In the 1990s, efforts were launched in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in the Russian Federation to support the revival of Sakha (Yakut) language education. This interdisciplinary study examines the evolution of school-based Sakha language education in the city of Yakutsk over a 25-year period beginning with the launching of the first reforms in the 1990s. Language education reform in the capital city has been shaped by a dynamic interplay between federal, regional, and local factors. Grassroots social and cultural activism continues to play a key role in school-based language revitalization in Yakutsk, influencing how policies have been received and implemented at the local level. Local community stakeholders are working together to counteract federal education policies, which direct school resources away from minority language education. This case study shows that the Sakha (Yakut) language revival has taken root in the capital city, and it provides important evidence that civic activism continues to develop in urban areas of the republic.

Unlike the Habsburg Empire, the Republic of Austria established in 1918 saw and sees itself basically as an ethnically homogeneous state—as did the Weimar Republic and Federal Republic of Germany. Austria's constitution of 1920 made German the official language, just as Hungarian became the official language in Hungary. The relatively high degree of ethnic homogeneity in Austria and Hungary were a result of the collapse of the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire and the new borders of these two successor states. Before 1918, the German-speaking and Hungarian-speaking population of the Empire were politically dominant, but. from a quantitative point of view, “minorities.” It was only the borders established by the Entente in the peace treaties of Saint-Germain and Trianon that reduced Austria and Hungary geographically to two territories, in which the German-speaking population on one side and the Hungarian on the other also became numerically superior, while creating large German and Hungarian minorities in the neighboring countries of Italy, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and SHS-Yugoslavia.

This paper is based on a study which compares repatriation policies of Germany, Russia, and Kazakhstan. The choice of cases is based on a “most similar case design.” The Russian case results in unsuccessful and unsustainable repatriation, the German case exhibits a change from sustainable repatriation to a slow termination of the program, while the case of Kazakhstan is one of sustainable and relatively successful repatriation. The main argument of the paper is that in order for a repatriation program to be sustainable, the program must contain both a practical component and an ideological component. If a repatriation program lacks ideological backing which permeates other aspects of political life in a state, then the repatriation program grinds to a halt. If a repatriation program has ideological backing, but is rendered impractical and does not meet the economic, demographic and labor market needs of a state, then the further development of the program stops. The findings of this study merit further reflection on issues of changing national identities, on transnational migration pathways, and on the “post-Soviet condition” which has set the stage for all of the aforementioned processes and transformations.

Before 1945, Masuria was part of Germany and known primarily as the scene of the 1914 Battle of Tannenberg and as an attractive summer vacationland of numerous lakes, extensive forests, and villages of characteristic wooden houses. Since 1945, Masuria has belonged to Poland, where it is known as the scene of the 1410 Battle of Tannenberg/Grunwald, and as an attractive summer vacationland. To students of nationalism and national identity, however, Masuria is interesting primarily because its predominately Polish-speaking population seems to present the clearest and best-documented example anywhere in Europe of national identity developing counter to native language. Although most Masurians spoke Polish and lived adjacent to Poland, they gave every indication over quite a long period of time of voluntary and virtually unanimous identification with the Prusso-German state and nation. They did so at a time when most of the rest of eastern Europe was increasingly subject to the influence of ethnolinguistic nationalism and the rest of the German–Polish borderlands were witness to one of Europe's classic ethnic-national rivalries. (see Maps 1 and 2)

At the formation of the second Polish republic in 1918 the Communist Workers Party of Poland (KPRP) displayed total disregard for the Polish national feelings. Polish communists actively opposed the creation of the new Polish state which they thought would impede the march of revolution from Russia to the West. They saw Polish national liberation as an expression of a bourgeois ideology hostile to the interests of the Polish workers. True national liberation, they maintained, could only be achieved by the way of the international proletarian revolution.

The following statement was delivered by His Holiness Vazken I, Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of All Armenians, over Yerevan State Television following the bloody confrontation on July 5-6, 1988, at Yerevan's International Airport in which Armenian activists and Soviet troops clashed.

My beloved people, citizens of our mother country, at this hour of trial, I, Catholicos of All Armenians, address all of you from Holy Etchmiadzin. First, I must express my condolences to all those who suffered on July 5 this year during the events that took place near Zvartnots International Airport. I was told that one of [the activists] died. I pray for his soul, and grieve over his death together with his relatives. I also deeply regret that our soldiers were among the wounded.

I'll start with culture. Today we have been speaking principally about culture in the republics. I would like to address the common problems facing the post-Soviet republics. I agree with Edward Allworth that there is a crisis or trauma not only for the national intellectuals, but for intellectuals as a whole. This is especially a trauma for intellectuals who were supported by the state. They had very comfortable lives inside the institutes and the cultural unions. Now these privileges are disappearing. Previously intellectuals’ lives were characterized by a kind of self-adoration of their positions, of their purity, of their disengagement from political life, and this stance is now also in crisis. Recently, I read a very interesting article which said that today nobody wants to engage in the escapist literature that was once so popular. Nobody wants to hear about themes of history, of Egypt, the Silver Age, and so on because politics is now the hot topic in cultural life. A similar situation occurred in the Prague Spring, and we know that the results in this case were very fruitful. Havel, who was a very sophisticated journal writer, became a very contemporary, very active, and essential writer. And I consider this crisis, this struggle of intellectuals, a good sign. The people who will survive will be those whom other people read. Conversely, Chengiz Aitmatov, who was long a friend of the national struggle, who made a name for himself as a writer concerned with conditions in Kirgizia, and who was a defender of the national traditions, now prefers to be Ambassador to Luxembourg. While I was very surprised by this, this is also typical of the struggle to which I refer. Secondly, as Professor Allworth noted, it is true that Kazakh leaders

The relationship between Islam and ethnicity has generally been studied almost exclusively from a theoretical (theological) and/or practical (historical) viewpoint of the Muslims themselves. If we observe this problem from another point of view, that of the Islamized natives, we discover that there exists a tacit consensus as to the three levels or degrees according to which Islamized peoples can be classified: (a) a maximum or even total confluence of Islam and ethnicity, as in the Arab lands and in Daghestan; (b) a partial distinction between Islam and ethnicity, stemming from a certain ‘ethnicization’ of Islam, as in Shia Iran; and (c) a somewhat vague decentralization between these two focal points, as in Turkestan, Subsaharan Africa and Southeast Asia.