In Estonia, parties have, within a short period of time and with little trouble, assumed a dominating position in the political process.

On the eve of the October revolution most of Central Asia was a tsarist colony with the exception of the Amaret of Bukhara. Islam as a religion and a way of life had become more and more ibadah (religious ritual) and less and less as a program of action for the ummah. The tsarist functionaries deprived its religious and educational institutions from their major sources of income (the auqāf) and encouraged instead a program of russification through the schools, specially the Russian-Native schools (russkotuzamnaya shkola) and active conversion of the Muslims of Turkestan to Orthodox Christianity through organizations such as the Anti-Muslim Missionary Division (protivo-musul'manskoe missionerskoe otdelenie), of the Kazan Ecclesiastical Academy. Aside from these and settlements of the Slav immigrants on the Turkestanis lands by force and without compensation the Tsarist government interfered very little in the Central Asian way of life. Almost all of the religious laws (Shariah) dealing with the domestic matters, and the customary laws of the land (adāt) were kept intact.

The European Parliament (EP) adopted, between 2004 and 2009, a series of resolutions calling for recognition of Communist crimes and commemoration of their victims. This article focuses on an overlooked aspect of anti-Communist activism, the awareness-raising activities carried out by some Central European Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to perpetuate the cause through networks that enable them to exchange institutional credibility, scientific legitimacy, and policy-oriented knowledge with Institutes of National Memory, parts of academia, and victims associations. Although they use the techniques of expertise and scandalization that are often effective in European institutions, these memory entrepreneurs have largely failed to further their claims in the European Union (EU) after 2009. In line with the turn toward “practice” in EU studies and the increased attention paid to agency in memory politics, this article contends that the conditions of production of their narrative of indictment of Communism accounts for this relative lack of success. Because their demands produced a strong polarization inside the EP while colliding with established Western patterns of remembrance, these MEPs’ reach remains limited to their Conservative peers from the former Eastern bloc. This weak national and ideological representativeness hinders their capacity to impose their vision of the socialist period in the European political space.

The collapse of the Soviet Union unleashed a number of violent, usually secessionist ethnic conflicts. These conflicts were typically intensified (or “escalated”) by foreign intervention. Although there is a great deal of consensus about the fundamental forces driving these conflicts and their escalation, there remain considerable theoretical differences about how to understand these factors and assess their relative importance. These differences mirror debates in the broader literature on national identity and its consequences. This article seeks to clarify these debates by elucidating some theoretical distinctions among the factors taken to contribute to the outbreak and escalation of violent ethnic conflicts. These distinctions are then applied to post-Soviet conflicts in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, and Tajikistan. The case studies bear out the relevance of the theoretical distinctions, but also reveal the difficulty of applying them unambiguously in any given case. These examples form the basis for some concluding suggestions. These suggestions aim to maximize the clarity with which theoretically distinct causal factors are empirically distinguished for purposes of testing hypotheses.

The need to handle ethnocultural diversity and the external pressures of Euro-Atlantic integration have led to the development of complex minority rights regimes in Central and Southeast European states. The aim of this paper is to perform a comparative analysis of the political representation dimension of these regimes, and to investigate how the regulations in this domain are related to the more general attitude of states toward diversity recognition and registration. For this purpose, we classify the states according to a series of variables concerning the manner in which ethnocultural diversity is recognized and portrayed, as well as the regulations concerning the representation of minorities, and identify patterns of their incidence. The formal-legal analysis of the constitutions, minority protection laws and of the electoral legislation of the included countries reveals a clear connection between the general attitude of the state toward diversity and the incidence of autonomies, and a less unequivocal, yet strong relationship in the case of minority representation in the national polity.

The Soviet military officer's motto was “I serve the Soviet Union.” He had taken an oath to a state whose leadership constantly stressed the ethnic diversity of its population. When the USSR fell apart, however, only one of its 15 successor states—the Russian Federation—did not declare itself the homeland of one specific ethnic group. The reality of the divorce was difficult to grasp for many people in the former Soviet Union. In Russia, ideas of democracy and hopes for the future of the RSFSR as an independent state were standing strong. Not all the newly independent states would be missed; the Central Asian republics were widely seen as a culturally distant periphery tapping the RSFSR of resources. However, shedding off Kazakhstan, Belarus, and above all, Ukraine was a completely different story.

The final declaration of the Conference of Security and Cooperation in Europe has affirmed the duty of the various signatory states to observe the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief for all without distinction to race, language or religion.

It is a truism that without clear cut historical terminology and determination of historical periodization, which reflect the multi-dimensional development of individual nations and states, no effective and objective historical research is possible. Therefore, historians should welcome this session which, in my opinion, can serve as a starting point in the discussion dealing with controversial problems of East European historical terminology and periodization.