The interwar years are relatively understudied by intellectual historians of Eastern Europe. This is especially true of the study of the region's radical left-wing cultures, where attention has tended to focus on the Marxist revisionists of the post-war decades. As a period typically identified with political repression and economic crisis, the years following the end of World War I and the outbreak of World War II are assumed to hold little interest to the intellectual historian. However, throughout Eastern Europe, the 1920s and 1930s saw the growth of rich left-wing cultures that engaged with a diverse set of ideas from Western Europe and the Soviet Union, and adapted them to their local conditions. This article explores the development of leftist ideas during the interwar period by examining three prominent figures from Yugoslavia's literary left: the Croatian modernist Miroslav Krleža, the Montenegrin critical realist Milovan Đilas, and the Slovene Christian socialist Edvard Kocbek.

We contact the world
only through our boundaries.
Blaga Dimitrova

In a recent issue of the Bulgarian periodical Sega (Now) a reporter related an extraordinary tale of how various name-changing campaigns had marked the experience of a Bulgarian-speaking Muslim—hereafter “Pomak”—in the village of Bachkovo. The story began during the Balkan Wars in 1912–1913 when Hasan, the aforementioned Pomak from the Rhodope mountains of southern Bulgaria, was forced to change his name to Dragan as part of the wartime state campaign for Muslims with “Slavic origins” to “reclaim their Bulgarian names.” A change in politics at the beginning of World War I opened the door for Dragan to change his name back to Hasan; and so he did. In the late 1930s, however, he was again compelled to change his name back to Dragan, in line with the Rodina (Homeland) directed name-changing campaigns, described in depth below. After the Communist takeover in 1944 Dragan was able, again, to change his name back to Hasan as wartime “Fascist” policy was reversed. But with the movement towards “national integration” in the 1960s Hasan was forced, again, to change his name back to Dragan. After the fall of Communism in Bulgaria in November 1989 “Dragan” again was allowed to change his name back to Hasan; and so he did. In his one lifetime this “Bulgarian” of Islamic faith, subject to the whims of the fickle and contested Bulgarian national project, changed his name six times. Admittedly, the Pomak's fate in Balkan history seems to be primarily as pawn in Bulgarian and other Balkan national rivalries and domestic designs. Pomak history is, more often than not, the story of the center looking to the margins and imposing its own designs. Having said that, these designs—generally driven by the dual forces of modernity and nationalism—were always subject to a spectrum of Pomak responses and strategies.

One of the longest standing debates in social science has been that which has divided students of ethnicity over the issue of modernization. On the one side are the tribalists, who emphasize that the ethnonational consciousness of a self-defined group is historically rooted and believe that processes of racial and cultural homogenization associated with the broader phenomenon of modernization promote the gradual break-down of ethnic boundaries within states and ultimately encourage the spread of global culture and the disappearance of ‘tribal’ languages (here one might include such examples as Catalan, Sorb, Romansch, and perhaps also Welsh, Macedonian and Estonian). In this view, ethnocentrism is negatively correlated with the degree of interaction, and multiethnic societies are supposed to be less ethnocentric than ethnically homogeneous societies. There are two chief variants of this approach represented by the functionalists (assimilationists) and the Marxists.

In 1929, local officials in the mountainous region of upper Ajara in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) pursued aggressive policies to force women to remove their veils and to close religious schools, provoking the Muslim peasant population to rebellion in one of the largest and most violent of such incidents in Soviet history. The central authorities in Moscow authorized the use of Red Army troops to suppress the uprising, but they also reversed the local initiatives and offered the peasants concessions. Based on Party and secret police files from the Georgian archives in Tbilisi and Batumi, this article will explore the ways in which local cadres interpreted regime policies in this Muslim region of Georgia, and the interaction of the center and periphery in dealing with national identity, Islam, gender, and everyday life in the early Soviet period.

The phenomenon of Iron Age vitrified ramparts has become increasingly recognisable in the last twenty years in the Iberian Peninsula. After the first walls with vitrified stones were discovered in southern Portugal, there have been several findings scattered throughout western Iberia. A chronological sequence from the Late Bronze Age to the Late Iron Age can be established on the basis of the archaeological remains, with reference to different historical and functional conditions. This article reviews the data obtained from the various sites, in order to understand the context in which the stone structures became vitrified. Furthermore, we have analysed samples of stones and mud bricks that have been altered by fire from these sites, which has allowed us to explain the variability in the archaeological record in relation to different historical processes. With all these data, we aim to contribute to our knowledge of a phenomenon that is widespread in Iron Age Europe.

