At the formation of the second Polish republic in 1918 the Communist Workers Party of Poland (KPRP) displayed total disregard for the Polish national feelings. Polish communists actively opposed the creation of the new Polish state which they thought would impede the march of revolution from Russia to the West. They saw Polish national liberation as an expression of a bourgeois ideology hostile to the interests of the Polish workers. True national liberation, they maintained, could only be achieved by the way of the international proletarian revolution.

The following statement was delivered by His Holiness Vazken I, Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of All Armenians, over Yerevan State Television following the bloody confrontation on July 5-6, 1988, at Yerevan's International Airport in which Armenian activists and Soviet troops clashed.

My beloved people, citizens of our mother country, at this hour of trial, I, Catholicos of All Armenians, address all of you from Holy Etchmiadzin. First, I must express my condolences to all those who suffered on July 5 this year during the events that took place near Zvartnots International Airport. I was told that one of [the activists] died. I pray for his soul, and grieve over his death together with his relatives. I also deeply regret that our soldiers were among the wounded.

I'll start with culture. Today we have been speaking principally about culture in the republics. I would like to address the common problems facing the post-Soviet republics. I agree with Edward Allworth that there is a crisis or trauma not only for the national intellectuals, but for intellectuals as a whole. This is especially a trauma for intellectuals who were supported by the state. They had very comfortable lives inside the institutes and the cultural unions. Now these privileges are disappearing. Previously intellectuals’ lives were characterized by a kind of self-adoration of their positions, of their purity, of their disengagement from political life, and this stance is now also in crisis. Recently, I read a very interesting article which said that today nobody wants to engage in the escapist literature that was once so popular. Nobody wants to hear about themes of history, of Egypt, the Silver Age, and so on because politics is now the hot topic in cultural life. A similar situation occurred in the Prague Spring, and we know that the results in this case were very fruitful. Havel, who was a very sophisticated journal writer, became a very contemporary, very active, and essential writer. And I consider this crisis, this struggle of intellectuals, a good sign. The people who will survive will be those whom other people read. Conversely, Chengiz Aitmatov, who was long a friend of the national struggle, who made a name for himself as a writer concerned with conditions in Kirgizia, and who was a defender of the national traditions, now prefers to be Ambassador to Luxembourg. While I was very surprised by this, this is also typical of the struggle to which I refer. Secondly, as Professor Allworth noted, it is true that Kazakh leaders

The relationship between Islam and ethnicity has generally been studied almost exclusively from a theoretical (theological) and/or practical (historical) viewpoint of the Muslims themselves. If we observe this problem from another point of view, that of the Islamized natives, we discover that there exists a tacit consensus as to the three levels or degrees according to which Islamized peoples can be classified: (a) a maximum or even total confluence of Islam and ethnicity, as in the Arab lands and in Daghestan; (b) a partial distinction between Islam and ethnicity, stemming from a certain ‘ethnicization’ of Islam, as in Shia Iran; and (c) a somewhat vague decentralization between these two focal points, as in Turkestan, Subsaharan Africa and Southeast Asia.

In early 1983 I concluded my book on Iu. V. Andropov with the prediction: “This is how Andropov's country will advance toward its own 1984 which hopefully will not correspond to Orwell's description.” Scarcely one year later the Soviet Union did actually enter 1984 — both in the chronological and in the profounder sense — but without Andropov. And it probably happened against Andropov's desires and expectations.

The development of new states in Central and Eastern Europe during the inter-war period was an enthusiastic attempt to build free and democratic societies, which unfortunately was soon followed by a sense of disappointment among both the public and political elites. This eventually led to the replacement of the young democracies with authoritarian regimes in Estonia, Lithuania, Poland and other countries. I explore this growth of anti-democratic tendencies through the case of Latvian democracy and its opponents in the 1920s and early 1930s. I particularly focus on the role of the nationalist intelligentsia as the author of anti-democratic and pro-authoritarian political ideas.