This article tells the story of the construction of Turkish national identity in the early republican era by addressing two canonical novels about occupied İstanbul: Sodom ve Gomore (“Sodom and Gomorrah”) by Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu and Biz İnsanlar (“We People”) by Peyami Safa. Following the establishment of the Turkish Republic, Turkish nationalist intellectuals attempted to offer certain formulations and implemented various mechanisms to create a national self. The study aims to focus on the ways in which Karaosmanoğlu and Safa create the new Turkish national identity and deals with the questions of how occupied İstanbul was perceived by these intellectuals and how the memory of the Allied occupation of İstanbul, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the National Liberation Struggle shaped Turkish elites' self-identification as well as their formulation of the national identity.

With the withdrawal of the Yugoslav People's Army from Slovenia, the Yugoslav conflict escalated into a full-scale war in Croatia in the summer of 1991. The article explores the involvement of the Yugoslav People's Army in the war in East Slavonia from the local perspective of the Serbian town of Valjevo. Touching upon Serbia's political and social radicalization in Valjevo in the second half of the 1980s, it discusses the process of the local garrison's military mobilization and an incidence of mass desertion by Valjevo reservists in September 1991. Based on local archive material, press releases, and interviews with former soldiers, the account focuses on the city's national engagement, the garrison's deployment in combat, and the process of “reimplanting” patriotism after the reservists' desertion. It reveals that the engagement of Valjevo's troops completed the city's mental process of ethnic segregation. The outbreak of violence in Croatia in 1991 destroyed the Yugoslav People's Army as a pillar of Yugoslav statehood and permanently transformed the identities of Valjevo's soldiers.

The first years of Communist rule in Poland profoundly shaped the 45 year political experience of the country until the 1989 democratic breakthrough. These formative years encompassed such historic developments as postwar reconstruction and central economic planning, the emergence of new and the disappearance of old political parties, the heretical notion of a Polish road to socialism but also the advent of high Stalinism. Even with the redrawing of Poland's postwar boundaries and with increasing Communist hegemony over political life, the period between 1945 and 1948 was characterized by considerably more political and ethnic heterogeneity than the decades that followed. A significant and, ultimately, controversial role in the shaping of postwar Poland - in its rebuilding, in its economic program, political configuration, national security organization, and in its minorities policies - was played by Jewish Communists.

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 current situation in former Soviet Central Asia has been formed by two sets of factors: long-term developments which are the direct results of decades of Soviet rule; and specific trends that are more characteristic of the pre-independence decade.

A year ago it was still possible to review events within the regional confines of Transcaucasia. The three republics constituted a logical sub-unit of the Soviet Union. Subsequent events, however, no longer permit such a tidy delineation. A revolution is taking place: the Raspad, or Great Collapse, of which the dissolution of the USSR was but the beginning of a major political reshufflement throughout Eurasia, a continuing process that is still playing itself out in the entire Caucasian region. The demise of the trans-continental Soviet empire has left the three Transcaucasian successor states separated by international borders from the Russian Federation, Iran, and Turkey as well as from one another. Nevertheless, the dynamics of ethnic-fueled fragmentation, which initially helped bring down the power of Moscow, continues to gnaw away in defiance of any artificial frontiers, most of which cut through ethnic communities. Revisionist ethnic activities thrive on either sides of frontiers, especially those shared by Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Iran, and the Russian Federation, thereby forcing one to consider the whole of Caucasia as the proper area of evaluation for the crucial year 1991-2. North and south of the mountainous divide, ethnic-driven politics proves all too clearly that the energies of the Raspad are anything but spent.

Over the last decade or so there has been renewed interest in the Greek civil war, with a number of important publications shifting the focus of research from the high plane of international relations and Cold War polemics to a critical history of the period, allowing unheard voices and perspectives to be heard and revealed. The volume edited by Mark Mazower, for example, places the experiences of the 1940s in the longue durée of Greek nation-state formation as well as in the wider context of war and post-war violence and resistance—the social character of which is emphasized. Yet the importance of the Greek civil war in the emergence of the Cold War cannot be underestimated as Gerolymatos makes clear. This paper, therefore, aims to demonstrate how the refugees from Greece who arrived in Poland constitute an important part of Cold War history and to show how their experience in Poland can shed light upon both the wider international context and the dynamics of nationality policy in Poland itself. I contend that the arrival of Greek refugees weakened the Polish state's drive to national homogeneity.

How is it possible for a Rusyn nation-builder to have contributed to the historiography of Ukraine to such a significant degree that one might suspect that Paul Robert Magocsi is really a Ukrainian nation-builder? Like all social-science puzzles, this one dissolves upon closer inspection. Magocsi resembles a Ukrainian nation-builder – or perhaps even is a Ukrainian nation-builder malgré soi – precisely because he is a Rusyn nation-builder. That is so because all nation-builders are always builders of at least two nations, their own and the others.

The genesis of “National Communism” is often traced to the Yugoslav dictator Tito, but in reality the only novel aspect about Titoism is that it has succeeded. The ideology of National Communism was manifested in Ukraine in the early 1920's and its pre-eminent leader was Mykola O. Skrypnyk. It was a reaction to the strong centrist policies of the Bolshevik Party, which had many leaders who were committed to a belief in Russian superiority, a belief which was carried over from the Tsarist regime. At the Eighth Party Congress in 1919, Lenin remarked: “Scratch many a Communist and you will find a Great Russian chauvinist.” The traditionalist utterances made by several highly placed Bolsheviks during the first years of the Revolution were certainly indiscrete. Thus did George Piatakov, a Russian Communist, tell a meeting of the Party held in Kyiv on June 17, 1917:

This paper examines the controversial music genre rabiz in relation to political and socioeconomic developments in post-Soviet Armenia. Rabiz, an urban folk-pop genre characterized by melismatic singing and “oriental” embellishments, is a ubiquitous soundtrack to everyday life in the country, with lyrics commonly covering romance, male friendship, and family ties. Ethnographic observations suggest that its popularity draws on the affective appeal with which it captures common hardships and aspirations of post-socialist transition. In spite of this, rabiz is almost universally denounced by nationalist intellectuals and liberal citizens for foreign influences, sentimentality, consumerism, and conservatism. While for the cultured classes, the rejection of rabiz as “un-Armenian” is often an integral part of the construction of a virtuous self, the alternative conceptions of performers and fans reveal the polysemy of Armenianness as a moral category.