This is a presentation that will be more concerned with impressions than with numbers. I suppose we could count the number of theaters or schools that have gone out of business. Yet I am not sure that would be an advantage in a presentation about culture. Two years ago, I was having lunch at a Theater Institute in Alma-Ata. It was a very special occasion because that morning they had just slaughtered a horse for us. And as my host told me this, he loooked me right in the eye and said, “You know, this is freshly-killed horse meat. We did it just for you.” As I responded, I returned his gaze, and said: “I love it.” And actually, it was very good, but remember that the Kazakhs, like all people of the East, are very sensitive to how people from the West regard them. That is but one small demonstration of this tendency. Another was that in the course of the meal someone suddenly came in and whispered something to someone else—remember the date, late May 1990—and everyone stood up and cheered. And I asked, “What's happened?” Somebody else said, “Yeltsin has been elected.” Two people at the table subsequently made mention of Yeltsin's popularity in the non-Russian areas and said that that this was an exciting development. Kazakhs really thought that this was a change for the better. And they were right.

Russians say that there is a defeat in every victory and a victory in every defeat. On 16 September 1999, in the Russian Republic of Dagestan, combined forces of civilian militias, police, and Russian federal troops defeated insurgent militants from Chechnya who intended to establish an independent Islamic state in the Northeast Caucasus which would have united Chechnya with Dagestan and Ingushetia. On that same date the Dagestan People's Assembly enacted legislation intended to thwart future Islamic extremism by awarding official political status to the Spiritual Directorate of the Muslims of Dagestan (DUMD).

This article is based on the preliminary results of a project on “Islam, Ethnicity and Nationalism in Post-Soviet Tatarstan and Dagestan,” which began in March 1997 and ended in September 1999. These two out of Russia's 21 autonomous republics were chosen for comparative research because, although they are both Muslim, there are obvious geographical, ethnic, cultural, and political differences between them. Each republic also represents a distinctive model of the evolution of Muslim society and its relations with Russian culture in general and with the Russian political center in particular.

With these words, the Romanian–Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian expresses within his private diary some of the darkest moments of a World War II “transfigured” Romania, populated as they are by the gothic characters of legionaries, Nazis, and antisemitism. His death soon followed in 1945, when Romania was at the threshold of fascism and communism. However, with the discovery and the subsequent publishing of Sebastian's diary in 1996, and following 50 years of communist mystification of the Jewish Holocaust, the entire chaotic war atmosphere with the fascist affections of the Romanian intellectual elite was once again brought to light with all the flavor and scent of the dark past. In this entry from Sebastian's diary he speaks of his friend, Eugen Ionescu who, born of a French-related mother and a Romanian father, was living in Bucharest at that time. He would later become known to the world as Eugène Ionesco, the famous French playwright and author of the well-known plays The Bald Soprano and The Rhinoceros. The above quote from Sebastian's journal, predating the international fame of Ionesco, but already marking the end of Sebastian's career under fascism, remains a traumatizing testimony of the Jewish Kafkian torment as “guilt,” a deeply claustrophobic identity that many Eastern European Jewish intellectuals have learned to internalize. Beyond this symbolism, the publishing of Sebastian's diary in Romania unintentionally challenged an existent post-communist tendency of legitimizing inter-war fascist personalities within the framework of a general lack of knowledge about the Jewish Holocaust in both the communist and post-communist periods.

This article examines Russia's civics and history test, which has been mandatory, since January 2015, for millions of labor migrants applying for a work permit. An analysis of the test's content and of the context in which it was adopted provides a strong case to study how autocracies can use civics tests as instruments of control. Specifically, I argue that the test must be understood in light of Russia's state-sponsored nationalism, latent xenophobic sentiments, and its increasingly restrictive and incoherent migration policy. Not only are many questions irrelevant or disconnected from migrants' everyday concerns: their personal experiences of paying bribes, obtaining fake certificates, or being harassed by the police often contradict the correct answers on the exam. While it is doubtful that this test – along with several other new requirements imposed on migrants – will dissuade foreign laborers to seek employment in Russia, it is bound to make them even more vulnerable to bribes.

Social movements are not completely spontaneous. On the contrary, they depend on past events and experiences and are rooted in specific contexts. By focusing on three case studies – the student mobilizations of 2011 and 2013, the anti-government mobilizations of 2012, and the protests against the Rosia Montana Gold Corporation project of 2013 – this article aims to investigate the role of collective memory in post-2011 movements in Romania. The legacy of the past is reflected not only in a return to the symbols and frames of the anti-Communist mobilizations of 1989 and 1990, but also in the difficulties of the protesters to delimit themselves from nationalist actors, to develop global claims, and to target austerity and neoliberalism. Therefore, even in difficult economic conditions, Romanian movements found it hard to align their efforts with those of the Indignados/Occupy movements. More generally, the case of Romania proves that activism remains rooted in the local and national context, reflecting the memories, experiences, and fears of the mobilized actors, in spite of the spread of a repertoire of action from Western and southern Europe.

The collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe promised bold opportunities for the various ethnic groups populating that vast, diverse region. Yet if history had any lessons to teach these groups it was that democracy, or at least the political systems that emerged in the midst of the rubble of the Berlin Wall between 1989 and 1991, was no guarantor of whatever idealized rights the region's ethnic groups hoped would come in the wake of the collapse of the communist dictatorships that had dominated these parts of Europe for decades. Communism, had, in many instances, done nothing more than stifle the festering ethnic tensions that had exploded in the nineteenth century and short-circuited the complex, lengthy process of resolving these conflicts. Consequently, for those knowledgeable about the essence of these conflicts, it should have come as no surprise that Yugoslavia, for example, was torn asunder by ethnic violence so terrifying that it took the intervention of the Western world's great powers to end the most violent aspects of these wars of ethnicity.

Drawing on field theory, this paper aims to shed light on the development and functioning of the Kurdish literary world in Turkey, characterized, in particular, by the use of a non-official language. It argues that this “small literary world” is to be understood in relation to a “double macrocosm”: the sphere of Kurdish politics and the national Turkish sphere, which provide specific constraints and resources. The paper argues that in such a context the emergence of a literary field, autonomous from other social fields and independent from political stakes, follows an unpredictable path, and will not always be achieved political dimension of the literary act stresses its dependency on political stakes and the field of politics. This however does not impede the emergence of autonomous literary institutions. The multilingualism of the actors involved drives also toward another heteronomy: this small literary world is also to be understood in relation to the Turkish literary field. The paper first presents the macrocosms in which Kurdish literary activities developed. It then examines the progressive integration of a field freeing itself from political constraints. Lastly, it focuses on the trajectories of a few writers, the analyses of which show the intertwining of the different worlds.