1 Moldova's exit from the Soviet Union on 27 August 1991 and its entry into the United Nations the following year, though, raised the difficult question of the republic's future orientation.

The study of the Macedonian identity has given rise to far greater controversies and debates than that of most, if not all, other nationalisms in eastern Europe. This has been only in part due to the hazy past of the Slavic speaking population of Macedonia and to the lack of a continuous and separate state tradition, a trait they had in common with other "small" and "young," or so-called "non-historic," peoples in the area.

Following the devastation of World War II, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) called on all patriotic youth to join volunteer labor brigades and to rebuild the country's shattered infrastructure. Party propaganda for the brigades emphasized not only their economic function but also their role in nurturing a generation of people with new values, beliefs and standards of behavior.

Soviet nationality policy was devised and carried out by nationalists. Lenin's acceptance of the reality of nations and "national rights" was one of the most uncompromising positions he ever took, his theory of good ("oppressed-nation") nationalism formed the conceptual foundation of the Soviet Union and his NEP-time policy of compensatory "nation-building" (natsional'noe stroitel'stvo) was a spectacularly successful attempt at a state-sponsored conflation of language, "culture," territory and quota-fed bureaucracy.

By the beginning of the twentieth century Europe had added to its repertoire of Schimpfwörter, or disparagements, a new one which turned out to be more persistent than others with centuries old traditions. "Balkanization" not only had come to denote the parcelization of large and viable political units but also had become a synonym for a reversion to the tribal, the backward, the primitive, the barbarian. In its latest hypostasis, particularly in American academe, it has been completely decontextualized and paradigmatically related to a variety of problems.

The revolutions of 1989 in central and east Europe raise crucial questions for the social sciences. Is it possible to build democracy and capitalism simultaneously in societies that have no real history of either system? Will democracy really take root and flourish in societies without an existing market economy? Or will the monumental task of creating a market economy strain these new democratic governments to the limit and ultimately lead to an authoritarian backlash? Since the transition to democracy from socialism is unprecedented, history can offer little useful data from which to derive well founded predictions.

Between 1987 and 1990, simultaneous with "glasnost' and perestroika" and the rehabilitation of the victims of Stalin's crimes, execution sites were discovered, particularly in the European regions of the former USSR. One such discovery at Kuropaty (formerly Brod) about twelve kilometers north of Minsk, elicited widespread publicity, and was a serious embarrassment to the communist authorities.

In a recent article in the Slavic Review, George G. Weickhardt undertook to demonstrate that Russia "gradually developed a concept of private property for land which more or less approached that of the English 'fee simple' and that the only significant limitations on individual property in [pre-Petrine] Russia were in favor of the clan rather than the state" (665). This thesis runs counter to virtually the entire historical literature in Russian as well as foreign languages.

Richard Pipes's contribution to our understanding of Russian history has been substantial and my own interest in Russian history dates from taking his course on imperial Russia in college some thirty years ago. It is thus only with great reluctance that I would disagree with him. Nevertheless, I respectfully submit that his response to my article suffers not only from insufficient evidence but also from serious conceptual flaws.