This article introduces a special issue on Ukrainian statehood. Based on the conference “A Century of Ukrainian Statehoods: 1917 and Beyond” at the University of Toronto, the special issue examines the relationship between the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1920 and the Soviet Ukrainian state over the long term. The authors survey the history of the Ukrainian SSR and propose two points of emphasis: the need to study the promises of “national” and “social” liberation in tandem and the persistent presence of an “internal other” in Soviet Ukrainian history.

This article examines the attempts by left-wing Ukrainian nationalists to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable: Ukrainian nationalism and Soviet socialism. It describes how leftist Ukrainian parties active during the Revolution and Civil War in Ukraine 1917–1921 advocated a soviet form of government. Exiled members of the two major Ukrainian parties, the Social Democrats and the Socialist Revolutionaries, then took this position further, arguing in favor of reconciliation with the Bolsheviks and a return to their homeland. After the Entente recognized Polish sovereignty over Eastern Galicia and Soviet Ukraine introduced a policy of Ukrainization in 1923, many West Ukrainian intellectuals took up this call. The Great Famine of 1932–1933 and the Bolsheviks’ purge of Ukrainian Communists and intellectuals all but ended the position. However, it was more the Soviet rejection of the Sovietophiles that ended Ukrainian Sovietophilism than any rejection of the Soviet Union by leftist Ukrainian nationalists. Thus, an examination of the Ukrainian Sovietophiles calls into question the accounts of the relationship between Ukrainian nationalism and the Soviet Union that have common currency in today’s Ukraine.

In the Soviet Union theatre was an arena for cultural transformation. This article focuses on theatre director Les Kurbas’ 1929 production of playwright Mykola Kulish’s Myna Mazailo, a dark comedy about Ukrainianization, to show the construction of “Soviet Ukrainian” culture. While the Ukrainian and the Soviet are often considered in opposition, this article takes the culture of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic seriously as a category. Well before Stalin’s infamous adage “national in form and socialist in content,” artists like Kulish and Kurbas were engaged in making art that was not “Ukrainian” in a generic Soviet mold, or “Soviet” art in a generic “Ukrainian” mold, but rather art of an entirely new category: Soviet Ukrainian. Far from a mere mouthpiece for state propaganda, early Soviet theatre offered a space for creating new values, social hierarchies, and worldviews. More broadly, this article argues that Soviet nationality policy was not only imposed from above, but also worked out on the stages of the republic by artists, officials, and audiences alike. Tracing productions of Myna Mazailo into the post-Soviet period, moreover, reveals a lingering ambiguity over the content of culture in contemporary Ukraine. The state may no longer sponsor cultural construction, but theater remains a space of cultural contestation.

This article looks at the rehabilitation of the early history of the Communist Party of Ukraine and the Ukrainian SSR during the Thaw. It argues that the post-Stalin political moment offered the Ukrainian Party and academic establishments the opportunity to revalorize their republic’s founding narrative. In order to popularize this narrative, they produced publications on the revolution in Ukraine and early party history, rehabilitated Ukrainian Communists from the 1920s who had fallen victim to repressions, and constructed a set of monuments that embodied the new historical paradigm. These efforts aimed to de-Stalinize the country’s history as well as promote a Soviet Ukrainian patriotism that would make Ukrainians feel more integrated into the Soviet whole. Based on archival research, newspapers, and memoirs, the article suggests that rehabilitating this narrative was a strategy for the legitimization of the party within Ukraine.

This article analyzes the debate on Ukrainian statehood going on in the 1960s in Suchasnist’, the most intellectually prestigious journal among Ukrainian emigrants in the West. These intellectuals and political activists interpreted the renaissance of Ukrainian national culture in the 1960s (the so-called shistdesiatnytstvo) in various ways and proposed different political strategies to influence their original homeland and its future political and cultural developments. In the Ukrainian diaspora, two opposing factions emerged: the first, despite condemning Soviet imperialism, favorably evaluated the birth of a movement for the defense of human rights in Soviet Ukraine and was happy to exploit the rapprochement between the USSR and USA to finally have an opportunity to make contact with the motherland. The other did not consider the Ukrainian SSR as a real example of a Ukrainian state and acknowledged its existence only for tactical reasons; this faction thought that contact should be avoided and that the Soviets should be offered no opportunity to address the Western public. Eventually, at the beginning of the 1970s, even those who had opposed collaboration with any subject from Soviet Ukraine decided to embrace the cause of human rights and join the struggle led by the Ukrainian dissent.

This article examines the goals and practices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ukraine in the 1970s, a Soviet institution that functioned as an ideological organ fighting against Ukrainian nationalists domestically and abroad. The central figure of this article is Heorhii Shevel who governed the Ministry from 1970 to 1980 and whose tactics, strategies, and practices reveal the existence of a distinct phenomenon in the Soviet Union—the nationally conscious political elite with double loyalties who, by action or inaction, expanded the space of nationalism in Ukraine. This research illuminates a paradox of pervasive Soviet power, which produced an institution that supported and reinforced Soviet “anti-nationalist” ideology, simultaneously creating an environment where heterodox views or sentiments were stimulated and nurtured.

