This study concerns how people throughout Uzbekistan were making sense of the tremendous socioeconomic changes taking place in their Central Asian republic during their first decade of independence from Soviet rule in 1991. This paper analyzes talk about the daily struggles of Uzbekistanis in order to arrive at ground-level insight about the kind of postsocialist state Uzbekistan was becoming in the 1990s, and how its citizens envisioned it. The extent to which people felt empowered to understand and potentially act on social issues, I argue, depended on geographical location. Looking at a series of focus group interviews conducted in three Uzbekistani cities in 1996, I identify spatial inflections in talk about social problems. The results of the study allow us to think about the Uzbekistani state's changing bases of legitimation since the late 1990s.

Developments in Serbia's democratic consolidation over the past six years have been both ongoing and progressive. Yet the establishment of a widely shared and collectively accepted political culture that has departed from the ethnocentric and euroskeptic narratives of the Milošević era remains incomplete. Additionally, the failure by Serbian socio-political elites in appropriating alternative narratives of Serbian history and culture that demonstrate a tradition of shared values and identities with other European communities has stymied public acceptance of Serbia's European integration and public trust among its leaders. This paper argues that Serbian socio-political elites can appropriate narratives and symbols of Serbian collective identity that have been either sidelined or neglected by previously established ethnocentric narratives, and ascribe new systems of meaning and codes of behavior that qualify European liberal democratic values. I argue that a plentiful reservoir of democratic capital can be found in the histories of Serbian communities in Vojvodina over the past three centuries, and the urban cosmopolitanism of Belgrade from the late 1860s up to the present period.

For several years, various nationalist groups and the Russian state have been competing over nationalism as a political concept and for popular support to nationalist claims. This paper analyzes the relationship between the state and anti-government, ethnocentric nationalistic groups that gather annually in an event called “the Russian March.” Emphasis is on the change in that relationship that happened in 2014, when the state added efforts to channel and mobilize the nationalists to its previous repressive and controlling measures. The article conceptualizes the competition over the nationalist argument in contemporary Russia as a case of dissentful and consentful contention in hybrid regimes, and shows how the dissentful nationalists have been forced to make way for the more consentful ones. Until recently, the room for maneuver for the radical nationalists was relatively wide. The events in Ukraine, however, divided the nationalists, and since 2014 radical nationalists have faced increased state repression. At the same time, pro-government nationalist actors have strengthened, and new players have appeared in the field. These developments tell us not only about the Kremlin's diminished tolerance for dissentful contention, but also about the importance of the nationalist argument in Russian politics today.

The December 2002 issue of Nationalities Papers is my last as editor. Steve Sabol, assistant professor of history at University of North Carolina, Charlotte, begins his four-year term as editor with the March 2003 issue. I am sure he will take as much pleasure in editing this journal as I have.

In December 1995, Kazakstan celebrated its fifth anniversary as a sovereign state, although the rich, tumultuous history of the Kazaks themselves encompasses more than five centuries. The complexity of this history is revealed in a statement by Kemal Akishev, a well-known archeologist: “Kazakstan reveals itself through territorial contact, where, beginning in ancient times, infiltration and aggression, immigration and ethnic immigration, the integration and spreading of culture, and racial and linguistic palimpsests took place.” The ethnogenesis of the Kazak people can be divided into three periods: the pre-Turkic, the Turkic, and the Turko-Mongolian periods. The development of modern Kazakstan likewise falls into three periods: the pre-revolutionary, the Soviet, and the modern republic.

