This article compares causes and mechanisms of the mass mobilizations which took place in Kyrgyzstan in 2005 and 2010. The upheavals of 2005, the so called “Tulip Revolution,” led to the ousting of President Akaev who was replaced by Kurmanbek Bakiev. In 2010, Bakiev himself had to flee the country after violent social upheavals. As this analysis shows, the causes for both series of events were similar: neopatrimonial rule and the elite's control of resources together with oppressive tactics stirred up discontent among wide parts of the population and instigated violent protest. The mechanisms of mass mobilization, however, differed considerably. While the revolution of 2005 was carried out as the concerted action of varied political forces and NGOs, which, supported by patronage networks and traditional institutions, offered material and solidary incentives for the crowds, the great mass of people who took part in the 2010 protests were spontaneously mobilized through purposive incentives when news of the killings spread through the media.

Two events in 2008 shaped the political map of the Caucasus: the West's decision on the independence of Kosovo and the Russo-Georgian War. First, on 17 February, Kosovo authorities unilaterally declared the independence of what was at the time a UN protectorate. This declaration enjoyed much support in the West, including near-immediate recognition by key states such as the US, Germany, France, the UK, and a dozen others. But it also faced strong opposition from Serbia and Russia and strong skepticism from prowestern countries such as Georgia. Russia opposed not only the Kosovo declaration itself but more importantly the western adoption of it. From the Russian perspective, by supporting Kosovo's accession to sovereignty western states were violating the rules set at the moment of collapse of the federal states of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union: to invite the former union republics to join the international clubs of sovereign states, but not extend such invitation to any other sub-units. In other words, Azerbaijan, Croatia, Kazakhstan, and Russia became members of the United Nations, but sub-entities like Chechnya, Kosovo, or Tatarstan did not receive the same recognition.

A massive monument of Chinggis Khaan (Chinggis Khaan's name is spelt differently depending on the language in which it was written and on conventions of transliteration. Among the most common are Chinggis, Genghis, Genghiz, or Jengiz. For the purpose of the paper, the Mongolian transliteration is used.) imposingly gazes down from the government palace in Ulaanbaatar, the capital city of Mongolia. The monument was erected in 2006 in commemoration of the 800-year anniversary of the establishment of “the Great Mongolian State.” Occupying arguably the most prominent national space, the monument serves as an arresting emblem of the state. With its silent yet triumphant symbolization, the monument articulates the state's new ideology in the post-Soviet era. The monument is one of countless symbolic and material grand-scale state expressions appropriating Chinggis Khaan. In this article, I examine the state's appropriation of Chinggis Khaan as the marker of Mongolian post-socialist national identity. In doing so, I critically examine how the state appropriates history, remembering and forgetting certain parts, to cultivate a shared sense of belonging and pride. Unifying the public in shared glorification and celebration of Chinggis Khaan ultimately serves to instill devotion to the national political and ideological project.

To some extent I feel as Robert Lewis does, that the process leading from “national awakening” to “national liberation” is a worldwide tendency, and that the Soviet Union is part of a global Zeitgeist in this respect.

Byway of illustrating this fifteen-stage process, I would like to just report on a couple of examples I came across in reading about the republics as independent actors. One such issue has to do with the attempts of the different republics, and the nations within them, to form transnational coalitions across borders. In a way, these attempts get around the problem of establishing formal diplomatic relations with other countries: maybe you do not need de jure recognition if in fact you can do things with other people. For instance, consider the anti-nuclear congress, organized in Kazakhstan by something called the Nevada-Semipalatinsk Movement, led by the poet Olzhas Suleimenov. In early 1989, a Soviet nuclear test in Kazakhstan was followed by a public protest, and Suleimenov became the leader of the movement. He and his people quickly decided to call it not the “Semipalatinsk Movement” but the “Nevada-Semipalatinsk Movement.” And they immediately brought in American Indians, Maoris, and other people from around the world, who are all being subjected to nuclear testing. He also established personal liaison with Dr. Bernard Lawn of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War in Cambridge, Massachusetts; last summer three hundred doctors and scientists in Semipalatinsk talked to people who were immediately affected by military nuclear testing.

The question of ethnic and national identity has dominated post-Soviet life in Abkhazia, which is situated on the Black Sea coast, in the north-west corner of the South Caucasus. Formerly an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic within the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, its status is now contested. Following violent armed conflict with Georgia over a period of 13 months in 1992/1993, Abkhazia became de facto independent. However, while not now under Georgian control, Abkhazia remains de jure part of the Republic of Georgia, which considers Abkhazia an integral component of its state. Abkhazia declared independence in 1999, a status that remains unrecognized by the international community.

Reaction and revolution, so much a part of the reign of Nicholas II, became even more prevalent in the opening years of the twentieth century. The foundation of the Russian Empire had begun its erosion process which would topple the autocracy by 1917. Nicholas and his ministers had to act decisively and aggressively if they hoped to stem the process. To fight the wave of revolution and popular discontent in April of 1902, Nicholas appointed Viacheslav Pleve as Minister of the Interior. Pleve was a careerist who was devoutly loyal to the autocracy. In contemporary terms he might be described as an ‘aparatchick,‘ a party man who towed, and at times shaped, the party line. V. I. Gurko, a colleague, characterized him as “a legal clerk … a very superior clerk it is true, but a clerk nevertheless.” Pleve had also earned the dubious honor of being the autocracy's “most famous policeman,” a reflection of fourteen years of service as Director of the Police Department and Assistant Minister of the Interior.

