The fall of communist regimes and the breakup of the multinational Soviet and Yugoslav states produced a remarkable experiment in regime change. Twenty-eight old, new and revived states emerged. While most adopted democratic institutions, many others evolved new variants of authoritarian rule. Some new democracies maintained much higher standards in upholding formal democratic rules and complementary freedoms of the press and political organization. How is this variation in initial democratization to be explained? Among countries that initially adopted democracy, how is variation in the survival and development of democratic freedoms to be explained?

Troeshchyna is a down-at-the-heels late Soviet moonscape that happens to be located on the fringe of Kyiv, though it is indistinguishable from hundreds of other socialist neighborhoods built in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s anywhere between Berlin and Beijing. This Brezhnev-era district has almost no distinguishing features other than the Ukrainian capital's most robust and scraggly markets. Walk by one of Troeshchyna's neighborhood elementary schools, such as School 247, and something looks not quite appropriate for this part of the world. The school's playground will be chock full of kids from countries and cultures not traditionally associated with the central Dniepr, including children from Afghanistan, Angola, Korea, Mongolia and Vietnam.

The organizers of the international conference entitled “The Cultural Contexts of Kazakhstan: History and Contemporaneity,” held in Almaty between 7 and 10 September 1997, chose as the logo of their conference one of the stills from Rustam Khalfin's film Lazy Cinema (Lenivoe Kino). It was the still representing a handful of earth. The choice was far from whimsical, for, as the writer Auezkhan Kodar, one of the organizers of the conference noted, the intention was “to underline the amorphous state of contemporary culture which needs to acquire a precise shape, characteristic to Kazakhstan alone.”

Unlike in some other former Soviet republics, when Kyrgyzstan achieved independence in 1991 its government granted citizenship to all residents, regardless of ethnicity or language. The government hoped this would help to quell incipient ethnic tensions in the country before they got out of hand. It was argued that, in a constantly changing ethnic landscape, citizens' identification with the country above all other considerations, including ethnicity and religion, would introduce a degree of stability—a common denominator for all residents of Kyrgyzstan, where there is a relatively high level of ethnic diversity (see Table 1).

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, nationality as an “ordering principle” became for the first time a significant factor for Russian imperial policy. Among the most thorny issues facing the imperial bureaucracy was the delimitation of the boundaries of the “Russian nation.” As is well known, St Petersburg never accepted either Ukrainians (at the time more often referred to as “Little Russians”) or Belarusians as separate nations. On the other hand, official Russia also did not deny the linguistic and cultural difference of these two groups entirely. Categories used in the 1897 census reflect this: under the category “mother tongue” (not surprisingly, no specific category of “nation” or “ethnicity” was included), those surveyed could respond “Great Russian,” “Little Russian,” or “Belarusian.” All three of these categories were then, however, subsumed into the larger category “Russian.” In a similar way, Russian officials never denied that Belarusians were in certain respects different from their brethren in central Russia. They did, however, indignantly reject the idea that these differences were so great as to exclude Belarusians from membership in the Russian nation.

In early 2003, President George W. Bush touted the prospects for democratization in Iraq, as well as in adjacent countries of the Middle East, following a U. S.-led invasion. He neglected to explain, however, how a country home to Kurds, Arab Sunnis, and Arab Shi'a—groups that historically have not co-existed harmoniously—would adjust to new and imposed political arrangements. Both the Shi'a, who constitute a majority, and the Kurds seek to escape Sunni oppression, omnipresent since the creation of Iraq in the 1920s. Although democracy may end Sunni privilege, Washington's commitment to the territorial integrity of Iraq will likely dissatisfy some if not many Kurds and Shi'a, who, presumably, not only expect improved representation within an Iraqi parliament but also enhanced political and cultural autonomy. Nearly a century ago, similar yearnings manifested themselves only to remain unfulfilled. This theme of dashed expectations pervades Aviel Roshwald's superb book, Ethnic Nationalism & the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia & the Middle East, 1914–1923.

With the rise of ethnonationalism, scholars have generated intense debates over civic nationalism versus ethnic nationalism. The Mongols at China's Edge represents another effort added to endorse ethnic nationalism with its application to the Chinese context. The author aims to “explore from diverse angles the moral and political implications and contradictions of minzu tuanjie (national unity) in the socialist China” (p. 1). A legitimate question raised by the author in the introduction is whether the regional autonomy granted to national minorities in China encourages a sense of separate nationhood for Mongols or contributes to the assimilation of Mongols into China.

In the period after Gorbachev's rise to power and later after the Soviet Union's collapse, the measurement and presentation of Russia's political culture and national identity were the province of practitioners of the mass survey. Over the past several years, however, a number of excellent qualitative studies involving extended field work and open-ended questions have added significant depth of understanding generally missing from these mass survey findings. Bo Petersson's National Self-Images and Regional Identities in Russia is an excellent example of this relatively new wave of qualitative studies.

