From the end of the eighteenth century until the Revolution of 1917, the Jewish communities of Vilna (Vilnius), Odessa, and Warsaw stood out as the prominent intellectual and cultural centers of Russian and Polish Jewry. In the period immediately following the Partitions of Poland, the preeminence of the northern region and Vilna, its major city, was acknowledged by all. Characterized by the rich Talmudical tradition associated with Elijah ben Solomon (1720-1797), the famous Gaon [Sage] of Vilna, and his disciples, Vilna signified then, and to a great extent continues today to signify, the values of intensive traditional learning combined with deep religious piety. In fact, in the literature on Russian Jewry, Vilna is often referred to as the Jerusalem of the North, indicating its special character and place in the history of East European Jewry. However, while Vilna symbolized the traditional world, over the course of the nineteenth century, the Jewish community of Russia was moving in a different direction. The political, economic, social and especially demographic forces of the modern period significantly altered the basic character of the Jewish community of the Russian Empire.

For analysts as much as for advocates of ethnic nationalism, language is an important elemental symbol of national identity. The relationship between language and nationalism has received attention in the scholarly literature, as has the role of linguistic problems in the resurgence of minority nationalism in the USSR, along with state-sponsored intervention in linguistic processes in that country.

One of the most spectacular developments concerning the Baltic States in the last ten years is the interest of the People's Republic of China in the fate of the Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians.

It was in late 1964, in a major address before the 8th Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, that Tito condemned “various negative ‘traditions’” in the sphere of Yugoslav historiography. He called for resolutely “stamping out nationalistic interpretations of the cultural achievements and legacy of the past.” Tito deplored “un-Marxist, uncritical and unscientific appraisals of events and personalities in national history” which were sometimes mere repetitions of “certain bourgeois-nationalistic assessments.” He specified, “For instance, only the positive aspect of certain movements, events and persons is stressed while their negative side is hardly ever mentioned, or, if so, only in general terms and reluctantly. Further, we come across cases, although less frequently, where some sort of superiority of one national history and culture over another is stressed in some indirect way.” Tito warned that nationalistic conceptions in Yugoslav historiography often assumed a political character and led to disputes of “ugly proportions.” In 1966 Tito had occasion once again to warn that some historians were poisoning relations between the nationalities of Yugoslavia by discussing “who had what great men and when” and which nationality had “a more glorious past.”

Romanian historiography since 1944 has accurately reflected the political realities that have faced the Romanian Communist Party both its relations with the Soviet Union and its plans for the “socialist transformation” of Romania. Since the Romanian communists have based their claims to legitimacy on historical rather than on ideological considerations from as early as the “liberation of Romania from fascism,” which occurred on August 23, 1944, the essential task of Romanian historiography has been to provide a “scientific basis” for validating the varying claims advanced by leaders of the Romanian communist movement in search of legitimacy.

The Soviet discovery of the approach of postindustrial society is not an incidental one. Since converging trends are observed in both capitalist and communist economic systems, the inclusion of macroplanning and more significant activity of the public sector could not be left unnoticed by the Soviet authors. For if convergence is viewed as a “capitalist policy” toward integration, postindustrialism stresses behaviorism with an accent on the consumer demand whose outlook became subject to extended modernization and technical acceptance of societal transformation. Soviet observers claim that in the capitalist environment, objective economic principles are replaced by purely biological determinants, because technocracy and consumerism are the very functional representatives of oncoming social values. Parenthetically then, planning and welfare-state designs are modes to “socialize” capitalism, since the two systems, as western economists claim, possess common values in terms of dynamic growth with no particular doctrine of implementation. Therefore, capitalism not only enforced hybridization of two ideologies, it became a virtual variant of socialism, converging around an industrial nucleus with increased participation of the public sector. Thus, capitalist convergence and revisionism in certain socialist countries are inbred, because by recognizing certain Marxian truisms but by ignoring class struggle, western societies approximate reinterpretation of Marx in the eastern bloc. The latter is a direct contradiction of the Soviet aim of establishing a classless, community-oriented society.