The Sovietization of East Central Europe between 1945 and 1948 led to a complete reformulation of the “nationalities question” on the basis of Marxist-Leninist theory and the practical experience of the USSR. The changed political and ideological context provided the expanded camp of peoples' democracies with new guidelines for the treatment of their minorities. From this time onward, the ethnic/national minorities of these states were guaranteed an existence which was “national in form,” but “socialist in content.”

The blood-and-soil concept relates to nationalism tied to land that is tied to specific bloodlines—meaning reconsideration of national membership on the basis of ethnicity. Soil affiliation implies objective criteria of national membership, related to birthplace or residence and associated with providing roots (homeland attachments, friends, marriage, children, or citizenship). The idea of blood and soil is about rejecting a soil claim in those with different, “wrong,” blood. As part of national purification, blood-and-soil nationalism emerges as a political process using the “blood” concept as a mechanism to restrict national membership—to reconsider the soil benefits by not making them accessible to everybody. In this work I will use the term “blood and soil'” to stress the exclusive nature of Soviet Russian ethnonationalism in relation to Jews as its number one target and to show the controversy surrounding Soviet membership.

The paper explores forms of sociability and partner relationships among pious young Muslims in Sarajevo with a focus on the emic concepts of Islamic cafés (hospitality establishments perceived to operate according to Islamic moral principles) and Sharia dating (premarital relationships perceived to be sanctioned by Sharia). It draws on 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in different spaces of Islamic worship, learning, and sociability. This paper places the renewed interest in Islam within the context of a post-Dayton Bosnia characterized by complex and impractical government structures, lingering post-war grievances, and a brutal transition to a neoliberal capitalist economy. Although it acknowledges the continuing relevance of Islam as a resource for Bosniak nation building, it suggests treating the Muslim faith community as overlapping but distinct from the Bosniak community. By focusing on gendered interaction and partner-seeking strategies, this paper explores how young members of this faith community contextually negotiate their Islamic beliefs with mainstream local expectations of conventional behavior. The paper argues that believers’ varying responses to this predicament can be observed as an example of the localization of Islam, but they do not constitute a return to local, traditional gender roles and marriage practices, nor are they an introduction of foreign cultural patterns.

The study of ethnic nationalism in the Caucasus is problematic. This situation arises not so much from the extreme ethnic and cultural diversity of this region, but more from the same methodological obstacles and problems encountered when studying ethnic nationalism anywhere in the USSR. Before discussing ethnic nationalism in the Caucasus, then, a brief treatment of some of these problems is presented. It is hoped that this format will make this paper more valuable to those interested in the nationality situation in the Soviet Union in general.

It is estimated that, in 1913, less than 500,000 Muslims lived in the regions ruled by Greece and around 800,000 Muslims in those areas which were under the authority of the Bulgarian state. In the aftermath of the 1923 obligatory Greco-Turkish population exchange the number of Muslims in Greece reduced to approximately 200,000, of which around 180,000 lived in the region of Western Thrace and 20–25,000 Albanian-speaking Muslims, known as Çams, in Epirus and Greek South-West Macedonia. In the same period, the number of Muslims in Bulgaria was between 800,000 and one million people. Meanwhile, during the two Balkan and the First World Wars a hardly definable number of Muslims lost their lives due to starvation, disease, massacres and physical destruction caused by the military and paramilitary troops of the two Balkan states, as well as due to voluntary and forced migration to areas controlled by the Ottoman Empire.

From May to August, 1991, the author distributed 250 questionnaires among Poland's Lemko minority. The questionnaire is part of a dissertation being written on the long-term impact on the Polish Lemko community of the 1947 “Vistula” Operation population resettlement. To date, 52 questionnaires have been returned.

The good die young.

If you kill me you will not easily find a successor to me, who, if I may use such ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly, given to the State by God; and the State is a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which God has attached to the State, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you. You will not easily find another like me, and therefore I would advise you to spare me.

Abkhazia during the Stalin era was at the same time a subtropical haven where the great leader and his lieutenants built grand dachas and took extended holidays away from Moscow, and also a key piece in the continuing chess match of Soviet politics. This paper will examine how and why this small, sunny autonomous republic on the Black Sea, and the political networks that developed there, played a prominent role in the politics of the south Caucasus region and in Soviet politics as a whole during the Stalin period.