Like the declarations of the newly empowered republican elites in Jeffrey Kahn's text, murky notions of federalism, democracy, sovereignty and the rule of law mar current debates about Russian federalism. Lacking some foundational understanding of these concepts as applied to the Russian context, analysts neither agree on the nature of the problems nor the potential means to resolve them and analyses frequently degenerate into subjective judgments about the intentions of political actors involved in the institution-building process. Jeffrey Kahn's Federalism, Democratization, and the Rule of Law in Russia comes the closest of any currently available work to providing a framework for discussions of Russian federal reform by tracing the development of contemporary Russian federalism and attempting to place it within a carefully constructed federal typology. In this respect, this work is essential reading for anyone interested in issues of federalism and post-Soviet Russia.

In bringing together this wealth of information on Russia's republics and regions, Orttung and his associates at the EastWest Institute have done the field a tremendous service. Spanning almost 700 pages, this weighty tome includes all of the basic information on each of Russia's subjects of the federation in one easily accessible volume. The fact that this is the only place much of this information can be accessed in English also makes it extremely useful as a teaching resource, given the limited number of students with adequate Russian-language skills.

One of the burgeoning areas of political study over the past ten years has concentrated on the role of non-state actors in world politics. In the wake of the Soviet collapse and the end of the Cold War rivalry, some social scientists began to construct paradigms and theories centered on identity and to concentrate their research on ethnodemographic challenges posed by migration and porous borders in the post-Soviet states, including how various groups facilitated secessionist movements and insurgencies, undermining regional stability and efforts at democratization in the process.

For the Russians, Siberia has always been “Other” and, as a result, it has often been imagined as something other than what it is. As Mark Bassin argues in this richly detailed book, this habit of the Russian imaginaire was on full display during the mid-1800s when hopeful Russian observers and statesmen envisioned the Russian Empire's latest territorial acquisition—the Amur river in far eastern Siberia—as a new Mississippi and the region around it as a potential second America. Ultimately, of course, these geographical analogies proved well off the mark. The region of the Amur never went on to experience the prosperity of the United States and the Amur river never even remotely rivaled the importance of the Mississippi as an artery of trade and settlement. And what is so interesting about all this is that the Russians themselves began to have their doubts about the Amur within just a few years of annexing it. Bassin's work, in fact, concentrates on explaining this strange shift. It is a study of why the Russian vision of the Amur that began so hot ended up turning so cold so quickly and what the vision itself seems to reveal about the content of Russian national identity.

When it comes to identity, nationalism and the various perceptions of “the Other,” postcolonial theory has inspired historians of Central and Eastern Europe for years. This inspiration, however, has not overcome a certain superficial level of slogans and catchphrases: identity is a cultural construction, yes, so it is somehow connected to the problem of power; knowledge too, since we have read Said and Foucault, is to be considered as both a result and an instrument of power. Now it seems that this superficiality will not be accepted any more. Recently, scholars of Central Europe organized a conference focusing on the questions of whether and how postcolonial theory can be applied on the study of Austria-Hungary. Was the Habsburg Empire really an Empire, can perspectives developed in Delhi be transferred to Prague and Bratislava?

Virginia Martin tells the fascinating story of the change of legal culture that occurred among the Middle Horde Kazakh nomads under Russian colonial rule in the nineteenth century. Her essential argument is based on the premise of conceptualizing law as a cultural system. This leads her to describe “law in action” in a convincing way, as she shows in her book the flexible use of law by various social groups.

Pessimism and skepticism dominate this most recent work by Martha Brill Olcott, one of the leading scholars of Central Asia and the Eurasian realm. Her central theme is that, even with abundant natural resources, an educated population, and a situation between East and West, Kazakhstan's seemingly bright future and promised prosperity failed to materialize. In short, political and economic corruption has dominated the transition from Soviet dependency to post-Soviet independence.

Turkmenistan remains the least studied and understood republic to have achieved independence with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The autocratic and dictatorial rule of Saparmurat Niyazov (also known as “Turkmenbashi,” or “Leader of the Turkmen”) has so restricted information about this resource-rich but economically desperate republic that any new work about Turkmenistan and the Turkmen is always a welcome addition. Shokhrat Kadyrov is a well-known Turkmen historian whose opposition to the Niyazov regime resulted in his exile to Norway, where he compiled what will be the first of two encyclopedia-like volumes devoted to Turkmen history, culture, and society. In addition, the author has added a historical foreword, chronology, and epilogue, which fill in various gaps that both Soviet and current scholarship in Turkmenistan avoided. As with Soviet interpretations of Turkmen history and culture, present-day Turkmen scholars must conform their work to the wishes of Niyazov's whims and fancies. Moreover, most works now published in Turkmenistan must include praise to Turkmenbashi for his guidance, wisdom, and enlightened vision for Turkmenistan. The most ostentatious demonstration of this reverence is the Rukhnama, Niyazov's quasi-religious history of the Turkmen, which is required reading in schools and necessary to know if one wants employment.