This article compares causes and mechanisms of the mass mobilizations which took place in Kyrgyzstan in 2005 and 2010. The upheavals of 2005, the so called “Tulip Revolution,” led to the ousting of President Akaev who was replaced by Kurmanbek Bakiev. In 2010, Bakiev himself had to flee the country after violent social upheavals. As this analysis shows, the causes for both series of events were similar: neopatrimonial rule and the elite's control of resources together with oppressive tactics stirred up discontent among wide parts of the population and instigated violent protest. The mechanisms of mass mobilization, however, differed considerably. While the revolution of 2005 was carried out as the concerted action of varied political forces and NGOs, which, supported by patronage networks and traditional institutions, offered material and solidary incentives for the crowds, the great mass of people who took part in the 2010 protests were spontaneously mobilized through purposive incentives when news of the killings spread through the media.

Post-communist development in Russia has been characterized by the development of a dual state in which the constitutional order is balanced by the consolidation of an arbitrary prerogative state. This horizontal dualism has taken root in Russia's regions; and this is accompanied by the establishment of a form of vertical dualism in relations between the regions and the center. Attempts to overcome this form of segmented regionalism under president Vladimir Putin have been undermined by the development of Chechenization, which represents not only the repudiation of dualism in this republic, but threatens to undermine the precarious balance between the constitutional and prerogative states at the federal level as well. Chechenization has its opponents in Moscow as well and its fate is defined by the struggle between the factions at the center. The process of “separatism without secession” is a highly ambiguous one and reflects broader developments in the Russian state as president Dmitry Medvedev seeks to strengthen the constitutional pillar of the dual state.

The bulk of scholarly literature views nationalism as harmful to democratic transition. Yet Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan indirectly suggest that nationalism may benefit democratization. This study shows that under the right conditions nationalism can benefit democratic transition. Building on the typology of Linz and Stepan and the liberal nationalism tradition of Yael Tamir and David Miller, this study examines the transitions in Estonia and Ukraine. It introduces an important layer, the multinational federal state, into the typologies developed by Linz and Stepan to show that nationalism can prove a useful political tool of mobilization in a multiethnic setting.

In Polish history, Prince Adam Czartoryski is almost universally regarded as one of the most important Polish statesmen and patriots of the first half of the nineteenth century. In Russian history, on the other hand, he is remembered chiefly as the Foreign Minister of the Russian Empire, and a close personal friend of Tsar Alexander I. How did Czartoryski reconcile his commitment to the Polish nation with his service to the Russian Empire (a state which occupied most of Poland)? This paper will attempt to place Prince Adam's friendship with Alexander, and his service to Imperial Russia, in the broader context of national identity formation in early nineteenth-century eastern Europe. It will be argued that the idea of finding a workable relationship between Poland and Russia, even within the framework of a single state for a “Slavic nation,” was an important and forgotten feature of Polish political thought at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By answering the question of precisely how Czartoryski was able to negotiate between the identities of a “Polish patriot” and “Russian statesman,” the paper will shed light on the broader development of national identity in early nineteenth-century Poland and Russia.

This article asks why a popular bar named after a criminal Soviet secret police organization has not provoked the outrage of the developed world's intellectual and artistic elites, who would surely condemn an SS Bar. It attributes this moral blindness to the Holocaust's centrality in Israeli, German, and American national discourse and the resultant binary morality that ascribes collective innocence to all Jews at all times and in all places and collective guilt to all Germans – and potentially to all non-Jews – at all times and in all places. The moral logic of the Holocaust thus transforms Jews into victims and non-Jews into victimizers; the moral logic and reality of the Gulag transform everybody into both victim and victimizer. The binary morality of the Holocaust insists that all human beings be heroes; the fuzzy morality of the Gulag recognizes that all humans are just humans constantly confronted by moral ambiguity. But because the Gulag's moral ambiguity concerns non-Jews and Jews, the Gulag undercuts binary morality. The Holocaust and the Gulag are not just incompatible moral tales; they are incompatible and intersecting moral tales. As a result, they cannot co-exist. We therefore fail to respond to the KGB Bar because to recognize the Gulag as a mass murder worthy of categorical moral condemnation would be to challenge the sacred status of the Holocaust. Ironically, the KGB Bar is possible precisely because an SS Bar is impossible.

Research on diasporic youth identities in the British and American context has stressed hybridity, heterogeneity and multiplicity. This paper draws upon ethnographic research undertaken with Armenian girls to explore some of the tensions and ambivalences of negotiating diasporic identities in the Russian context. Diasporic identities are constructed through gender, and this paper illustrates how research participants negotiate their identities in relation to both belonging to the Armenian community and wider Russian society. At the same time, this paper examines how research participants draw differently on diasporic identifications in order to overcome tensions and ambivalences in their everyday lives. The paper shows that research participants are not inclined to reject their cultural roots in favor of new hybrid identities, but are able to recognize and appropriate different cultures in their identity negotiations.

