This article traces the gradual accommodation of early socialists in Romania with the predicament of nationalism in the period between 1880 and 1914. The attitudes of Romanian socialists evolved from initial ambivalence toward nationalism to staunch commitment to internationalism in the 1890s, and an inadvertent but unmistakable growing engagement with nationalism after the turn of the century. Locating socialism in the broader political and cultural debates of the time, this article argues that belonging to the Romanian public arena forced socialists to become increasingly more sensitive to the challenges of nationalism. Especially after 1900, the rise of very influential competing nationalist ideologies, as well as the necessity to address the Jewish question and the problem of ethnic Romanians living abroad, turned Romanian socialists into opponents but also implicit partners of dialogue in debates on nationalism. In the long run, however, socialists failed to find a persuasive alternative to nationalism and eventually resorted to the same language, concepts, and imagery they were so vocally dismissing. Engaging the popular nationalist trends of the time required socialists to reevaluate their own theoretical tenets and to put forward different, but essentially no less nationalistic, projects for the future.

The official interpretation of the histories of the nations of the USSR emerged between 1934 and 1953 on the basis of decrees signed by Stalin and/or the Central Committee. This interpretation subsumes the histories of the non-Russian Republics within the “history of the USSR” that begins not in 1917 or 1922 in Moscow, but in prehistoric Asia. The official view recognized the non-Russian nations and republics as separate historical entities, yet imposed upon their pasts a Russocentric statist framework while denying the Russians a separate history of the RSFSR. Within this scheme the history of non-Russian nationalities before they became part of the tsarist state was built around the idea of “oppression” of “the people” and their “struggle” against native and foreign ruling classes. Russian and non-Russian “working people” were assumed always to have been “fraternal” while non-Russian political leaders, before and after incorporation, were judged according to their sympathy and/or loyalty to Russia. Russian political and cultural tutelage of non-Russians was stressed and activists in nineteenth-century national movements were labelled “reactionary” if they were not radical socialists. Official historiography admitted that non-Russians suffered political and cultural oppression but not economic colonialism under tsarist rule. In keeping with the logic of Lenin's The Development of Capitalism in Russia, the official view argued that tsarist economic development was “progressive” for non-Russians because it centralized production and tied “outlying regions” of the empire to the world market. Accordingly, the non-Russian “national bourgeoisie” were “reactionary” because both threatened the integration supposedly demanded by the forces of production. By contrast, during the twenties and the thirties, Russian/non-Russian relations in the Tsarist Empire were presented in terms of Lenin's Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Historians argued that tsarist centralism impeded the development in non-Russian provinces and that “national liberation movements” were “progressive” responses to Russian economic colonialism.

At the end of 1928 Matvyi Iavorskyi, head of historical studies in the Ukrainian Institute of Marxism-Leninism and hitherto considered a sort of court historian of Ukrainian communism, was attacked for allegedly committing “nationalistic deviations” in interpreting Ukrainian history. Iavorskyi was in no sense a “dissident” like Oleksander Shumskyi or Mykola Khvylovyi; he never, so far as is known, questioned the official Party line. Rather, he was a close associate of Mykola Skrypnyk, the political strongman of the Soviet Ukrainian regime, and the hue and cry raised against “Iavorskyism” in historial scholarship was actually an indirect attack upon Skrypnyk. It had the distinction of being the first such attack; it would not be the last.

The Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic provides a unique opportunity for an examination of Soviet linguistic policy. Part of the difficulty in the analysis of the development of Soviet languages has been the lack of a control language or suitable basis for comparison between a language in its Soviet and non-Soviet environment. While it is impossible to determine how a language would have developed had there been no revolution or had it not been in the Soviet Union, some very general observations seem clear. The example of Turkish and Azerbaijani is instructive in this respect. The entire orientation of these two languages has changed drastically since their respective revolutions, particularly in the replacement of the Arabic alphabet by Latin and Cyrillic respectively, the handling of traditional arabisms and Persianisms, and the sources for neologisms (Western European languages and native roots for Turkish and Russian for Azerbaijani). There are, however, very few situations where a realistic comparison can be made between different versions of the same language, for the language abroad may represent only an emigre community or may exist in totally different circumstances, such as Iranian Azerbaijani, or the Soviet language may itself represent only a rump, such as Soviet Yiddish.

Today's pictures of Belgrade are not much different from late-nineteenth-century descriptions: messy streets, uncompleted infrastructure projects, lack of coordinated urban plans and strategies. No doubt all of this shows that the weak Serbian society never raised sufficient funds to invest in a glamorous-looking capital city. The most frequent excuse to justify the poor-looking conditions of the national capital has been found in the nation's struggle to fulfill an uncompleted project for national unification. For more than two centuries, the modern Serbian elite has remained unsatisfied with current national boundaries. This paper will address the question of how those unfulfilled national aspirations can be detected in the urban fabric of Belgrade.

It is very difficult to translate fully the above verse from the great Persian-speaking poet Bidil without violating its spirit in the context of the Central Asian (and other Iranian areas) culture. The spirit of the verse is not so much fatalism about life itself but is one of cynicism derived from power-lessness over one's fate. This verse is often uttered by the Central Asian intellectuals in response to questions about their relationship with the Russians and sharing of power in the Soviet bureaucracy. It does not communicate resignation. It describes the reality of the USSR, an awareness that a Central Asian is powerless to change circumstances to those favoring his/her well being and spiritual instincts. It camouflages the underlying resentment toward the dominant group, the Russians, who have the monopoly of the means of violence and who have not hesitated to use these means against the Muslim population of Central Asia on numerous occasions during the past hundred years of their rule there.

The sheer enormity of Soviet losses at the hands of German forces during the Second World War staggers the mind. During the immediate post-war period, Stalin did not want the West to know just how badly the Soviet Union had been mauled or the fact that far more Soviet soldiers had died than German ones (up to three times as many); consequently, the Soviets clamed that the total number of dead was 7 million, while Western estimates were between 10 and 15 million Soviet dead. It was only during the Khrushchev era that the true scale of the disaster was revealed and the more accurate figure of 20 million dead was generally accepted. Of these, only half were soldiers. The rest were at least 10 million civilians, including 2 million who died as slave laborers in Nazi Germany. The death toll has more recently been put at 25, 27 and even 30 million, though I suspect the latter figures also take into consideration the decline in birth rates. In April 2009 Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev appointed yet another commission to give a final accounting of Soviet losses.

Bilingualism is the ability of an individual to use two languages to an equal or near equal degree. A completely bilingual person can switch from one language to another instantaneously.

We should not be surprised if we find each of the former republics of the Soviet Union placing foremost in their foreign policy the desire to achieve a truly recognized statehood. Obviously, developing their constitutions, and internal political and economic structures, is an internal matter, but it is closely related, of course, with the foreign policy that they can pursue. The principal aim of a foreign policy—just as perhaps the principal aim of an individual—is self-preservation. And once the entity has been created, either because of a long struggle of important forces within the society or, in a few cases, because independence is handed to them due to events elsewhere, the fact is that once you are independent you must act in a way that defends your independence. You defend the ability of whatever political system you have to make its own autonomous decisions. And I believe that what we are seeing today reflects this imperative. We see it most spectacularly, of course, in the jockeying of Russia and Ukraine within the Commonwealth of Independent States.