In exploring the history of the Russian minority in Estonia during 1918–1940, one is inevitably drawn to the figure of Professor Mikhail Anatolevich Kurchinskii (1876–1939). An academic and journalist, Kurchinskii was also an important political actor devoted to the quest for a satisfactory resolution of the nationality question in Estonia and Europe. It is with good reason that Kurchinskii has been called “the most important theoretician and practical advocate of cultural autonomy amongst the [interwar] Russian minority in Estonia.” From 1927 he also served as a leading member of the Congress of European Minorities (CEM), which became the main promoter of the cultural autonomy concept on the wider European stage. During the same period he took a deep interest in the work of the Pan-Europe movement and the quest for a durable settlement of European affairs following the traumas of World War I. Until very recently, however, Kurchinskii has remained a neglected figure among historians, even within the narrow field of Baltic studies. This neglect is symptomatic of the lack of attention devoted to the political history of the Russian minority more generally. As the first group to implement Estonia's celebrated 1925 law on cultural autonomy, the interwar German minority has already formed the object of a number of studies. By contrast, Kurchinskii's failure to realize the autonomy project means that he—and, indeed, the Russian minority as a whole—barely receives a mention in most histories of Estonia. Just as Kurchinskii's aspirations regarding cultural autonomy were never realized during his lifetime, so his vision of building a “New Europe” faded against the background of economic depression and a retreat into inward-looking national particularism during the 1930s. The tragic fate that befell central and eastern Europe after 1939 has in turn tended to obscure many of the ideas and positive achievements of the interwar minorities movement. This article uses Kurchinskii's career to illuminate issues relating to the sociopolitical development of the Russian minority between the wars. In particular it compares Kurchinskii's thinking on minority issues with that of his rival Aleksei Janson (1866–1940), a socialist politician and pedagogical expert who served as Russian National Secretary in the Estonian Ministry of Education from 1922 to 1927. Finally, by linking Kurchinskii's quest for cultural autonomy to his broader thinking on the “New Europe,” the article assesses the relevance of these ideas to contemporary debates on the nationality question.

This article seeks to analyze the ideology of the RNE as represented by its undisputed leader Barkashov and by the RNE Council which he dominates. Particular attention is paid to RNE's relation to Russian ethnicity. The first part discusses Barkashov and his organization's policies with regard to the russkii (ethnic Russian) nation and to Russian nationalism. Then follows a critical review of the RNE's relation to nazism and fascism. The article then considers the RNE's ideas about how the new Russian state should be shaped, i.e., its political and economic program. Finally, the RNE is placed in the wider Russian political landscape by means of a discussion of its political friends and foes.

I guess after the atmospherics of ideology and so on, Alexander Motyl thought that, like Anteus, we could not stay in the air the whole time, that we would have to come down to the ground with resources.

The aim of the paper is to go beyond the commonly accepted view of Sarajevo's Plavi orkestar (The Blue Orchestra) as the 1980s “teen pop-rock sensation” and illuminate the less conspicuous, but nevertheless crucial, political dimension of the band's music and visual aesthetics. This will be done by discussing several “pieces of the puzzle” essential to understanding the background to and motivations behind Plavi orkestar‘s political engagement in the second half of the 1980s: (1) the “Sarajevo factor;” (2) the Sarajevo Pop-rock School and the New Primitives “poetics of the local;” (3) the generational Yugoslavism; (4) the New Partisans “poetics of the patriotic;” and (5) the post-New Partisans “hippie ethos.” The concluding section of the paper will reflect on Plavi orkestar‘s resurgence in 1998 and explore the question of the band's continuing resonance within the post-Yugoslav and post-socialist contexts. An argument underlying the discussion of all of these elements is that Plavi orkestar's Yugoslavism of the 1980s is best understood as a soundtrack for the country that never was (i.e. a popular-cultural expression of what, from the viewpoint of a particular generational cohort and its location in the “Yugoslav socialist universe,” the community they thought of as their own ought to have been but never really was), and that the current value of this soundtrack lies in offering not only a particular window into the pre-post-socialist past but also in being a symbolic referent for a certain kind of retrospective Utopia that gauges the realities of the post-socialist – that is, neo-liberal capitalist – present and, in so doing, figures as a “normative compass” for the life of dignified existence.

The colonial dependence of nations and their arbitrary de-nationalization in our time can neither be approved nor tolerated by democratic countries. It is also impossible to speak of human rights in countries where basic freedoms do not exist, and one basic human right is the right of every nationality to independence. Nevertheless, colonial-imperialistic relations continue to exist in today's world, and a glaring example is in the USSR.

There has been a tremendous proliferation of informal groups in the Soviet Union, by which I mean any organization that comes into being that is independent of the state, where citizens come together, create a group, promote their various intersts, be they political or nonpolitical. Pravda estimates approximately 60,000 of them this year alone; it gave a figure of 30,000 just one year ago. This phenomenon is hard to measure and most Soviet commentators, writers and sociologists basically throw up their arms and say that there are thousands and thousands of these various groups popping up everywhere: some small, some obviously larger with greater networks. I would like to sketch out some of the problems that I found, some of the areas that are worth investigating, and put forward some proposals that we may want to tackle in the discussion subsequent to this panel presentation.