Personal independence of scientists, particularly in social sciences, presents a multidimensional problem. We propose to base our observations mainly on the careers of scientists in Poland, as seen against the background of the relations between the power elite and the cultural elite in a communist country. There are differences in time and place, but certain general tendencies can be observed.

This article analyses how migration has affected the Roma in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) since they entered both regions in the Middle Ages. It explores the importance of migration in the culture and history of the Roma and looks at how forced migration has harmed the Roma and helped build some of the negative stereotypes and prejudices that have haunted them until today.

I will be focusing on unofficial or informal social-political activities that Soviet workers have been engaged in over the course of the last several years and, particularly, over the course of the last several months. But first, as a way of introducing that discussion of informal or unofficial activity, I would like to step back to 1987 and look at attempts on the part of the Gorbachev regime to preempt unofficial activity on the part of workers, both in order to be better able to control those activities and to use them for Gorbachev's own political purposes. From this discussion I would make the case that the failure of those attempts has lead more recently to the growth of unofficial activity among Soviet workers.

American citizens have had over two hundred years to judge the differences between liberty and license, but for Russians freedom of expression is a new, heady, unsettling experience. Glasnost has not only permitted them to print liberal, democratic sentiments, but opened up a Pandora's Box of suppressed anger and frustration at what many Russians consider the systematic destruction of their culture during the Soviet period. An ugly side to this eruption of patriotic outrage has resulted in the public expression of violent hostility to the tiny fraction (less than 1%) of the Soviet population who are Jewish. It is in this context that Ogonek's sophisticated handling of certain unsavory aspects of the Russian nationalist movement deserves special attention. Under the guidance of its chief editor, Vitalii Korotich, the weekly magazine has not limited its coverage to such neo-Nazi organizations as Pamyat (Memory) and “Otechestvo” (Fatherland), but focussed attention also on the important role in fomenting antisemitism being played by certain prominent members of an immensely important but little known organization, the Russian Republic Writers' Union. Ogonek has handled both sources of antisemitism with the traditional weapons of democratic pluralism: exposure to public scrutiny, and deflation through satire and ridicule.

In the spring of 1990, Lithuanians surprised the world by first declaring their independence and then, after Moscow had declared the act illegal, refusing to retract their declaration even in the face of military occupation and economic blockade. Many foreign observers despaired of their “stubbornness,” but the Lithuanians' determination was based on their newly regained national pride as expressed in their concept of statehood (valstybingumas in Lithuanian and gosudarstvennost' in Russian). Lithania, they insisted, had a right and a historical destiny to be an independent state.

Walter C. Clemens, Jr. Negotiating a New Life: Burdens of Empire and Independence—the Case of the Baltics

The Soviet Union disappeared in 1991 but, dying, gave birth to many new shoots of life, each struggling to survive and flourish despite great difficulties. Devolution of empire rarely proceeds without pain; it often causes, or results from, great violence. The first year of independent life for the successor states of the USSR witnessed much less violence than attended the demise of other great empires in this century. None had to fight for liberation as did Algeria and Angola. The fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh and South Ossetia does not approach the violence seen in the breakup of India, the attempted secessions of Katanga and Biafra, or the Croatian-Serbian war.

This article examines the current heroization of Ukrainian nationalist leader, Stepan Bandera, as manifested in monuments and commemorative practices. It offers a topographic survey that reveals the extent and variety of modes of Bandera heroization. It examines the esthetic and historical controversies that surround Bandera memorialization. It enquires into the personal motivations and political strategies that underlie the effort to project the chosen image of Bandera upon the public space in highly visible terms. It suggests that the campaign in favor of memorializing Bandera can best be understood in performative terms. It is in depicting Bandera as a hero of Ukraine that Bandera becomes a hero of Ukraine.

By 1920 nationalist forces had won independent statehood for Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. But they owed their victory to a propitious sequence of world-shaking events: first, the German defeat of Russia followed by the Entente defeat of Germany; second, the subsequent assistance the Entente rendered nationalist Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians in beating back the Red tide. Peter the Great's “window on Europe” was thereby reduced to a Soviet aperture on Europe. Only the narrow Gulf of Finland, flanked by a “White” Finland and a “White” Estonia, afforded the USSR direct access to the Baltic Sea.

The resurgence of Germany under Hitler and Soviet Russia under Stalin overturned the configuration of world power that had attended the birth of the Baltic Republics. In treating the fate that befell the Baltic States confronted by the resurgence of German and Soviet power in 1939, this article has three aims: first, to give due attention to German policy towards the Baltic States; second, to assess the efficacy and wisdom of the policies pursued by the Baltic States to avoid being ground between the Hitler and the Stalin millstones; and third, to incorporate pertinent new information published in the USSR since 1989. Even under the “Gorbachev Revolution,” publication of newly declassified diplomatic papers in the USSR has been conducted, so far, by dozirovka; i.e., the measuring out of information in small doses. This previously unpublished material, though exiguous, can at least begin to fill certain glaring “blank spots” in the history of the Baltic Question in 1939.