These have been very stimulating presentations. The conclusion we can draw from all of them is somewhat bleak—that the Soviet system is in something of a life-threatening crisis. A major part of the problem is economic. Indeed, each of the presentations provides evidence for the view that there are important economic aspects to the problems addressed by the speakers.

Is an imagined democracy more important than actual democracy for nation-building purposes? After 20 years of independence, Central Asian countries present a mixed bag of strong and weak states, consolidated and fragmented nations. The equation of nation and state and the construction of genuine nation states remains an elusive goal in all of post-Soviet Central Asia. This paper examines the role that electoral politics has played in nation-state formation. We argue that electoral processes have been central to attempted nation-state building processes as part of efforts to legitimize authoritarian regimes; paradoxically in those few countries where (for brief periods) partial democratization actually occurred, elections contributed, at least in the short term, to nation-state fragmentation.

On the eve of the referendum on Armenia's independence on September 21, 1991, Vazken I issued the following appeal to voters.

By the will of God, the citizens of our freedom loving nation and newly born Republic will respond on September 21, 1991, to the invitation for independence by declaring unanimously and loudly, “yes.”

In 1991 the ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking communities, who had migrated to and been resident in the non-Russian regions of both the tsarist empire and Soviet Union, found themselves located beyond the borders of the newly independent Russian Federation. Despite an absence of actual, physical movement, the communities experienced a form of stationary or figurative displacement as the Soviet Union broke up and political borders demarcating their homelands moved over them. This displacement was furthered in subsequent years due to the nature and security of the environment where they lived and their often secure sense of ethnocultural and socio-economic identity being challenged through processes of political and economic transformation and increased levels of instability and uncertainty. This article focuses on members of those Russian communities who are living in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Through an analysis of narratives of their everyday lives it explores how they perceive and understand the “displacement” which has occurred, and how they are responding and actively renegotiating relationships with both their physical homeland—Uzbekistan—and their “historical” homeland—Russia. Furthermore, the article assesses how through these processes of displacement and renegotiation they are reshaping their own identities in the post-Soviet period.

The Soviet Union has a Muslim population about the size of Turkey's. Definition is a problem because Soviet censuses do not ask about religious convictions. All one can say is that those nationalities which have traditionally been predominantly Muslim number, according to the 1989 census, approximately 55 million people out of a total population which exceeds 285 million. Although it is common to refer to “Soviet Muslims” as if they constituted a monolithic community, these millions of people are in fact diverse in terms of their religious traditions, current attitudes toward their ancestral faith, nationality, and numerous other secular aspects of life as well. This essay will attempt to describe all the forms of Islamic activity among the Muslim peoples of the Soviet Union, but will consider the status of Islam primarily in Central Asia, where the largest number of the Soviet Union's traditionally Muslim nationalities live, and especially the republic of Tajikistan, where the status of Islam largely resembles that of other important parts of the region.

When it comes to identity, nationalism and the various perceptions of “the Other,” postcolonial theory has inspired historians of Central and Eastern Europe for years. This inspiration, however, has not overcome a certain superficial level of slogans and catchphrases: identity is a cultural construction, yes, so it is somehow connected to the problem of power; knowledge too, since we have read Said and Foucault, is to be considered as both a result and an instrument of power. Now it seems that this superficiality will not be accepted any more. Recently, scholars of Central Europe organized a conference focusing on the questions of whether and how postcolonial theory can be applied on the study of Austria-Hungary. Was the Habsburg Empire really an Empire, can perspectives developed in Delhi be transferred to Prague and Bratislava?

This article analyzes discursive representations of Lithuania and of Belarus as Lithuania's “Other” in the context of the recent political crisis in Ukraine. Focusing on the media discourse of Lithuanian intellectuals regarding the historical Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) and its legacy, it examines how Belarus and its role vis-à-vis Lithuania have been depicted. The analysis is informed by the discourse-historical approach within critical discourse analysis, using thematic content and argumentation schemes for studying the images ascribed to the GDL, Belarus, and Lithuania in the selected texts. Focus in the discourse of intellectuals on the GDL as a historical homeland is found to shift from history as a scholarly endeavor to the politics of history and the uses of the past in today's political projects. Belarus and the GDL emerge as topics not only historically and politically salient but also potentially dangerous for Lithuania within the setting of the events in Ukraine.

My comments on ideology, unlike the two presentations that preceded mine, which were substantive and had something to report on, will be similar to the story about the dog that did not bark: a dog that barked incessantly in the Brezhnev era, ideology has literally stopped barking since then. In this sense, the most striking aspect of contemporary Soviet ideology is its silence. From one of the most insistent features of Soviet reality under Brezhnev, ideology has retreated into a dark corner, where, presumably, it is licking its wounds and plotting a return. Ideology is far from dead, however. The ace up ideology's sleeve is, of course, the Party. As long as the Party purports to play a leading role in Soviet society—and, as Gorbachev has suggested, its role will increase under conditions of perestroika—then something like ideology will be necessary to justify and legitimate the one-party rule of a party that, even by its own criteria, does not deserve to rule, let alone to rule alone.

Although most contemporary theories of nationalism and identity formation rest on some form of social constructivism, few theorists of nationalism and identity formation interrogate social constructivism as a social construction – a social science concept “imposed” on the non-self-consciously constructivist behaviors of people, who generally do not believe they are engaging in construction. Since social constructivism – unless it is a metaphysics about what is real – is really about the concept of social construction, the first task of constructivists is to ask not how various populations have engaged in social construction but how social construction should be defined. As this article shows, constructivism is at best a run-of-the-mill theoretical approach – perfectly respectable, but no different from any other theoretical approach in the social sciences. It is only when social constructivism makes outlandishly radical claims – that all of reality or all of social reality is constructed – that it is unusual, exciting, and wrong.

In 1920 the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic emerged upon the ruins of German and Polish occupation. It replaced the short-lived Belarusian Democratic Republic as the embodiment of national statehood. The ensuing decade came to be an important but ambiguous period in Belarusian history. New state institutions such as the Commissariat of Public Enlightenment, the Institute of Belarusian Culture, and the Belarusian State University carried out unprecedented “nation-building” policies designed to reverse the effects of tsarist Russification and foster the development of Belarusian national culture. Parodoxically, many of the same institutions also implemented various aspects of “Sovietization.” A myriad of measures under the label “socialist construction” served to integrate ever more closely Belarus into the Soviet Union.

“We, the nationals of a big nation, have almost always been guilty, in historic practice, of innumerable cases of violence; furthermore, we commit violence and insult innumerable times without noticing it.”