The present brief commentary is focused primarily on a topic which at first appearance might seem tangential, but which nevertheless is of central importance to a sociological study of dissent among the non-Russian people of the Soviet Union, who together make up approximately one-half of that country's total population. Ongoing sociological study of any phenomenon ideally is characterized by a data-theory cycle, where a conceptual or theoretical model or framework helps guide empirical research, and where the social reality manifest in observations or the data collected continually tests and refines the guiding model or framework. The ideal is, of course, rarely attained, a matter most noticeable and pronounced in the study of “Soviet minorities.”

The article seeks to explore the common ground between biopolitics, fashion, patriotism and nostalgia. Taking off from the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics as a control apparatus exerted over a population, I provide an insight into the modern construction of the Russian nation, where personal and collective sacrifice, traditional femininity and masculinity, orthodox religion, and the Great Patriotic War become the basis for patriotism. On carefully chosen case studies, I will show how the state directly and indirectly regulates people's lives by producing narratives, which are translated (in some cases designers act as mouthpieces for the state demographic or military politics) into fashionable discourses and, with a core of time, create specific gender norms – women are seen as fertile mothers giving birth to new soldiers, while men are shown as fighters and defenders of their nation. In the constructed discourses, conservative ideals become a ground for the creation of an idea of a nation as one biological body, where brothers and sisters are united together. In these fashionable narratives, people's bodies become a battlefield of domestic politics. Fashion produces a narrative of a healthy nation to ensure the healthy work- and military force.

In world history, parts of Western Central Asia (see the previous map) remained colonies of an imperialist Russia and political system for nearly two centuries before the 1990s. Eastern Central Asia, long dominated by Chinese overlords, continues in deep subordination today. These political realities color and underpin much of the writing and publication that appears in the present Annotated Bibliography.

The uneven course of Hungary's domestic politics and its relations with its socialist neighbors, which have large Magyar populations, has deeply affected the evolution of its minorities' policies since 1948. Initially, the minorities question seemed to be an insignificant issue, since 1949 census figures showed that only 128,758 people out of a total population of 9,204 799 chose something other than Hungarian as their primary language.

Hungarian, Saxon, and Romanian nationalist activists in Transylvania disseminated competing claims to “Westernness” by swaying visiting British travel writers' descriptions through hospitality networks that guided what writers saw and heard, assuring that travelers favored the nationalists' classifications of the region's ethnicities. Although the qualities British travelers valued varied depending on individual differences and intellectual currents such as enlightened reform, scientific racism, and the romantic revival, travelers consistently ascribed the qualities they best favored to the nationality on whose hospitality they relied. Wealth and time of travel determined which hospitality networks travelers favored. The Hungarian noble elites hosted most travelers until 1918, when the newly dominant Romanian nobility replaced them. Throughout, peasant voices especially remained marginalized.