One of the major problems facing independence movements in the USSR is that significant and increasing numbers of people reside outside their national homelands and, therefore, are considered aliens in the national homelands of others. The ancestral homeland is intimately enmeshed with nationalism, and the deep emotional attachment to and the sense of exclusive ownership of the sacred soil of the homeland should not be underestimated. Most ethnic conflict involves alien in-migration or disputes over the control of the homeland. Significant numbers of nonindigenous groups within the national homelands undermine the nation's exclusive claim to the homeland, dilute the national homogeneity of the homeland, and increase interethnic interaction within the homeland. Thus, throughout the world, nations strive to maximize national homogeneity within their homelands, and migration that results in alien incursions into the national homeland is viewed with alarm and frequently results in violence. In the Baltic republics, for example, alien in-migration is of intense public and political concern and is frequently cited as a major justification for political independence. Differential natural increase among the nationalities in a homeland is also a vital concern when it significantly affects the ethnic composition of a homeland. Assimilation through intermarriage is another development frequently viewed as a threat to national homogeneity, although in the Soviet Union offspring of intermarriage in national homeland most often identify with the indigenous nationality.

This article begins with an observation of a contemporary and yet reoccurring political dilemma that small nation-states face with respect to larger states in being either inside or outside of supranational political entities regarding political and economic asymmetries. Employing an intellectual history approach, the article explores this dilemma with reference to the Georgian nation in late-nineteenth century Tsarist Russia and the early twentieth century, when that territory briefly became a nation-state: It explores this through the language of political economy articulated in the thoughts and actions of two founding Georgian national intellectual and political figures, the statesman Niko Nikoladze and Noe Zhordania, who was one of the first prime ministers. It argues that conceiving of the nation(state) primarily in economic terms, as opposed to exclusively nationalist ones, was more conducive to the option of remaining inside a supranational space.

A world in which every nation has become a state, that is, a world in which cultural and political units coincide, would be a very different world from the one we know. There are now close to 200 political units recognized as states in the international system. Nations, understood as cultural units, are not as easily identified. Taking only language as a defining criterion, one could count some 6,000 linguistically defined groups. Many of these groups number so few speakers and are so close to extinction that their future can be discounted. If one turns to other cultural markers, however, from religion (or church) and ethnicity, in the sense of common origins, to “a shared style of expression,” the number of cultural groups may well be almost unlimited. Many such groups would call themselves “nations” as a dignified form of self-designation.

In 2006 the Croatian singer Severina Vučković attempted to represent Croatia at the Eurovision Song Contest with a song arranged by Goran Bregović, the ex-Yugoslav musician from Sarajevo. Before the song “Moja štikla” [My Stiletto] had even been released, the Croatian (and Serbian) mass media had questioned its “Croatianness” in an escalating sequence of claims and counter-claims to authenticity. Its use of musical elements based on folk song and dance left it open to allegations that it had compromised folk music's authenticity; those elements’ regional associations (especially ganga and rera singing from Lika and Herzegovina) connoted spaces which had been marginalized as “eastern” or “Balkan” in comparison to privileged inland and coastal traditions; the involvement of Bregović (represented as Serbian throughout the Croatian mass media) enabled suggestions that the song presented “Serbian folklore” or belonged to the Serbian genre of “turbofolk”—and all this in the particularly sensitive context of a competition which was supposed to symbolize Croatia's full European membership.

Just after becoming the first-ever successful, democratically re-elected President of Russia, Boris Yel'tsin ambitiously called for creating, within the next year, a new ideology that would reflect the new state of affairs in Russia—in essence, he was calling for “re-imagining,” or reinventing, the foundations upon which Russian national community is based. With this directive, Yel'tsin was confirming something that had already become clear to many observers of Russian politics: post-Soviet Russian political life not only continued to resist democratization and pluralism, but also appeared to exhibit signs of discomfort without an officially-sanctioned ideological reference point by which the political players could set their compasses. The Kremlin's quest for a restoration of Russia's credibility as a great power included serious consideration of religion, specifically Russian Orthodoxy, playing a leading role in helping to reformulate an ideology acceptable to diverse communities within Russia in order to replace the now-defunct Marxist–Leninist ideology of the Soviet state. The old French adage “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose” seems particularly appropriate for the new Russia in its efforts to regain credibility as a great power, along with the prestige and respect to which it had become accustomed. This article examines the dynamics of the Russian search for a new ideology in order to help restore its credibility as a great power, as suggested by Yel'tsin's call for a new “national idea.” But the search for a new ideology began well before Yel'tsin made this statement, and, therefore, the following discussion focuses on the interplay between religion and politics in this quest, covering the first five years of a reconstituted, post-Soviet Russia, that is, the time period roughly from the collapse of the Soviet Union up to the Duma (parliament) elections of December 1995 and the two-stage presidential elections of June-July 1996.