On 4 March 1914 the Young Czech party newspaper Národní listy published the startling accusation that a prominent Czech politician, the National Socialist Karel Šviha, was a paid informant of the Habsburg imperial police. The paper alleged that for several years Šviha, who was the chairman of the National Socialist party's parliamentary club, had exchanged information on the activities of his colleagues for a police stipend. In the weeks that followed, the public was treated to a daily diet of charge and counter-charge in the Prague newspapers, a carnival of mutual recrimination that concluded with an elaborately staged public trial of Šviha in an attempt to settle once and for all whether he was truly an informant. During the proceedings leading figures of most of the main Czech political parties either sat in judgement of Šviha or testified for one side or the other, many of them displaying for all to see a level of personal animosity previously reserved for the Bohemian Germans or the Imperial government. As one observer (a National Socialist) put it, by the summer of 1914, “there was no nation in Europe as internally disorganized as were the Czechs” and according to another (a Young Czech), political life in Prague had reached a state where it was “everyone against everything.”

This study examines attitudes towards language and ethnicity among nearly four hundred high-school students in the Teschen region of the Czech Republic and Poland. The borders of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia meet in this region of mountains, coal mines, and heavy industry which earlier in this century was bitterly contested by Poland and Czechoslovakia.

Throughout Central and Eastern Europe, the collapse of communism has led to an unleashing of ethnic strife and a worsening of the economic conditions of the Roma, who by any measurement occupy the lowest rung of the social ladder. In the former Yugoslavia, the situation has been aggravated enormously by war, rampant nationalism, forced emigration, ethnic cleansing, and economic sanctions. The nearly four-year war in the region took a heavy toll on all the successor states except Slovenia.

In the 1992 elections to the national legislature, Lithuania became the first country in Eastern Europe to return its former communist party to power. Headed by Algirdas Brazauskas, the former First Secretary who had led the party in its split from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in December 1990, the party had rejected the Soviet past and renamed itself the Lithuanian Democratic Labor Party (LDLP). Declaring itself a social-democratic party, the LDLP supported democracy and a free market “with a human face.” In the 1992 elections the LDLP campaigned as a party of experienced, competent administrators capable of managing the reforms in such a way as to lessen their social impact. As a result the party won a resounding victory in the elections of that year to the national legislature, winning 73 of the 141 seats in the Seimas.

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.

This paper traces political events and modes of generating legitimacy in Turkmenistan since the Soviet collapse. The emphasis here is on state policies and social movements that relate to “nation building” for their contribution to political legitimacy. The extent of nation-building success is not an immediate subject of inquiry, for this paper is not about public perception and bottom-up response to state policies, but the reverse. It is certain that state-sponsored proclamations and nationalist ideas espoused by the intelligentsia do not always find resonance among the national population at large. However, attention given to social movements in this paper may compensate for this shortcoming in a small way. It must be stated that social movements in Turkmenistan, and Central Asia, as a whole, have been top heavy. They were principally initiated and steered by the urbanized intelligentsia. The extent of mass involvement in such movements is suspect and hard to gauge.