The Congress considers it necessary to inform you that, according to the opinion of its participants, the laws on education and culture adopted in 1993 by the State Assembly of the Republic of Estonia do not correspond to the interests of the Russian language population of Estonia. We cannot accept the situation where, by legal means, our children are left without the possibility of getting secondary education in their mother tongue in state subsidized high schools. We regard them as a violation of one of the most fundamental principles of the Universal Declaration of the Human Rights. Possibilities of getting higher education in Russian in the institutions of higher education of the Republic of Estonia are also being cut to a minimum. We should remember that, even during the most gloomy years of the Stalinist totalitarian regime, Estonian youth could and did get elementary and secondary as well as higher education in Estonian, their native language. Why then in a democratic Estonia is the Russian language population legally deprived of the right to secondary education in their mother tongue?

I start instinctively as the airplane swings on its descent toward a stretch of land that is my country. A simple view from an aircraft approaching the Ljubljana airport suddenly becomes a fictitious vision of the ‘memory landscape’ conveyed by Dušan Kirbiš in his picture Gesichte einer Jugend (1984). Under the lowered, steel grey sky, among patches of snow-covered landscape, I catch glimpses of a dark green surface which reminds me of the woodland above the Sava river—the Kočevski rog forest or the Pohorje hillsides of dark, peaceful, impenetrable woods and sparse clearings with remote, unfriendly houses. In the coolness of this vision, the landscape of Slovenia looks both like a satellite photo and an object of fantasy.

Nostalgia for the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, yugonostalgia, has become widespread throughout the former Yugoslavia. It takes various forms and expressions, but it represents a selective and largely embellished remembrance, influenced by the need of those who engage in it to escape from the unsatisfying present they live in. In most cases, yugonostalgia is a bittersweet craving for the past – passive, static, and restricted. The paper argues that the actions inspired by yugonostalgia not only can have an active, dynamic, and progressive face, but can also serve as an important factor in the reconciliation process among former Yugoslavs. With its focus on positive and inclusive aspects of the common socialist past, yugonostalgia has the potential to (re)connect the nostalgic subjects throughout the former Yugoslav space, helping them to overcome the alienation that resulted from the violent dissolution of the common state.

This article by Zenon Pozniak is the last of a two-part series on the question of bilingualism. Part one, an article by Maté Hint, appeared in Volume XVI, Number 1 (Spring 1988) pp. 94-105.

Unlike in some other former Soviet republics, when Kyrgyzstan achieved independence in 1991 its government granted citizenship to all residents, regardless of ethnicity or language. The government hoped this would help to quell incipient ethnic tensions in the country before they got out of hand. It was argued that, in a constantly changing ethnic landscape, citizens' identification with the country above all other considerations, including ethnicity and religion, would introduce a degree of stability—a common denominator for all residents of Kyrgyzstan, where there is a relatively high level of ethnic diversity (see Table 1).

Until Gorbachev's glasnost', Soviet treatment of nationalities problems within the USSR ranged from carefully worded ethnographic studies to utterly dishonest articles in the political press. Much of this has changed, and we are now able to read some revealing works in the pages of avant-garde Soviet publications. Among the latter, Vikukaar (Tallin) and its Russian Raduga edition (which is not the exact twin of its Estonian counterpart), are remarkable by their frankness.