Late Imperial Russian society experienced a time of profound social and cultural change in spite of the fact that aristocratic privilege and monarchical power endured until 1917. Contemporary writers bear witness to an emerging working-class consciousness in the cities, a peasant culture increasingly in contact with the wider world of the city and beyond, and a literary culture shaped by the latest currents in the experimental modernism of the West.1 Scholars have long explored the Russian variant of interest group politics that emerged in the wake of the Great Reforms, such as technological innovation and the Russian Navy, the development of a legal consciousness, new cultural expectations about the city and the process of urbanization, the modern aspirations and ambitions of a thriving popular culture, and even an emerging modern set of assumptions about individual sexual autonomy.2

The migration and settlement of Russians throughout the former Soviet Union in combination with rising nationalism have resulted in a set of conditions that will probably result in considerable national conflict. From an operational perspective, the subjective definition of a nation is the most useful. A nation is a self-defining community whose members claim a common ancestry and a common destiny. They also claim a common geographic origin, the national homeland, over which they claim an exclusive, proprietary right. In fact, nations seek to ensure their destiny by controlling the national homeland for the benefit of their nation, and by promoting the indigeneous nation to a dominant, preferential position. A primordial connection between nation and homeland—blood and soil—is claimed, which results in a geographic or spatial identity, imbued with great emotion as the sacred ancestral land. The national homeland is delimited and justified by either history, demography, or both. Although demographic dominance can generally be claimed by only one nation, the historical claim can be made by more than one, and frequently the demographic claim is reinforced by the historical argument. Most national and ethnic conflict is provoked by conflicting claims to the homeland or aliens residing in the national homeland. Thus, as a rule, the more ethnically homogeneous the homeland, the less the conflict among nations. Of course, this is not always the case. A major national goal is ethnic homogeneity in the national homeland, as various restrictive language, citizenship, and immigration laws demonstrate. Yet this aim will not be sought at the expense of control over ancestral territory.

As the post-1989 outlines of historical evolution come into focus, two fundamental and ancient forces help shape post-communist societies, both in the countries of the former Soviet bloc and in the territorium of the once Soviet Union: one is dynamic cultural and political ethnicity; the other is potent revivals of religious activity. These phenomena are interrelated, perhaps inextricably intertwined, though conceptually distinct.

Just as Mikhail Gorbachev, in announcing the goals of perestroika and setting the spirit of glasnost', had no program in his scheme to resuscitate the Soviet Union to accommodate the explosion of republican separatism and the tidal wave of ethno-politics, neither had he given any thought to the potential of grassroots revitalization of religious life. To his surprise, spiritual and social religious activities forcefully entered onto the stage of post-Brezhnev civic society throughout the USSR.

Getting a fix on Estonians’ state of mind was difficult in the years before and after September 1991. The runup and aftermath of independence produced what an observer in Estonian Life called a “psychic rollercoaster”—euphoric hopes, long periods of boredom, and moments of sheer terror as Soviet agents struck hard at Baltic independence. Earlier years of collective obedience training had produced the effect of psychic numbing. In the 1990s Estonians dared to think and feel.

In the aftermath of the June 2010 violence in southern Kyrgyzstan, much scholarly attention has focused on its causes. However, observers have taken little notice of the fact that while such urban areas as Osh, Jalal-Abad, and Bazar-Korgon were caught up in violence, some towns in southern Kyrgyzstan that were close to the conflict sites and had considerable conflict potential had managed to avoid the violence. Thus, while the question, “What were the causes of the June 2010 violence?” is important, we have few answers to the question, “Why did the conflict break out in some places but not others with similar conflict potential?” Located in the theoretical literature on “the local turn” within peacekeeping studies, this article is based on extensive empirical fieldwork to explore the local and micro-level dimensions of peacekeeping. It seeks to understand why and how local leaders and residents in some places in southern Kyrgyzstan managed to prevent the deadly clashes associated with Osh, Jalal-Abad, and Bazar-Korgon. The main focus of the project is on Aravan, a town with a mixed ethnic population where residents managed to avert interethnic clashes during the June 2010 unrest. The answers to the question of why violence did not occur can yield important lessons for conflict management not only for southern Kyrgyzstan, but also for the entire Central Asian region.

In Polish history, Prince Adam Czartoryski is almost universally regarded as one of the most important Polish statesmen and patriots of the first half of the nineteenth century. In Russian history, on the other hand, he is remembered chiefly as the Foreign Minister of the Russian Empire, and a close personal friend of Tsar Alexander I. How did Czartoryski reconcile his commitment to the Polish nation with his service to the Russian Empire (a state which occupied most of Poland)? This paper will attempt to place Prince Adam's friendship with Alexander, and his service to Imperial Russia, in the broader context of national identity formation in early nineteenth-century eastern Europe. It will be argued that the idea of finding a workable relationship between Poland and Russia, even within the framework of a single state for a “Slavic nation,” was an important and forgotten feature of Polish political thought at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By answering the question of precisely how Czartoryski was able to negotiate between the identities of a “Polish patriot” and “Russian statesman,” the paper will shed light on the broader development of national identity in early nineteenth-century Poland and Russia.

A vibrant countercultural and dissident movement developed in Romania between 1965 and 1975. Young Romanians combined elements of the global youth movement with local cultural and political practices. Thus, Romanian counterculture and dissent shared the era's hippie aesthetic and anti-authoritarianism, but was highly isolationist, vehemently antisocialist and heavily couched in the language of the nation and nationalism. Furthermore, during this early Ceauşescu period, the socialist regime attracted some level of nonconformist support through a program of reform, opposition to Soviet interference, and nationalist rhetoric. These conclusions demonstrate that the rubric of 1960s counterculture needs to be extended to include a variety of ideological and cultural positions beyond the New Left that scholars generally emphasize. Furthermore, scholarly avoidance of Ceauşescu's early period has obscured the existence of an alternative culture, and has led to an un-nuanced interpretation of Romania's postwar history.