I would like to discuss the subject of the ethnic dimension of cadre policies. The basis of cadre policy came from Stalin, and the Stalinist approach to cadres remains basically unchanged. True, this approach may not be working in some areas of the Soviet Union today; still, the basic approach has never been changed.

Studies of southern and eastern European ethnic groups in the United States often become submerged in the ongoing argument of assimilation vs. cultural pluralism. As a result, underlying factors affecting the persistence or dissolution of a particular group are obscured or ignored. Social, historical, cultural, religious, political, and economic aspects of ethnic differences are useful targets of analysis. However, much of the research on ethnicity is devoted to documenting the loss or retention of specific cultural traits such as language, religion, or custom. Thus, two distinct though related problems emerge: 1) a tendency to “rate” ethnic groups in terms of degree of assimilation or cultural distinctiveness; and 2) a reliance on cultural indicators as the sole measure of ethnic persistence.

This paper returns to a topic the author dealt with in a more basic form some years ago. But it also makes an attempt to conceptualize the development of independent Belarus through its population migration to urban centers and especially its capital city, a development that dates exclusively from the post-1945 period, but that paradoxically has prevented this republic from experiencing the sort of modernization processes evident elsewhere in Europe. It takes as its starting point the pioneering work by the German historian Thomas Bohn (Bon/Bohn 2013) titled The Minsk Phenomenon and develops it further by linking it to demographic issues, current health concerns, and problems in industrial development.

The 1989/1991 demise of European communist regimes created a powerful impulse for the investigation of memory cultures at Cold War borders and, subsequently, for reflections on the creation of new European border regimes. The four studies included in this special section investigate these two processes on a micro level of their dynamics in new and old borderlands from the perspectives of history, anthropology and political science. At the same time, they explore the relations between the everyday life experience of borderland communities and larger historical and political processes, sometimes going back to the re-drawing of European borders in the aftermath of the First World War.

It is the hybrid nature of borders as at the same time separating and connecting (Anzaldúa 1987; Gupta and Fergusson 1997), as the place where “a transition between two worlds is most pronounced” (Van Gennep 1960 paraphrased in Berdahl 1999, 12) that makes them such an attractive and interdisciplinary site of research. It is of interest to geographers, historians, anthropologists, sociologists and other social scientists (e.g. Donnan and Wilson 1994; Anderson 1997; Ganster et al. 1997; Breysach, Paszek, and Tölle 2003; Wastl-Walter 2010). Daphne Berdahl sees boundaries as “symbols through which states, nations, and localities define themselves. They define at once territorial limits and sociocultural space” (Berdahl 1999, 3). Border research distinguishes between “border,” “bordering,” and “borderland” or “frontier” (the term first defined by Turner 1921). While borders connote a dividing line, borderlands connote an area, and bordering refers to the process of border- and borderland-creation. Borders are established through a three-stage process of allocation, delimitation and demarcation: a territory is first placed (allocated) under the jurisdiction of a government, then an imaginary line is drawn (delimited) on a map, and finally the boundary is marked with physical markers (demarcated) in the terrain (Sahlins 1989, 2). Borderlands or frontier zones are “privileged sites for the articulation of national distinctions” (Sahlins 1989, 271), and as such are places where difference is produced and institutionalized through territorial sovereignty, but also constantly renegotiated by multiple actors.

As with many states, in the case of Slovenia two songs principally contend for the position of national anthem. In this case an apparent ideological gulf masks perhaps a more essential temperamental divide: the bellicose army song versus the happy drinking “all together…” number. Vacillation between “Zdravljica” (“A Toast”) and “Naprej zastava slave,” (“Forward, Flag of Glory”) might be taken as reflecting the ambivalence with regard to potentially hostile others one reads attributed to Jesus Christ in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke: who's not with me is against me/who's not against me is with me. The 1989 adoption of “Zdravljica” (lyrics courtesy of Slovenia's national poet France Prešeren) is strongly suggestive of an outward looking state, one hoping for a place in a cosmopolitan Europe. “Naprej zastava slave” has remained the anthem of the Slovenian army and so is far from being discarded for the purpose of asserting Slovenian national aspirations. Perhaps retaining it in this minor role has been necessary because “Zdravljica” is a song which - at least as it is presently sung — de-emphasises national aspiration to a degree unusual for the anthem genre. In a crossroads of Europe dominated historically by the national (or imperial) aspirations of larger and more powerful political entities, “Zdravljica” is a song which tests the limits of what an anthem can be by holding out a hope of rising above the national.

The disintegration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) resulted in demographic shifts and drew new boundaries in a once borderless region. The South Caucasus, an area that has been characterized by its linguistic diversity witnessed one of the most destructive interethnic wars in the former USSR. Fought between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, it resulted in the removal of the Azerbaijani population. Two decades later the political status of the self-declared Nagorno-Karabakh Republic remains unresolved, but apparently a new linguistic self-identity of the population takes shape. While possibilities for extensive sociolinguistic research are limited, linguistic landscape research provides insights into patterns of individual and public language use. This paper analyzes the linguistic landscapes of Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, and establishes functional domains of the languages visible. Furthermore, it traces remnants of an Azerbaijani linguistic landscape in abandoned settlements and documents patterns of language use in rural parts of the territory. The demographic situation suggests a majority of Armenians, yet the results point toward a bilingual situation with Russian as a language of wider communication. On the other hand, the study shows the link between the removal of Azerbaijani from the public sphere and the eradication of Azerbaijani culture.

Opposition to Soviet rule has deep roots and traditions in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Modern dissentism, however, is a response to Soviet rule different from what we call opposition in the West. In the Baltic republics it must be dated from 1968, the watershed year in the rise of human rights movement in the Soviet Union. In Estonia and Latvia, dissident activity was galvanized to life primarily by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia which provoked vocal criticism. In Lithuania, reaction to Czechoslovakia's occupation coincided with the growing concern that an increasingly severe implementation of prohibitive anti-religious legislation will choke off the existence of the Catholic church. Concern for religious rights served as the primary catalyst for the reborn dissent movement in Lithuania.

This paper studies how religions, Islam in particular, play a part in the attempted reifications of “neo-ethnic” identities in Kyrgyzstan, a Turkic-speaking republic with a nomadic tradition and a Muslim majority (Hanafî Sunni Islam). In a context characterized by brutal transformations (decline in living standards, widening social inequalities, etc.) and by an increasingly failing central state whose autocratic rule appears ineffective, Islam intervenes as a paradoxical resource that is subjected to contrary uses. The traditional social link between collective identity and Islam is in fact reinvested ideologically within the framework of the new state construction. As a result a key question is what function the re-emergence of religion on the Kyrgyz political scene fulfils, especially considering broad disenchantment with politics. Islam is first re-emphasized as a national element by the authorities and, in the process, it becomes the subject of a drive towards territorialization that aims at erasing any transnational and/or pan-Islamist dimension from this universalist religion. Yet Islam and ethnicity are reinvested again in a new mode, the mode of subjectivization of religious belief, which gives rise, outside state control, to overlapping and often contradicting Islamic identities.