Nineteen eighty-nine appeared to be an annus mirabilis in Soviet language policy; during that year, nine of fifteen Soviet republics adopted laws that championed the language of the titular nationality. Among these was Kyrgyzstan, a small Central Asian republic where Russian had increasingly marginalized the language of the Kyrgyz.

Through scientific inquiry, applied technology, and hard work, the peoples of Europe and North America made the nineteenth century, as Asa Briggs has so aptly indicated, an “age of improvement.” In politics they simultaneously promoted what Alexis de Tocqueville then perspicaciously described as “the inexorable advance of democracy.” Moreover, an unprecedented rapid increase in wealth, knowledge, and speed of travel facilitated a rebirth of national consciousness and the formation of national political communities among the smaller and heretofore oppressed peoples of Europe.

The spirit of environmentalism generated some of the most memorable images of the eastern and central European independence movements of the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1988, protesters formed a human chain around the Ignalina nuclear reactor in Lithuania. That same year, thousands of Hungarians marched through downtown Budapest to rally against their government's prospective participation in the construction of a dam on the Danube River. The environmental movements in the former eastern bloc marked the beginning of the end of Soviet era communism in Europe. However, many commentators have implied that environmental protest was a proxy for other, more politically explosive grievances. Environmentalism was decisive, it is argued, because it provided a release valve for pent-up frustrations and repressed nationalistic ardor. Re-examining the independence movement in Estonia, this article contends that environmentalism was not incidental to citizens’ larger aims. The specific, environmentally destructive activities people condemned embodied many of the features of the Soviet system that people despised generally. Resource-intensive and pollution-prone projects proposed by Moscow provoked a broadly conceived environmental revolt rather than environmental protest “in name only.” The environmentally related constituents of Estonia's independence movement included citizens’ opposition to pollution of the environment and waste of natural resources; perceived “mindlessness” of industrial policy in Estonia; the promise of new Russian-speaking immigrants to work in environmentally unfriendly industries; and economic exploitation of natural resources in Estonia for the benefit of other Soviet republics, especially the Russian RSFSR.

In its 6th and 7th issues last year, “Rainbow” published an article by the linguist Mati Hint entitled “The Problems of Bilingualism: A View Without Rose-tinted Glasses.” The article, which examines the problems of bilingualism, provoked a debate which went far beyond the boundaries not only of Estonia and bilingualism, but according to many beyond the boundaries of permissibility. We know that the problem of bilingualism in the nationalities republics is a highly acute one, but we did not expect such an avalanche of responses…. Mati Hint's article continued its “religious procession through the country, eliciting more and more responses from people of feeling and conscience from all the corners of our country. In their responses people write “Rainbow” about their innermost concerns—about their people and about their native tongue. Today we received letters fom Moscow, Georgia, Armenia, Belorussia, Latvia, Lithuania, Chuvash, etc. The journal “Peoples' Friendship” ordered our writer Mati Hint to write an article about the problems of bilingualism.

The People's Front of Tajikistan (PFT), one of the parties to the country's civil war, was instrumental in bringing the government of President Emomali Rahmon to power. The article examines the official strategies of memorialization of the PFT from the early 1990s to the present. It discusses the emergence of a canon of the PFT heroes and martyrs and locates it within the nascent national mythology after independence. It argues that the maintenance of this canon was rendered impossible by the imperatives of consolidating presidential authority and securing national reconciliation following the 1997 peace deal. It concludes with an examination of the growing tension between the official line of historical amnesia on the one hand and resurgent social memory on the other. People in Tajikistan are increasingly interested in revisiting the events and protagonists of the war to develop a sense of the past, and remembering the PFT forms an essential part of their search for shared history and a sense of identity.

