There are basically three choices as far as the future of the Union is concerned. The first is empire by force because the current federation is a federation only by label, and so, basically, a continuation of the same. The second is confederation, Yeltsin-style, based on inter-republican treaties. Confederation could have several variants. One is the Solzhenitsyn variant; the other is that everybody will get out of the Union; and the last is the nine-minus-six-scenario. The third and last alternative Soviet future is disintegration, with outside forces attracting the pieces: Muslims attracting the Muslim republics; Eastern Europe attracting the western Republics; and Scandinavia attracting the Baltic republics.

Since the end of World War II more than one million citizens of the USSR have emigrated to the West in a unique and unprecedented movement today called the “Third Soviet Emigration.” In contrast to two earlier flights of refugees from the Revolution and from World War II, the Third Emigration is a voluntary, legally-sanctioned process involving mainly three nationalities—Jews, ethnic Germans, and Armenians. The origin of the exodus goes back to the early postwar years, but the vast majority of the emigrants have left since 1971, when the Soviet government relaxed its historic antipathy to free movement by its citizens.

This paper critically examines the Chinese framing of the “terrorist” violence in Xinjiang. Drawing on the Copenhagen school of securitization theory, it examines how the historical perception of the region as a primary source of security threats to inner China has led today's China to continue with representing the Han Chinese–Uyghur discord as an existential threat. In framing the ethnic conflict as a security issue, China has capitalized on the global “war on terror” of the early 2000s to transform the unrest into acts of Islamist terrorism to legitimize its counter-insurgency policies in Xinjiang. However, both the 2009 Urumqi riots and the 2014 Kunming attack lead us to conclude that the securitization strategy fails to quell the unrest. Not only have the Strike-Hard campaigns served to radicalize Uyghur nationalists, but also Han Chinese are not convinced that the Chinese government can contain the “terrorist” threat. Yet securitization blinds the leadership to the dysfunctional ethnic policy.

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 exerted a deep influence on the international communist movement and greatly affected the political and economic outlook in Hungary. A less well-known legacy of the uprising is what may be called the refugee experience, a momentous chapter in the history of human migration and resettlement. An examination of this experience reveals that the appearance of the Hungarian refugees in Western Europe and the New World greatly changed the development of Hungarian ethnic communities already in existence there, and that the refugees’ presence in the West continues to have lasting influence on relations between Hungary and the West.

In the past, Hungary has been both a source of refugees and a refuge for them. Many times in her history has she offered refuge to persecuted minorities and fugitives driven out of their own countries by war or other calamities. She has also sent her own refugees to the four corners of the world, after such events as the Rákóczi Uprising of the early eighteenth century, the War of Independece of 1848-49, the revolutions of 1918-19, and the Second World War.

There have been few areas of the world during the past 150 years that have beenas shaped by Jewish influences as East Central Europe. The prominent Czechwriter Milan Kundera observed seven years ago that in the years before Hitler,the Jews were the “intellectual cement,” the essentiallycosmopolitan and integrative element that forged the spiritual unit of thisregion. It was this small nation par excellence which added thequintessentially European color, tone and vitality to great cities like Berlin,Vienna, Prague, Budapest, not to mention Cracow, Lemberg and Czernowitz furtherto the east. The Nazi mass murder of the Jews, to which Stalin added his ownmacabre postscript after World War II, brought about the disappearance of thisfructifying Jewish leaven and crushed for forty years the independence of thesmaller East European nations sandwiched between Russia and Germany. Since theEuropean revolutions of 1989, these nations, re-emerging from asemi-totalitarian deep freeze, have been recovering their national identitiesand historical roots long repressed under Communist rule.

This article focuses on the shaping of the aesthetics and ideology of Eduard Limonov's National-Bolshevik Party (NBP) through the pages of the radical newspaper Limonka. In order to study the making of the NBP as a political and intellectual community, the piece discusses Limonka's editorial line, its graphic style, and the alternative cultural canon that this radical publication promoted, as well as several interviews with National-Bolshevik activists involved in this process. During its first years of existence, Limonka proposed a selection of controversial artistic, literary, and political role models, and the creation of an alternative fashion and lifestyle. The article argues that by provocatively combining totalitarian symbols, the aesthetics and posture of the historical avant-gardes, and Western counterculture, Limonka produced a collective narrative that contributed to the shaping of a new language of political protest in post-Soviet Russia. This resulted in a complex combination of stiob, a form of parody that involves an over-identification with its own object, and a neo-romantic impulse. This new discursive mode, which the article defines as “post-Soviet militant stiob” should be seen as part of a series of tactics of radical resistance to what the National-Bolsheviks saw as the dominant neoliberal discourse of the mid-1990s.

Our focus is upon problems of periodization in Belorussian and Ukrainian history. It is tempting, and perhaps even useful, at the outset of this commentary to speculate on what would be the problems addressed in a discussion of this subject had the 1917 revolution resulted in genuine national independence for the main nationalities of the Russian Empire, followed by nearly sixty years of relatively free scholarship within the context of democratic societies. Probably the early period would not have been too different from what actually occurred in the Soviet Union, with a considerable flourishing of the various national historiographies and with vigorous research into the unique elements of the particular national heritage. Indeed, we have the example of the inter-war Baltic states before us which seems to support such speculation.

Most studies of the post-Soviet space often explicitly or implicitly analyze Russia not as a new independent state but as the political successor of the USSR, thereby almost automatically leading to conclusions about Russian neo-imperialism. This paper explains how distorted discourses on the Soviet legacy originated and how they obstruct equal relations between Russia and other former Soviet republics using the example of the Baltic states.

The economic status of a country may be analyzed and measured in terms of a number of different attributes and components. The present study focuses on capital formation (i.e. generation of new wealth in the form of capital) because capital formation is a major and comprehensive determinant of the economy's growth. The ability of an economy to generate sufficient new capital is the foundation of its strength and vitality; only to a limited extent may domestic capital formation be supplemented by foreign funds.