Scholars of nation-building and secession tend to prioritize elite or broader nationalist activism when explaining the proliferation of nation-states. Yet, recent historical research reveals a major finding: the influence of great powers tended to eclipse nationalist mobilization for new states in Latin America, the Balkans, Anatolia, and Central and Eastern Europe. Drawing on recent trends in historical research largely unknown in other fields, this article examines context, timing, and event sequencing to provide a new approach to multi-case research on nation-state proliferation. Major power recognition of new states in the Balkans also emerges as transformational for the post-World War I replacement of dynastic empires with nation-states in Europe. These findings suggest a shift of focus to the interplay of nationalist activism and great power policy for explaining the spread of nation-states.

From the early 1990s through the 2008 “Russo-Georgian war,” waves of armed conflicts in the Abkhazia and South Ossetia/Tskhinvali regions of Georgia forced thousands of residents, mainly ethnic Georgians, to leave their homes. More than two decades of protracted internal displacement, marked by tough economic and social problems, led this vulnerable community to a common trap in reckoning with the past: an overwhelming sense of the fundamental ruptures between the idealized past and current, miserable reality. Failures of the displacement policy and “side effects” of numerous humanitarian aid projects hinder internally displaced persons’ social integration and leave them on the margins of Georgian society with almost a singular option: to constantly recall meaningful life in the lost homeland, which they remember as free of ethnic phobias and economic problems. In this article, we suggest that for persons who are internally displaced, memories are defined not only by their past lived experiences and present hardships, but also by the official historical narratives that argue that Georgian-Abkhazian and Georgian-Ossetian “endemic” unity and cohabitation was destroyed by Russian imperial politics. Living in constant pain also narrows the future expectations of the internally displaced persons. However, it is the past and the memories that are supposed to be useful in achieving the utopian dream of a return.

This article explores discursive construction of legitimating identity(-ies) of the state within official institutional and semipublic social discourses on the national flag in post-1990 Lithuania. By doing so, it contributes to the continuous discussion regarding the puzzling coexistence of a relatively stable democratic regime and a limited degree of social and ethnic unrest with signs of political alienation in Lithuania. It argues that an empirical approach to legitimacy studies paired with research on national symbols and discourse analysis can contribute to a better understanding of this problem. The article concludes that the most prominent legitimating identity of the state coming forth in the official discourse is that of the state as an object of love and respect. This view is both shared and challenged within the semipublic discourse—especially regarding issues of instrumental performance of the state as well as the ability to accommodate both the initiative and autonomy of its people within political affairs.

The article analyzes, from a historical and institutional perspective, the sociopolitical cleavages existing between ethnic Macedonians and ethnic Albanians in the Republic of North Macedonia. Although primarily ethnic, the division between the two groups is deeply connected to state ownership and the official status each group occupies and wishes to occupy in it. By scrutinizing both groups’ claims, standpoints, and dissatisfactions, the article asserts that the implementation of consociationalism in 2001, through the de facto institutionalization of ethnicity, has partly soothed both groups’ frustrations, using the pragmatic exploitation of the existing ethnic divide as a proxy for “state sharing” in addition to power sharing.

In 1992, after the dissolution of Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the Slovenian government unlawfully erased 25,671 individuals—ethnically mainly Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Macedonians, Montenegrins, and Roma—from the Register of Permanent Residents of Slovenia. The aim of this article is to analyze the logic of the governmental rationalities that served as a basis for the politics of the erasure. The article begins by refuting claims that the erasure was a tactic for achieving ethnocultural homogeneity and continues by explaining the mindset involved in this particular practice of government, resting upon Foucault’s notions of raison d’état, governmentality, and sovereign power. Highlighting the prominence of the individual’s political opinion and loyalty to the newly established state, the article discusses the principles of nationalism, which reinforce the very common-sense exclusionary politics related to political loyalty implied in citizenship and ethnic identity. Finally, the article deliberates on the effects of the contemporary diagram of power of the nation-state, which legitimizes the exclusion of individuals from the national polity and thus immobilizes universal respect of human rights.

This article, through comparative historical analysis, examines the traditional marriage rituals of the Dungan diaspora in Kazakhstan. Dungans are Chinese-speaking Muslims who were forced to migrate to present-day Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan after the defeat of their revolt against the Qing dynasty from 1877 to 1888. The article focuses on the diversity of wedding ceremonies in three zones where Dungan settled in Kazakhstan: Zhalpak Tobe and Sortobe, two rural areas in the Zhambyl region; and Zaria Vostok, near the city of Almaty. I find that the local variations in traditional wedding ceremonies stem from their close intercultural and social cooperation with non-Dungan peoples—primarily Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Uyghurs, and Russians. The example of wedding rituals shows that, while Dungan existence in another cultural environment has stimulated the consolidation of their ethnic group, preserving many of the traditional archaic cultural features, it has also led to the transformation of the marriage ceremonies. I address a much-neglected pathway—the nature of borrowed elements in Dungan wedding rituals—and ask why the extent of borrowing varies from community to community even though the Dungan arrived from China with similar traditions.