Much of the social science literature pertaining to the development of civil society in post-communist Eastern Europe focuses on the issue of religious pluralism, especially the relationship of religious minorities and new religious movements (NRMs) to the state and their established Orthodox churches. Their findings suggest that the equation of ethno-religious nationalism, cultural identity, and the state becomes a hindrance to religious pluralism and the development of civil society in these nation-states. As a result, social scientists depict these national churches, and in most cases rightly so, as being the caretakers and fomenters of ethno-religious nationalism in their particular states. A factor in this debate that is often overlooked, however, is the role of the local church in intra-ecclesial relations. Is the concept of the “local church,” which developed in the time of the Roman and Byzantine Empires, to be identified with the modern national church? If this is the case, these churches may be guilty of the sin of ethno-phyletism, which the Council of Constantinople condemned in 1872 in regards to the Bulgarian schism. Additionally, while the development of religious pluralism in post-communist society with the proliferation of Protestant Christian sects and NRMs challenges the religious hegemony of the national churches, even more problematic has been the issue of inter-territorial Orthodox churches in Eastern Europe. The existence of a plurality of national Orthodox churches in the same territory violates the ecclesiological principle of the “local church” as well as perpetuates the sin of ethno-phyletism. While some social scientists may laud the development of a multiplication of churches in the same territory, from an ecclesiastical standpoint such a multiplication denies the unity and identity of the Orthodox Church as the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, which it confesses to be. What social scientists have failed to discuss is this important self-understanding of the Orthodox churches, especially as it pertains to inter-Orthodox ecclesial relations. Only with this self-understanding of the church blended with the issue of ethno-nationalism can the problems pertaining to the relations and development of ethno-national churches be properly understood.

The official language of the medieval Kingdom of Hungaria was Latin until the mid-nineteenth century (Szekfű, 1926); the throne was occupied from the second half of the sixteenth century by the Hapsburgs. The subsequent change to Hungarian was due to several factors, but was caused above all by the ideas of the French Revolution, and by the early anti-Austrian nationalistic endeavors of the Hungarian gentry, endeavors which also expressed the economic interests of the country. As soon as the official idiom of the kingdom became Hungarian, it triggered similar aspirations among the non-Magyar minority groups against the dominating and assimilating Hungarian majority. These aspirations were prominent among the causes of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy at the end of World War I. Within the former Kingdom of Hungary the Felvidék (Upper Land) roughly coincided with what was, after 1919, Slovakia. The eastern part of the kingdom, Ardeal/Erdély/Siebenbürgen/Transylvania, which had enjoyed a certain autonomy between the sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, became a part of Romania in the same year. Thus, both in Romania and in Slovakia (as also in Yugoslavia and to a lesser extent in Austria) a Hungarian minority was created by the 1919 borders. Revision of the peace treaties became the focal point of Hungarian politics in the inter-war period. During World War II Hungary attained a partial revision in respect to, first, the southern part of Slovakia, and also the entire Ruténföld/Rusinsko, which had from the 1920s been administered by the Czechoslovak State); second, northern Transylvania; and third, two further areas which had belonged to the then-dissolved Yugoslav kingdom. As a consequence of these revisions, a considerable number of non-Hungarians once again became minorities in the Hungarian State. After World War II, the 1919 borders were reinstated (with two exceptions: the major exception being that Ruténföld became part of Ukraine). The situation of the minorities was also reinstated, but differently in each instance. This was the age when some kind of democratic reconciliation was on the agenda in Romania (Balogh, 1985; Lázok and Vincze, 1995; “Mit kíván,” 1946/1988), after a period of thorough self-searching and a synthesizing of historical research and political experience (see Bibó, 1946).

If until recently Western investigations of “the nationalities question” in Russia and the Soviet Union focused almost exclusively on the larger and more visible “nations” that enjoyed union-republic status in the Soviet period, scholars have now begun to devote more sustained collective attention to the history of smaller ethnic groups that received only “autonomous” units within the Russian republic itself. For many of these peoples, subjected to Russian imperial rule and cultural domination for the entirety of their modern history and endowed with fewer of the opportunities for national development available to titular nationalities in the union republics, the problem of maintaining their particularity and of articulating a vision of collective cohesion has been especially acute both historically and in more recent times. Yet the fact that some of these groups are now threatened with eventual disappearance as distinct linguistic and cultural communities should not blind us to the complex, contingent, and inherently messy nature of their assimilation. Indeed, close scrutiny reveals that the very processes of assimilation contain within themselves possibilities for the emergence of hybrid cultural configurations and the appropriation of dominant conceptions for the transformation of indigenous culture along new trajectories.