Gypsies are one of the most famous though least known national minorities, representatives of which can be found in many countries. Several works have been written about them but no analysis has yet been made of the interrelationship between Gypsies and the nationalities among whom they live. An analysis of this kind is timely in that it would give governments a means with which to alleviate ethnic tensions by amending their present faulty nationality minority policies.

The author of this article has recently made a detailed sociological study by means of a lengthy questionnaire of the attitudes of various nationality groups towards each other in Ukraine. Included in it are questions either directly or indirectly relating to the Gypsies. This ethnic group, despite its relatively small size, is well known throughout Ukraine. Gypsies stand out from the rest of the population by their way of life and by their appearance; as a rule, they speak their own language, even though they know the languages of other nationalities. Most of the population of Ukraine comes in contact with Gypsies, though most often with their worst representatives (swindlers, extortionists, etc.). They meet these Gypsies in the most populous places—at railroad stations, outside large stores, and in marketplaces.

This article explores the emerging national narratives about Muslim national identity in the period of the 1960s and 1970s. After the national recognition of a Bosnian Muslim nation, which was proposed by the members of the Central Committee of Bosnia and Herzegovina, it was the intellectuals’ task to endow the national category with cultural repertoire. Hereby affirmative as well as negating discursive practices on the national status of Muslims entered the debates, which geographically expanded the republican scope of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The author examines internal discussions of the LCY on that issue as well as the intellectuals’ engagement in the public spheres in Socialist Yugoslavia. By integrating the nation-building activities of intellectuals outside Yugoslavia, the author postulates for a trans-national dimension of nation-building processes.

This article analyzes memory politics during the first 20 years (1991-2011) of the newly independent Estonia. Memory politics is understood as a politics endeavoring to shape the society's collective memory and establish notions of what is and is not to be remembered of the past, employing to this end both legislative means and practical measures. The paper presents one possible scheme for analyzing Estonian memory politics and limits its treatment in two important ways. Firstly, the focus is on national memory politics, that is the decisions of the parliament, government, and president oriented toward shaping collective memory. And second, only internal memory politics is discussed; that is, bi- or multilateral memory-political relations with other states or political unions are not examined separately. The analysis is built on four interrelated dimensions of memory politics, which have played the most important roles in Estonia: the legal, institutional, commemorative, and monumental dimensions. Also, a general characterization and temporal articulation of memory politics in newly independent Estonia is proposed.

Das deutsche Interesse an der Ukraine war nicht ausschließlich an die Person des Het'mans gebunden. Gegen Ende des Krieges begann in Deutschland die im März 1918 von Paul Rohrbach und Axel Schmidt ins Leben gerufene “Deutsch-Ukrainische Gesellschaft” (DUG) ihre Aktivitäten auszuweiten. Sie veröffentlichte eine Zeitschrift (“Die Ukraine”), die zunächst bis zum November 1922 erschien. In ihr trafen mehrere an der Ukraine interessierte Strömungen zusammen. Rohrbach und Schmidt waren primär an der Auflösung des russischen Großreichs interessiert, um aus den “Randstaaten” wirtschaftlich für Deutschland interessante und gleichzeitig die politische Lage ausgleichende Gebiete zu machen. Der liberalen Grundtendenz entsprachen das Streben nach freier Markt wirtschaft und die wie selbstverständlich vorausgesetzte Praktizierung der fundamentalen Menschenrechte durch die entstehenden Nationen. Diese beiden letzten Positionen korrespondierten mit den linkeren Exponenten der Ukrainischen Volksrepublik: den großrussischen Föderationsplänen Skoropads'kyjs und der deutschen Militärs widersprachen sie deutlich. Rohrbach war als Feind des Russischen Reiches auch Gegner seiner deutschen Sympathisanten Das Auswärtige Amt hatte sich eine Zeitlang (wie auch das Militär im Frühjahr 1918) Positives von der ukrainischen Selbständigkeit (sowohl gegen Polen als auch gegen die Entente) versprochen; im Zuge der Konsolidierung Sowjetrußlands und der von der Entente Polen gewährten Sicherheiten verlor die bürgerlich-ukrainische Eigenständigkeit dann an Bedeutung, um in abgewandeltem Kontext 1926 erneut Relevanz zu gewinnen.

I am very pleased and very honored to be a participant in this discussion. In order to understand the situation in the former Soviet Union, we must first realize that there were many backward areas that never fulfilled their Five Year Plans, yet which coexisted with areas that developed much more rapidly. To understand this fact is to look into the future of the successor states. It points to factors that will influence why some states will have constitutions and why these constitutions will often be quite similar if we speak about the future of their political systems.

Wotic is one of the Balto-Finnic languages. In the nineteenth century, there were about 5000 speakers of this language. It was spoken between Leningrad and Estonia, in the area which is known as Ingermanland. Before the Second World War, their number was already drastically reduced (a loss of about 80–90% of the speakers). In 1939, their number was between 500 and 700. Even this small number of people who still spoke the language was spread out in a number of villages. Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian and Russian researchers who tried to note down some materials in this dying language even found dialectal differences between Eastern Wotic (spoken in the village which is called in Russian Itsepino), and Western Wotic which was spoken in several villages (for instance Korvettula, Mati, Velikino, Undova etc.)

The first disagreements between Russia's Provisional Government and the Ukrainian Central Rada emerged in the spring and summer of 1917, right after the proclamation of the Rada's First Universal and the formation of the Ukrainian executive body, the General Secretariat. The arrival in Kiev in July 1917 of the Russian governmental delegation, consisting of Alexander Kerensky, Irakly Tsereteli and Mikhail Tereshchenko, and the attempts to work out a compromise—which found their embodiment in the Second Universal—led, in fact, to the political crisis in Petrograd. The majority of the Kadet ministers refused to approve the results of the negotiations in Kiev and tendered their resignations.

Ukraine's independence signaled the end of the post-war Russification of the school system and the beginning of a large scale Ukrainization of the educational sector. From the 1990–1991 school year to the 1997–1998 school year, the national authorities raised the proportion of Ukrainian-instructed school children from 47.9% to 62.8% nationwide. As the language of instruction in Ukraine's schools almost exclusively is either Ukrainian or Russian, the relative percentage of Russian-instructed school children, conversely, declined from 51.4% to 36.4% during the same period. Ukraine is not the only Soviet successor state that has promoted the language of the titular nationality in the sphere of education at the expense of Russian. In Kazakhstan, for example, the proportion of pupils receiving their education in Kazakh grew from 32.4% in 1990–1991 to 40.1% in 1993–1994, and the percentage of Russian-instructed children, accordingly, fell from 65.0% to 57.2%. In Moldova, the number of pupils studying exclusively in Moldovan increased from 424,000 to 447,000 between 1989–1990 and 1992–1993, while the number of pupils studying exclusively in Russian dropped from 290,000 to 262,000.