With the recent attention given to the breakup of Yugoslavia, it is important to emphasize that the Serbs of Croatia and Hungary have always feared, rightly or wrongly, for their cultural, economic, and physical existence. The most prominent Serbian political parties in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Habsburg monarchy staked their reputations on their ability to defend the Serbian nation from cultural assimilation. The parties examined in this article were no exception. They believed that their primary task was to assure the continued existence of a Serbian nationality in Croatia and Hungary. In this article, the politics surrounding the Serbian Orthodox church in the Habsburg monarchy will provide the framework for an analysis and comparison of the political strategies of the two largest Serbian parties in Croatia and Hungary, the Independent and Radical parties.

In October 1989, Uzbekistan's Supreme Soviet adopted the law “On the State Language of the Uzbek SSR.” At that time, Uzbekistan was still one of the 15 constituent republics of the USSR. The law was an important symbol of Uzbekistan's changing relation to Russia and the assertion of the preeminence of Uzbek culture in Uzbekistan.

In May 1989, two series of demonstrations in Turkish villages of northeast Bulgaria was followed by a massive gathering of more than 50,000 Muslim Turks in the town of Shumnu in the same area. The Turks had converged to Shumnu from the surrounding villages and smaller towns in order to protest the forced changes of names and the bulgarization imposed by the government of Todor Zhivkov, then undisputed ruler of Bulgaria. The demonstration was put down in the usual brutal Bulgarian way; some twenty to thirty-five demonstrators were killed and hundreds were injured. However, the Turks had made their point; they were not going to give up, however fierce the official terror, their Islamic identity and culture.

History shows that in the development of a society, as in any other development, there are critical periods when deep and sudden changes take place, and crucial decisions need to be made. What makes these periods critical is that certain conditions must exist or be created at the right time. Otherwise chances for change may be lost and the results will be fundamentally different from what they could have been.

The Komi-Permiaks and Their Homeland

According to the Soviet 1989 census, there was a total of 496,600 Komis in the USSR. The nationality is composed of two main groups, closely related to each other ethnically, culturally and linguistically: the Komi-Zyrians and the Komi-Permiaks. The former are numerically larger, amounting to 344,500 in 1989, while the latter numbered 152,100. The status of the two as distinct ethnic groups is still debated, but in terms of territorial administration the two groups have been treated separately. The Komi-Zyrians have the Komi Republic as their titular unit, whereas the autonomy of the Komi-Permiaks is of lower rank, an autonomous okrug (area) within the Perm’ province. In line with the administrative separation, Soviet language planners classified the two groups’ languages as distinct ones.

On 9 February 1918, at Brest-Litovsk, the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire) concluded an unusually favorable treaty with the government of the Ukrainian Central Rada. By its terms, in exchange for diplomatic recognition and military support against a Russian Bolshevik invasion of the Ukraine, Rada negotiators placed at the disposal of the Central Powers, but primarily Germany, a surplus of foodstuffs and agricultural products estimated at 1,000,000 tonnes. The Brotfrieden, or bread peace, as this arrangement is generally known, had three significant repercussions. First, it greatly undermined Leon Trotsky's bargaining position and obstructionist tactics, forcing the Bolsheviks to accept German terms on 3 March 1918. Second, by acquiring a rich granary, and thus no longer fearing defeat through starvation, it enabled Germany to break the iron ring of the Allied blockade. And, third, it made it impossible for the Ukraine to receive a favorable hearing or reception from the Western (French, English and American) Allies at the peace conference.

In Estonia, parties have, within a short period of time and with little trouble, assumed a dominating position in the political process.

The implementation of language laws in multilingual territories often leads to acrimonious political conflicts, as demonstrated by the recent experiences of Quebec, Estonia, Moldova and Slovakia, to name but a few. The pattern of such conflicts is remarkably similar. First, one group (generally, but not necessarily, the demographic majority) claims ancestry on a territory which it considers its “homeland”; then it succeeds in proclaiming its language (the main marker of group identity) the sole official language in the “public domain” of the given territory. This action triggers organized protest from the other linguistic group (generally the demographic minority), which feels aggrieved over such fundamental issues as group status, equal opportunity for upward mobility, and educational rights.