Investigating Romanian radical right populism, I evidence the gendered nature of conceptual metaphors and provide insights on the specific masculinities that they underpin in such political discourses. With the 2004 presidential elections as a backdrop, the analysis focuses on how the radical right populist candidates articulated in their discourses the conceptual metaphor of the “strict father.” At first, the theoretical standpoints on conceptual metaphors are corroborated with the conceptualization of populist charismatic leadership. Subsequently, a gendered perspective is added to the populist conceptualizations. The leaders’ self-representation as messianic fathers of the national family is evidenced by investigating their discursive appeals to protect, discipline and punish the people. Furthermore, I elaborate how conceptual metaphors may be employed to consolidate a position of uncontested leadership and moral superiority of the radical right populist leaders.

This article argues that the formation of a mass sense of Russian national identity was a recent, contingent event that first began to take shape under Stalin. Surveying the new literature on Russian nationalism, it contends that elite expressions of “Russianness” and bureaucratic proclamations of “official nationality” or russification should not be conflated with the advent of a truly mass sense of grassroots identity. Borrowing from an array of theorists, it argues that such a sense of identity only becomes possible after the establishment of necessary social institutions – universal schooling, a modern army, etc. Inasmuch as these institutions come into being only after the formation of the Soviet Union, this article focuses on how a mass sense of Russian national identity began to form under a rapid and unpredictable series of ideological shifts that occurred during the Stalinist 1930s and 1940s. This article's major contribution is its description of this development as not only contingent, but accidental. Drawing a clear line between russocentric propaganda and full-blown Russian nationalism, it argues that the ideological initiatives that precipitated mass identity formation in the USSR were populist rather than nationalist. In this sense, Stalinism has much more in common with Perónism than it does with truly national regimes.

If Lenin were alive today and to find himself in Stalin's hands, without any doubt, he would have confessed being a German spy – and, maybe, with some more justification [than others who had done so in 1937-1938]. (Georgii Fedotov after the third show trial (as quoted in Liuks [Luks], Istoriia Rossii i Sovetskogo Soiuza 258)).

David Brandenberger argues that contemporary Russian identity was mainly a result of a “historical accident.” He maintains that this national identity was a product of the twentieth century rather than the nineteenth, which is more commonly cited, and that in terms of the state formulating a conception of what it meant to be Russian, the first decade of the Soviet period achieved little. However, by the late 1920s Soviet ideologists began to seek something more appealing than the mundane party slogans and eventually added non-proletarian, historical Russian heroes to the Soviet pantheon, particularly after the purges when the latter group was sorely depleted. This campaign was largely successful in inducing an understanding of national identity from a non-proletarian past as is evident today. He perceives this process as the formation of a Soviet populism, designed to mobilize society “on the mass level” and compares Stalin's USSR with Latin American dictatorships in this regard. Stalin, he argues, “was an authoritarian populist rather than a nationalist.” By 1953, Russians had a much better idea about their identity than in the period before 1937.

I am grateful to Andreas Umland and David Marples for their thoughtful responses to my piece and appreciate the invitation of the editors of Nationalities Papers to briefly reply. Because “Stalin's Populism” is an essay rather than an article devoted to empirical research, historiography or contemporary politics, some of the objections that Umland and Marples raise are a function of genre more than anything else. Other issues require more detailed engagement, however. As both responses indicate, “Stalin's Populism” elaborates upon an argument that I've advanced in a number of places about the USSR's rehabilitation of Russian historical heroes, imagery and iconography during the 1930s and 1940s. An enduring source of debate over the past half-century, this development has been variously attributed to Stalin's retreat from world revolution, his low confidence in proletarian internationalism, his wavering commitment to Marxism and his insecurity during the Second World War. It's also been seen as evidence of a turn toward nationalism and even fascism. I have long been frustrated by the schematicism of such accounts and offer here a more contingent interpretation situated specifically within the historical contours of the Stalinist 1930s. I have also grown frustrated by the hyperbole of the traditional literature's focus on Stalin's personal failings and ideological apostasy and suggest here that the policy changes in question display all the hallmarks of authoritarian populism, inasmuch as they advanced claims of Soviet state legitimacy and authority rather than Russian political autonomy or self-rule. Indeed, it is this official emphasis on party and state legitimacy and union-wide mobilization that leads me to use terms like “national Bolshevism” and russocentrism rather than Russian nationalism in regard to the Stalinist party line.