This article considers the role the Soviet Union's western borderlands annexed during World War II played in the evolution of Soviet politics of empire. Using the Baltic Republics and Western Ukraine as case studies, it argues that Sovietization had a profound impact on these borderlands, integrating them into a larger Soviet polity. However, guerrilla warfare and Soviet policy-making indirectly led to these regions becoming perceived as more Western and nationalist than other parts of the Soviet Union. The Baltic Republics and Western Ukraine differed in their engagement with the Western capitalist world. Different experiences of World War II and late Stalinism and contacts with the West ultimately led to this region becoming Soviet, yet different from the rest of the Soviet Union. While the Soviet West was far from uniform, perceived differences between it and the rest of the Soviet Union justified claims at the end of the 1980s that the Soviet Union was an empire rather than a family of nations.

This paper examines the contribution of the founder of modern Ukrainian geography, Stepan Rudnyts'kyi, to Ukrainian nation-building. It demonstrates how Rudnyts'kyi put Ukraine on the mental map of the Ukrainian public before the declaration of Ukraine's independence in 1918. This is done by analyzing his key publications and showing how he formed a vision of Ukraine and delineated its territory to influence the perceptions of the Ukrainian public on the eve of the struggle for Ukraine's independence. Rudnyts'kyi's contribution is also viewed within the context of competition from rival modern nation-building projects in Eastern Europe, most notably Polish and Russian. The developments are also examined within Miroslav Hroch's periodization of national movements. Rudnyts'kyi played an important role in stage B (patriotic agitation) in Ukrainian national revival.

The main objective of the research project “Self-Identification of Meglen Vlachs” was to compare the contemporary state of Meglen Vlach culture and identity in their different settlement areas. Fieldwork sponsored by the German Research Foundation (DFG) in Meglen Vlach communities in Romania, Greece, Turkey and the Republic of Macedonia was able to identify the settlement areas of the Meglen Vlachs in Turkey. The paper represents a summary of the most important findings in Turkey.

Focusing on the development of travel between the borderlands of Ukraine and Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe, this article explores what it meant to be Soviet outside the Russian core of the USSR between the mid-1950s and the mid-1980s. The cautious opening of the Soviet border was part of a larger attempt to find fresh sources of popular support and enthusiasm for the regime's “communist” project. Before the Prague Spring of 1968 in particular, official policies and narratives of travel thus praised local inhabitants who crossed the Soviet border for supposedly overcoming age-old hatreds to build a brighter future in Eastern Europe. By the 1970s, however, smuggling and cultural consumption discredited the idea of “internationalist friendship.” This encouraged residents of Ukraine to speak and write about the continuing importance of the Soviet border. The very idea of Sovietness was defined in national terms, as narratives of travel emphasized that Soviet citizens were inherently different from ethno-national groups in the people's democracies. Eastern Europe thus emerged as an “other” that highlighted the Soviet character of territories incorporated into the USSR after 1939, helping to obscure western Ukraine's troubled past and leading to the emergence of new social hierarchies in the region.

“Tell a man today to go and build a state,” Samuel Finer once stated, “and he will try to establish a definite and defensible boundary and compel those who live inside it to obey him.” While at best an oversimplification, Finer's insight illuminates an interesting aspect of state-society relations. Who is it that builds the state? How and where do they establish territorial boundaries, and how are those who live within that territory compelled to obey? Generally speaking, these are the questions that will be addressed here. Of more immediate concern is the fate of peoples located in regions where arbitrary land boundaries fall. Are they made loyal to the state through coercion or by their own compulsions? More importantly, how are their identities shaped by the efforts of the state to differentiate them from their compatriots on the other side of the borders? How is the shift from ethnic to national identities undertaken? A parallel elaboration of the national histories of the populations of Karelia and Moldova will shed light on these questions. The histories of each group are marked by a myriad of attempts to differentiate the identity of each ethnic community from their compatriots beyond the state's borders. The results of such overt, state-initiated efforts to differentiate borderland populations by encouraging a national identity at the expense of the ethnic, has ranged from the mundane to the tragic—from uneventful assimilation to persecution and even genocide. As an illustration of the range of possibilities and processes, I maintain that the tragedies of Karelia and Moldova are not exceptional, but rather are a consequence of their geographical straddling of arbitrary borders, and the need for the state to promote a distinctive national identity for these populations to differentiate them socially from their compatriots beyond the frontier.

Let me open with two caveats. First, given the very brief length dictated for this treatment of Czech and Slovak humanisms, I have chosen to concentrate on their main lines of development and on their primary — i.e., literary — aspect. Second, domestic humanism has received comparatively little attention from Czech and Slovak historians to date. The former have been occupied primarily with the great national-religious revolt, the Hussite Reformation, with which European humanism coalesces when it reaches Bohemia and Moravia. And Slovak historians are still doing basic research into much of their nation's past.