J. V. Stalin, in his 1923 denunciation of Sultan Galiev, formerly Stalin's own assistant in Narkomnats, stated:

As is generally known, the contemporary demographic situation in Estonia is fundamentally different from that of the prewar period. The autochthonous minorities who lived in the prewar Estonian Republic—Germans, Jews, Swedes, Finns, but also native Russians (living in the northern and southern areas of the Peipsi lake)—were lost after World War II together with a change of Estonia's eastern border by Soviet authorities in 1945. This left Estonia a very homogeneous country where Estonians formed some 97% of the population and where the entire population was made up of Estonian-speakers.

The December 1993 elections to the new lower house of the Russian legislature, the State Duma, resulted in a large number of seats going to parties and movements opposed to the Yeltsin reforms. Most dismaying for the democrats, however, was the attainment of seventy seats by the Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP) headed by ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky. As a consequence, the progress of economic and political reform was undermined, Yeltsin having been denied the mandate which he sought with the dissolution of the Supreme Soviet in October.

The social status of ethnic minorities residing in a state is one indicator of the level of democracy in each newly formed or restored democratic society.

In the fall 1989 issue of Heimatliche Weiten, the semiannual Soviet German literary journal, a bibliographical article by Victor Herdt, “Verzeichnis der russland- und sowjet-deutschen Zeitungen (1728–1989),” lists more than 150 German-language newspapers published in Russia and the Soviet Union. The entries are limited to German Russian newspapers and exclude those of other ethnic Germans, such as the Baltic, Bessarabian, or urban Germans, who differ from the German Russians in origin, culture, and history.

First Visions

During the Soviet period Estonia, like the other national republics of the USSR, lacked a foreign policy of her own. While foreign ministries did exist, they had just a symbolic function: staffed by only five or six people, they were allowed minimal cultural and trade contacts with the Western countries and limited inter-communist party ties within the Soviet bloc. They had to report to the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs on every move they made and served, first and foremost, as cover organizations for the KGB. Designing more substantive foreign policies in the Baltic Republics actually began before they gained independence in 1991. In 1989–1990, the emerging political parties voiced their first visions of the future of the Baltic States, which, generally speaking, boiled down to becoming sovereign democratic states, striving for friendly relations with all countries of the world. By that time, under the pressures of perestroika and glasnost, the Soviet authorities had been compelled to loosen their grip on the foreign contacts of the union republics. Those contacts, however, could not be called yet a foreign policy. They could, rather, be identified as isolated moves in the arena of international politics.

The Slavic and Baltic Division of the New York Public Library (NYPL) possesses a valuable collection of pamphlets, books and journals which numbers approximately three thousand items in various languages of the Eurasian nationalities. Bibliographical records of the collection were completed in the 1960s by Edward Allworth, Sakine Berengian, David Nissman and Azamat Altay. Each record contains bibliographic information in original script or in transliteration and a short annotation in English.

Historically there was a long-standing competition to control Estonian territory, primarily between Russia, Germany, Poland, Sweden, and Denmark, until 1710 when this area was conquered and ruled for two centuries by Imperial Russia. In the twentieth century, the only rival to Russia's (USSR's) domination over Estonia has been Germany. A Norwegian security analyst, Olav Knudsen, says correctly that the Baltic states “fall outside all other geographical and political contexts than the Russian and to some extent the German one.” As is known, Estonia was occupied by Germany in the course of the World Wars in 1918 and 1941–44. Generally speaking, the pre-1991 history of Estonia is a good case to prove that the survival of small states as independent powers is precarious, “depending on a multitude of factors over which they have little influence.”

Ever since the advent of perestroika and glasnost in the Baltic states in 1987–88, a heightened awareness of renewed state- and nation-building has prevailed. Regional politics and development acquired new life amid the officially proclaimed imperative of “restructuring.” Yet, it was really not until the re-establishment of independence in August 1991 that restructuring of state and society took on meaning and urgency. To be sure, the trappings required of a nascent state currently include legal frameworks and institutions to carry out basic functions. But, on a more profound level, there is also the question of assessing the societal foundation on which such a new structure would (should) rest. This issue represents a far more serious decision.