Reading the psychological literature on memory, there is little doubt who plays the leading roles on this stage. The radiant hero in the limelight is Remembering, attracting all attention, support and sympathy. The shady villain is Forgetting, the trouble maker who is lurking behind the scenes, always ready to counteract Remembering and thwart its achievement. There are various scenarios in which this plot is acted out. Typically, Remembering is forced to use all kinds of tricks to resist the villain's assaults and to guard the treasure – the accumulated wealth of past experience and knowledge. While Remembering strives to defend this precious treasure, maintaining it as untouched as possible, Forgetting never tires of trying to steal and destroy it (or at least to damage or, insidiously, to distort and falsify it). In this way, the conflict about the treasure of the past takes on still another dramatic dimension: it becomes a struggle for truth. (Brockmeier 2002, 15)

Albeit often — and fairly — degraded in the world of high culture as a populist and politicized representation of music, the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) — by sheer virtue of the populist and politicized nature of its essence — stands among the most consequential cultural encounters to which post-independence Azerbaijan has been exposed, in that the extent to which Baku's victory in the ESC-2011 — and the further developments this victory has generated — can potentially impact on, and contribute to, the very process of nation-building and national identity formation, with which this post-Soviet Muslim-majority country is currently struggling, is unparalleled by any of the state's earlier encounters of the kind. This paper focuses on, and examines, four intimately related ways in which the ESC and Azerbaijan's successful involvement with the latter worked to interfere with the country's nation-building: as a dubious factor in the evolution of the Western sense of self among Azerbaijanis; as a unifying force within the structure of the country's rapidly maturing civil society; as a medium working to open up a channel through which Western popular cultural elements could interfere with the evolving dynamics of, and work to globalize, indeed de-endogenize, indigenous Azerbaijani culture, on one hand, and unify the discursive realm within which the country's cultural domain is to further evolve, on the other; and, finally, as an important element serving to decouple the evolving processes within the country's cultural domain from the unfolding dynamics of conflict settlement and hence conducive to the diversification of public discourse in Azerbaijan.

History shows that in the development of a society, as in any other development, there are critical periods when deep and sudden changes take place, and crucial decisions need to be made. What makes these periods critical is that certain conditions must exist or be created at the right time. Otherwise chances for change may be lost and the results will be fundamentally different from what they could have been.

The demise of the Soviet Union entailed a reconfiguration of the political space and a reforging of collective identities within the boundaries of the new successor states. In the view of Anthony Smith, this was inevitable: “the rediscovery of the national self is not an academic matter, it is a pressing practical issue, vexed, and contentious, which spells life or death for the nationalist project of creating a nation.” Defining the national “self not only accomplishes a symbolic break with the previous political community but also sets out the parameters of statehood with regard to language and minority rights. However, even if the newness of the polity precipitates ”the definition, creation, and solidarification of a viable collective identity,“ this can be anything but straightforward. New states dwell on particularism, that is they look to ”local mores, established institutions, and the unities of common experience—to ‘tradition,’ ‘culture,’ ‘national character,’ or even ‘race’ for the roots of a new identity.“ And yet defining the national particularism may be fraught with inherent difficulties because, as Geertz observed, ”new states tend to be bundles of competing traditions gathered accidentally into concocted political frameworks rather than organically evolving civilizations.“

*“Democracy is next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities.”

—John Stuart Mill

“I have no doubt that this great Eastern Slav empire … has entered the last decades of its existence … Marxist doctrine has delayed the break-up of the Russian Empire—the Third Rome—but it does not possess the power to prevent it.”

—Andrei Amal'rik

Our times do not make much of prophets. The Soviet dissident, Andrei Amal'rik, went to the Gulag for his prophecy, which nevertheless turned out to be remarkably correct.

Motyl

Let me open by making one or two minor remarks and then raising a broader issue which, I believe, is relevant to all the papers and may lead to further discussion if the panelists are so inclined. The minor points speak to methodological and ideological concerns, and are addressed to Paul Goble's comments about the theorizing and the break-up scenarios of the 1970's and the 1980's. For what it is worth, that really is not the issue. From the 1970's through today, the central issue in interpreting the nationality question has been the stability of the system, whether one interprets this from a conflict model perspective or consensus model perspective, to put it simplistically. The conflict perspective has so far been validated. It has also been suggested that, if one removes the coercive apparatus—the influence of the police—and liberalizes society, conflict will become manifest. That should not happen according to the consensus perspective. Consensus is, as it were, a permanent feature.

The establishment of the Nemzeti Casino (National Casino) in Pest helped establish civil society in nineteenth-century Hungary. Count István Széchenyi, hoping to modernize Hungary on the English model, established the casino in 1827 as a public forum for the Hungarian nobility. By transcending caste divisions between nobles and bourgeois elites, Széchenyi's casino served as an unofficial parliament and stock exchange, and generally helped cultivate Hungarian patriotism. The Pest Casino inspired a nation-wide trend for casinos, which in turn formed a civil society in opposition to Habsburg absolutism. Yet when the casino movement spread to Hungary's minority nationalities, Jews, Slovaks, Romanians, and particularly Croats, the casino also contributed to national divisions in Hungary's ethnically diverse population that affected the course of the 1848 Revolution.

