Last year's conference ended with a general sense that national minority movements, still somewhat embryonic at the time, were seizing the initiative. This session opens with the consensus that these embryonic movements are far more mature, have aggressively taken center stage, and, in various degrees, have mounted a direct challenge to the center.

Turkmenistan remains the least studied and understood republic to have achieved independence with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The autocratic and dictatorial rule of Saparmurat Niyazov (also known as “Turkmenbashi,” or “Leader of the Turkmen”) has so restricted information about this resource-rich but economically desperate republic that any new work about Turkmenistan and the Turkmen is always a welcome addition. Shokhrat Kadyrov is a well-known Turkmen historian whose opposition to the Niyazov regime resulted in his exile to Norway, where he compiled what will be the first of two encyclopedia-like volumes devoted to Turkmen history, culture, and society. In addition, the author has added a historical foreword, chronology, and epilogue, which fill in various gaps that both Soviet and current scholarship in Turkmenistan avoided. As with Soviet interpretations of Turkmen history and culture, present-day Turkmen scholars must conform their work to the wishes of Niyazov's whims and fancies. Moreover, most works now published in Turkmenistan must include praise to Turkmenbashi for his guidance, wisdom, and enlightened vision for Turkmenistan. The most ostentatious demonstration of this reverence is the Rukhnama, Niyazov's quasi-religious history of the Turkmen, which is required reading in schools and necessary to know if one wants employment.

The debate about the Roma's fate throughout the Second World War has taken on a controversial character in recent years. The focal point of this controversy is whether the Roma's persecution was racially motivated or not. Reflecting upon the Roma's treatment throughout the war period, various scholars regard social-political factors such as the wandering way of life and especially the ascription of criminality as the main reasons for discrimination against and persecution of Roma. Ultimately, the authority most responsible for the crimes against Roma in the “Old Reich” was the Criminal Office. An extreme stance is the thesis of G. Lewy, who denies not only the planned character of the persecution but also its racial/racist intention. Lewy also refutes the comparability of the Roma's fate with that of the Jews.

The fall of communist regimes and the breakup of the multinational Soviet and Yugoslav states produced a remarkable experiment in regime change. Twenty-eight old, new and revived states emerged. While most adopted democratic institutions, many others evolved new variants of authoritarian rule. Some new democracies maintained much higher standards in upholding formal democratic rules and complementary freedoms of the press and political organization. How is this variation in initial democratization to be explained? Among countries that initially adopted democracy, how is variation in the survival and development of democratic freedoms to be explained?

Walker Connor was born in 1926, and was contemporaneous with my own father, so not surprisingly he was a father figure to me. Unlike my own father Walker made it past 90. Those of us privileged to have been Walker's friend will miss his mischievous humor and twinkling eyes, and his fondness for combining rich conversation with craft beers. Indeed his son Dan told me Walker deliberately had a beer a couple of days before he died. All will be pleased to know that he remained possessed of his faculties and character to the end. He is survived by his two sons Peter and Dan Connor, and their partners; by his daughter, Professor Joan Connor of Athens, Ohio, who has inherited her parents’ writings skills; and by Joan's son, Nils Walker (Kerry) Wessell, who is with us today.

The military had been concerned about military patriotic education for a long time when Putin's Patriotic Education Programme was published. As soon as the collapse of the Soviet Union occurred, followed a few years later by the creation of the Russian armed forces, they had already been developing patriotic education programmes aimed primarily at youth, aided by veterans of local wars, both volunteers and recruits. The aim of this article is to show that the military version of patriotic education aims openly to encourage military service, and that the Russian state will try to enlist veterans of the Afghanistan and Chechen wars in activities linked to military patriotic education and its spread in military and civilian spheres. Our hypothesis is that the determination to bring veterans together around a common project has two aims: (1) to federate veterans around the authorities and (2) to channel a population that escapes government control and some of whose excesses on their return to civilian life (violence towards the population in the context of their function, for veterans of the Interior Ministry in particular) have darkened the image of the ministries known as the “power” ministries.

Russia's Armenians have begun to form diaspora institutions and engage in philanthropy and community organization, much as the pre-Soviet “established” diaspora in the West has done for years. However, the Russian Armenian diaspora is seen by Armenian elites as being far less threatening due to a shared “mentality.” While rejecting the mentality argument, I suggest that the relationship hinges on their shared political culture and the use of symbols inherited from the Soviet Union in the crafting of new diaspora and diaspora-management institutions. Specifically, “Friendship of the Peoples” symbolism appears to be especially salient on both sides. However, the difference between old and new diasporas may be more apparent than real. The Russian Armenian diaspora now engages in many of the same activities as the Western diaspora, including the one most troublesome to Armenia's elites: involvement in politics.

Civil society, to the extent that it exists today in Bosnia, has developed alongside the recasting of women's roles in public life. Researchers equate civil society in Bosnia today almost exclusively with non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The early post-war NGOs grew out of the peace movement that took shape before and during the open conflict of 1992–1995. Peace organizations evolved to a large extent from feminist organizing and organizations in the Yugoslav republics of Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia. Thus, to study the origins of Bosnian civil society, we must begin with the struggle for equal rights for women in modern Yugoslavia.