Moldova has been widely argued to be a failed nation-building project, with two national identity discourses coexisting within Moldovan society and amongst Moldovan elites: Romanianism and Moldovanism. Challenging the dominance of these discourses in the literature, this article argues that in spite of its absence from the nationalism debate in Moldova, the ballad Mioriţa is a key element for the Moldovan articulation of national identity. The analysis employs a discursive approach focused on language as a constituting phenomenon and draws from Mioriţa's appeal to the grass roots level, its banality in day-to-day life, and, more importantly, its promotion by Moldovan cultural elites. This latter part focuses specifically on the writings of novelist Ion Druţă. Druţă places Mioriţa at the very center of his construction of Moldovan national identity. He highlights its links with Moldovan history, culture, religious thinking, and geographical space, both reproducing a structure similar to the two national identity discourses, Romanianism and Moldovanism, and building on their similarities. But more importantly, Druţă's representation of national identity sheds light on the possibility of an all-encompassing Moldovan identity, overcoming the existing cleavage, and a series of mechanisms that can be employed to achieve this.

Nursultan Nazarbayev has been President of Kazakhstan since that country became independent in 1991. Observers expect him to remain in his current position until 2013, and there are clear indications that he has started to prepare for his daughter, Dariga Nazarbayeva, to take over power after 2013. Analyses of Kazakhstan's foreign policy therefore both has had and will continue to have a close focus on the person of Nursultan Nazarbayev. In addition, this is all the more true because foreign policy in Kazakhstan to an extreme degree is a one-man affair. The present article discusses the interplay between personal and national interests as motivating factors in the foreign policy of Nazarbayev. More specifically, it investigates how these different types of motivation have influenced Nazarbayev's attempts to seek partnership with or distance from the USA and Russia.

Empire depends not only upon the strength of the center but upon compliant behavior in the periphery, and the nature of interactions between center and periphery. Each of these three variables is changing rapidly in the former Soviet empire.

“The following text on the activity, views and plans of the Coalition Party is based on interviews with the party's chairman, Tiit Vahi, published in the monthly supplement of the Hommikuleht (“Morning Paper”) and Rahva Hääl (“People's Voice”) daily newspapers.

In 1944, the Soviet Army recaptured Galicia and Transcarpathia from the Germans, and the last stronghold of Ukrainian Greek Catholicism fell under Soviet control. Following the arrests of all Uniate bishops and of the “recalcitrant” clergy, the Lviv Sobor of March 1946 nullified the 1596 Union of Brest, which first established the Greek Catholic Church, and forcibly “reunified” the Uniates with the state-controlled Russian Orthodox Church. The post-World War II period saw the gradual suppression of the Uniate Church throughout Carpatho-Ukraine, Poland, and Eastern Slovakia, and marked the beginning of more than four decades of struggle for Eastern Rite Ukrainian Catholics in the USSR to maintain their banned Church against the overpowering alliance of the Soviet regime and the Russian Orthodox Church. Despite the enforced “reunification,” the Greek Catholic Church has remained the most important cultural and institutional preserve of national identity in Western Ukraine. The following is an examination of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church's attempts to assert its right to legal existence since the beginning of political and social revitalization under Mikhail Gorbachev.

This study examines the transformation of policy toward Islam in Uzbekistan during the Gorbachev era. It considers both Moscow's policy and, as Uzbekistan began to achieve greater control over its own affairs, the policy of the republic's leaders. The article begins by placing the changes in policy toward Islam in the broader context of emerging Soviet policy toward religion during the middle of the 1960s. It then examines some of the All-Union and republic communist parties’ concessions toward Islam and attempts to use Islam in addressing the most pressing cultural, social, economic, and political problems facing Uzbekistan. The study pays particular attention to the official religious establishment and briefly explores its role in efforts by Uzbekistan's political leadership to maintain political control.

Basically this question comes down to asking: Will the economy or the economic situation be of any help in salvaging the Union? Along the way to answering that, I want to address the question of what is the relationship between economic reform and republican integration from the perspective of the Center and from the perspective of economics.

This article develops a linguistic injustice test. Language policy measures passing the test conflict with the normative ideal of equal language recognition. The first part of the test checks for external restrictions - language policies that grant more recognition to one language group than to another. The second part of the test checks for internal restrictions - language policies that grant more recognition to some members of a language group than to other members of the same group. The article then applies the linguistic injustice test to two models of linguistic justice: linguistic territoriality and linguistic pluralism. It is argued that real-life cases of linguistic territoriality tend to pass the test. It is argued that instantiations of linguistic pluralism tend to fail the test.

Freedom from the Soviet empire created an opportunity for elites of each former Soviet Socialist Republic to “nationalize” their newly independent state. Most observers of contemporary Kazakh politics would agree that Kazakhstan has taken advantage of this historic opportunity, and can thus be classified as a nationalizing state. For Rogers Brubaker, a nationalizing state is perceived by its elites as a nation-state of and for a particular nation, but simultaneously as an “incomplete” or “unrealized” nation-state. To resolve this problem of incompleteness and to counteract perceived discrimination, Brubaker argues, “nationalizing elites urge and undertake action to promote the language, culture, demographic preponderance, economic flourishing, or political hegemony of the core ethnocultural nation.” While the foundation of any Soviet successor state's nationalization program is a cluster of implemented formal policies that privilege the titular nation, these policies are often reinforced by informal practices, primarily discriminatory personnel practices, with the same function. Much has been written about Kazakhstan's nationalization strategy, and not surprisingly scholars rely on what they know about formal policies and informal practices to characterize that strategy. Little has been written, however, about the “Pugachev Rebellion” in Ust'-Kamenogorsk, Kazakhstan, and nothing has been written about the relationship between the official Kazakh reaction to what I call the “Pugachev incident,” and Kazakhstan's nationalization strategy in general. This article sorts out confusing events surrounding the Pugachev incident, and offers an interpretation of the official Kazakh reaction, which is best understood when situated in the broader context of Kazakh nationalization, to the incident.