A statistical analysis of publications in the Belorussian language during the last decade reveals an ominous decline in the number of titles and imprints. This has been accompanied, however, by a parallel increase in Russian-language publications in the BSSR. These factors seem to indicate an attempt by policy-makers to homogenize the Soviet population at the expense of Belorussians, and perhaps other nationalities as well.

This article investigates the politics of national identity implemented in Rijeka after World War II, when the city was integrated into socialist Yugoslavia. These national and political transitions posed various challenges to the consolidation of the Yugoslav Communists' power. The nationalities policy embedded in the slogan “Brotherhood and Unity” was the official answer to the national question, promoting collaboration among the Croatian majority, the Italian minority, and other national communities in the city. This article focuses on the definition of postwar Rijeka's image, investigating the relationship between Yugoslav socialism and national identities in everyday political practice. The negotiation of the representation of national identities in a socialist society led to ambivalences, contradictions, and contentions expressed in and through Rijeka's public spaces, highlighting the different orientations of cultural and political actors. The process of building socialist Yugoslavia in this specific borderland context reveals the balance and tension between the multinational framework and the integrative tendencies pertaining to the legitimization and consolidation of the socialist system.

The study of politics is popular in Russian history; the examination of Russian politics in its regions is not, at least, not yet. The spectrum of interpretations about autocratic politics includes the parading of litanies of imperial arbitrariness and/or manipulation of interest groups against each other, incidents of ministerial incapacity to restrain the autocrat, examples of the inordinate power of favorites, the failure to establish regularizing institutions that would restrain autocrats, and a series of interesting categories including such wonderfully suggestive terms as “free floaters” proposed in Alfred Rieber's important article on the subject. Whether one is wedded to the notion that tsars decided all in the nineteenth century, or advocate some scheme that emphasizes the plurality of conflicting interests at play in decisionmaking, however, the pattern of scholarly production suggests that regional politics has been of secondary importance, and that in any event documentation often is lacking; in short, such approaches are not seen as ideal lines of inquiry. This article seeks to make a contribution to the debate about the politics of autocrats by examining a localized question where documentation is rather complete and where ministerial/bureaucratic lines may be traced fairly closely, in an attempt to shed added light on Russia's leadership in a time of great crisis, specifically the aftermath of the humiliating defeat in the Crimean War and the tension surrounding the preparations and implementation of the Emancipation and other reforms. To be specific as well as anticipatory, it is argued that there are regional questions of great national, indeed international, importance to autocrats, that the Caucasus was so recognized in the post-Crimean War period, and that those involved in the region affected policy decisions in ways that rivaled, as well as displaced, senior officials in the capital.

The Program of the CPSU adopted at the 27th Party Congress (1986) included a guarded reference to the nationality question. It observed that the “nationality question, as it has been inheritedfrom the past, has been successfully solved.” This reference to nationality problems as a remnant of the fading capitalist past was not designed to suggest that problems of a national character have ceased to exist in the Soviet Union today. Gorbachev made this point to the Congress delegates noting: “Our achievements should not create the impression that there are no complications in nationality processes. The contradictions characteristic of all development are unavoidable in this sphere as well.” The violent outbursts of a national character in Kazakhstan in December 1986 provide fresh evidence that ethnic tensions lurk just beneath the surface. These tensions have been held in check largely by the threat of reprisals from central authorities who have regarded meaningful expressions of nationalism as treasonous.

On 24 February 1992, Belarusian foreign minister Piotr Kraǔchanka told a visiting European Community delegation in Minsk that he wanted to record his country's claim to Lithuanian border territory in the presence of an international audience. When asked whether the claims extended to Vilnius, Kraǔchanka said “yes,” but added that the border areas were really the ones at issue. In the late 1980s and early 1990s many Lithuanian officials expected Poland to make such claims on their country, to regain territory lost in 1939. By contrast Lithuanians paid little attention to what Belarusians were saying about the role of Vilnius in Belarusian history and the national identity of the 258,000 Slavs in the Vilnius region.

For veterans of the Russian winter, the term “thaw” will ever remain an appropriate metaphor for the waning of periods of control and repression. Unfortunately, many Soviet political thaws have given way quickly to resurgent winters. Perhaps most significant in the current Soviet thaw, the policies of glasnost and perestroika associated with Mikhail Gorbachev, has been the extent to which Soviet society has been invited to participate in it. Society, in its turn, has responded with the creation of numerous grassroots, unofficial social-action groups (samodeiatelnye obshchestvennye organizatsii).