The conventional approach to describing ethno-cultural relations in a particular nation-state is in terms of the majority/minority dichotomy, that is, a representation of a society as consisting of the core nation and a minority or number of minorities alongside it. The minorities are usually of different ethnic origin, possess distinct linguistic-cultural characteristics and tend to be represented as groups that, owing to their minority status, are discriminated against. This approach has been adopted in Ukraine where in official discourse and state documents the core nation co-exists with national minorities. Ethno-cultural diversity is addressed by policy makers and the academic community, most often in terms of “national minorities,” “protection of minority rights,” “provision of schooling for minorities” and so forth. Ukrainian scholars and policy makers tend to use the same concepts as their counterparts in the West, albeit often modifying them to Ukrainian circumstances. However, as will be argued, this dichotomous treatment of the titular majority and the minority is ill-suited to Ukraine's circumstances as even the very concept of “minority” is unclear owing to the blurred sense of identity amongst many Ukrainians and Russians.

The politics of language identity have figured heavily in the history of the people of the Republic of Moldova. Indeed the region's status as a province of Russia, Romania, and then the Soviet Union over the past 200 years has consistently been justified and, at least partially, manipulated on the basis of language issues. At the center of these struggles over language and power has been the linguistic and cultural identity of the region's autochthonous ethnicity and current demographic majority, the Moldovans. In dispute is the degree to which these Moldovans are culturally, historically, and linguistically related to the other Moldovans and Romanians across the Prut River in Romania. Under imperial Russia from 1812 to 1918 and Soviet Russia from 1944 to 1991, a proto-Moldovan identity that eschewed connections to Romania and emphasized contact with Slavic peoples was promoted in the region. Meanwhile, experts from Romania and the West have regularly argued that the eastern Moldovans are indistinguishable, historically, culturally, and linguistically, from their Romanian cousins.

Many non-Russians in the Russian Empire were active members of imperial educated society (obshchestvo), and they often conceived of the colonial advance of Russia as part of the march of the progressive West and “civilization” itself into the backward lands of the East. Reformist empire builders who criticized the brutal wars and population transfers that marked the conquest of the southern borderlands also emphasized the civilizing mission of the empire on its eastern frontier. This article explores the conception of Russia and its empire in the work of the Azerbaijani publicist Hasan Melikov Zardabi. Zardabi was genuinely enthusiastic about Russia and the prospect of an enlightened imperial future for the lands of the former khanates on the frontier of the Iranian and Ottoman empires. The unusual circumstances of his life, however, which included exile to his remote and native village of Zardob, a small fishing village on the Kura River to the west of Baku, compelled him to re-evaluate his estimation of Russia and the benefits of imperial rule. Zardabi learned from his experience in Zardob, and grew to rethink his earlier views about civilization and the Russian Empire.

This article investigates a legacy of transnational activism in Polish-West German relations during the 1950s and 1960s, connected to the borderlands/expellee background of several of the early activists who initiated the relations. At a time when the Polish and West German states maintained no official diplomatic relations with each other, the importance of non-state initiatives and dialogue breaking with the antagonistic nationalism of the two world wars grew disproportionately. These individuals’ expellee background, bilingualism, cross-border networks and loosened national identities contributed to their effectiveness in Polish–German relations. Taking exception to the popular conceptions of expellees as necessarily identical with the negative or anti-Polish opinions commonly associated with the expellee organizations, the article also focuses specifically on how certain expellees and former borderlands inhabitants attempted to renegotiate their postwar roles, political stances and even identities by associating themselves with Polish–German relations. They challenged the dualistic and polarizing nature of media discussions about German expellees in politics. In addition, the article and these individuals pose a challenge to international relations/conflict resolution research to look to cross-border communities as key elements in postwar/post-genocide dialogues.

After first outlining the notion of anti-Semitism, the predominant survey method used for researching it, and the history of the presence and the current (near) absence of Jews in Poland, this article gives the results of different surveys of various kinds of anti-Semitism in this country, including the authors’ own, and discusses the findings of their qualitative study – focus group interviews with members of three different Catholic communities from three different cities. The qualitative study confirmed the hypothesis that imagined and stereotypical rather than real Jews are the objects of modern anti-Semitism in Poland, while real historical and stereotypically perceived Jews are the objects of its religious and post-Holocaust variants. The roots of religious anti-Semitism lie in the not entirely absorbed teachings of the Catholic Church on the Jewish deicide charge. Religious anti-Semitism supports modern and post-Holocaust kinds of anti-Semitism. Modern anti-Semitism is rooted in poor education, lack of interest in the Jewish history of Poland, lack of inter-group contact, and persisting stereotypes of Jews. Among the various Catholic communities of Poles, there are considerable differences in attitudes to Jews. The qualitative study also revealed a methodological deficiency in the standard survey questions intended to measure anti-Semitism, which are sometimes understood as questions about facts rather than about opinions.