The transformation of a society from socialism to a market economy, in addition to political and economic change, is accompanied by a socio-cultural transition of changing values, goals and social behavior by different groups in the population. It is also accompanied by a psychological transition from an overwhelming dependence of the people on the paternalistic state and its institutions, to individual choice, initiative and effort, and by substantial shifts in the demographic behavior of the population (Kuddo, 1995). The transitional crisis effects many aspects of people's everyday life, and demographic processes are a good indicator of such change.

Just after becoming the first-ever successful, democratically re-elected President of Russia, Boris Yel'tsin ambitiously called for creating, within the next year, a new ideology that would reflect the new state of affairs in Russia—in essence, he was calling for “re-imagining,” or reinventing, the foundations upon which Russian national community is based. With this directive, Yel'tsin was confirming something that had already become clear to many observers of Russian politics: post-Soviet Russian political life not only continued to resist democratization and pluralism, but also appeared to exhibit signs of discomfort without an officially-sanctioned ideological reference point by which the political players could set their compasses. The Kremlin's quest for a restoration of Russia's credibility as a great power included serious consideration of religion, specifically Russian Orthodoxy, playing a leading role in helping to reformulate an ideology acceptable to diverse communities within Russia in order to replace the now-defunct Marxist–Leninist ideology of the Soviet state. The old French adage “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose” seems particularly appropriate for the new Russia in its efforts to regain credibility as a great power, along with the prestige and respect to which it had become accustomed. This article examines the dynamics of the Russian search for a new ideology in order to help restore its credibility as a great power, as suggested by Yel'tsin's call for a new “national idea.” But the search for a new ideology began well before Yel'tsin made this statement, and, therefore, the following discussion focuses on the interplay between religion and politics in this quest, covering the first five years of a reconstituted, post-Soviet Russia, that is, the time period roughly from the collapse of the Soviet Union up to the Duma (parliament) elections of December 1995 and the two-stage presidential elections of June-July 1996.

When the American suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt (1859-1947), one of the founders of the International Alliance for Women's Suffrage, came to Prague in 1908 to lecture before German-speaking groups of women in the city, a beautiful young teacher asked her to address Czech women as well. Catt readily obliged. She could not have known, then, that this determined Czech feminist and nationalist, Františka Plamínková (1875-1942) would become, in time, a familiar figure on the international circuit of women's organizations, known as “Madame Plam” and would be executed by the Nazis as a member of the Czech resistance.

For her fight against fascism and for the liberation of her nation Plamínková was awarded, posthumously in 1950, the Czechoslovak Order of the Gold Star by the Ministry of National Defense. But then her name disappeared, along with thousands of other names from the First Czechoslovak Republic, as Stalinist repression set in. A plaque affixed to the building once her residence on Staroměstské Square tells us little about this energetic, dedicated patriot and fighter for women's rights. In 1993, the Gender Institute in Prague opened its doors, and, today, as feminism begins to awaken in the Czech Republic, the work and accomplishments of Františka Plamínková should be instructive.

Three full brothers were building a city,

Three full brothers, three Mrljavcevices:

The first brother was King Vukasin,

The second was Voivode Ugljesa,

The third was Mrljavcevic Gojko;

They were building Skadar on the Bojana,

They were building for full three years,

For three years with three hundred masons,

But they could not lay the fundament,

Much less raise up the turreted city:

What the masons built by the day

The highland oread destroyed by night.

Upon the dawn of the fourth year,

The oread cried from the mountain:

“Do not torment yourself, King Vukasin,

Torment yourself and waste your treasure;

You cannot, O king, lay the fundament,

Much less raise up the turreted city,

Until you find two kindred names,

Until you find Stoja and Stojan,

One a sister and the other brother,

And wall them up in the fundament,

So that the fundament will be maintained,

So that you will build your turreted city.”

[From a Serbian epic song “The Building of Skadar,” quoted by Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia, p. 406.]

On 24 February 1992, Belarusian foreign minister Piotr Kraǔchanka told a visiting European Community delegation in Minsk that he wanted to record his country's claim to Lithuanian border territory in the presence of an international audience. When asked whether the claims extended to Vilnius, Kraǔchanka said “yes,” but added that the border areas were really the ones at issue. In the late 1980s and early 1990s many Lithuanian officials expected Poland to make such claims on their country, to regain territory lost in 1939. By contrast Lithuanians paid little attention to what Belarusians were saying about the role of Vilnius in Belarusian history and the national identity of the 258,000 Slavs in the Vilnius region.

The radical right in the Ukrainian political spectrum is dominated by three movements—the Nationalist Union Ukrainian State Independence (DSU), the Ukrainian National Assembly (UNA, formerly the Ukrainian Inter-Party Assembly, UMPA) and the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists (KUN). The UNA is dominated by the highly secretive Ukrainian Nationalist Union (UNS) which grew out of the nationalist wing of the Association of Independent Ukrainian Youth (SNUM). The KUN was launched in 1992 in Ukraine as the overt arm of the émigré Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists-Bandera faction (known commonly as OUN revolutionaries, or OUNr).

In 1920 the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic emerged upon the ruins of German and Polish occupation. It replaced the short-lived Belarusian Democratic Republic as the embodiment of national statehood. The ensuing decade came to be an important but ambiguous period in Belarusian history. New state institutions such as the Commissariat of Public Enlightenment, the Institute of Belarusian Culture, and the Belarusian State University carried out unprecedented “nation-building” policies designed to reverse the effects of tsarist Russification and foster the development of Belarusian national culture. Parodoxically, many of the same institutions also implemented various aspects of “Sovietization.” A myriad of measures under the label “socialist construction” served to integrate ever more closely Belarus into the Soviet Union.

Along with her better known Czech neighbour, Slovakia is one of Europe's newest states. Born over the new year of 1993, it is the latest product of the unravelling of the post-communist order. A small nation—although at 5,269,000, it has a larger population than Norway, Denmark or Finland—Slovakia has yet to make a significant impact on European consciousness. This is illustrated by the repeated reply of a Slovak woman, living in London, to the question of the whereabouts of the strange land of her origin. Honolulu was the capital of this island she told Londoners in jest. To her amazement, rarely did anyone question her geography. When it comes to Britain, it would appear the sense of Slovakia can be aptly summarized by the infamous phrase with which interwar Czechoslovakia was dismissed by P.M. Neville Chamberlin—as a “faraway country of which we know nothing …” It still comes as a surprise, even to those who consider themselves familiar with the contours of contemporary Europe, that Bratislava, the new capital of this “faraway country's” eastern half (Slovakia), is only 60 kilometres from Vienna.

The association of nationalist consciousness and feminist ideology in Slovakia in the late nineteenth century was a protracted and uneven process. This conclusion rests upon the results of this study which examines the feminist and nationalist views of Slovak women intelligentsia who were at the forefront of Slovak nationalist efforts. It explores responses of leading Slovak women to the following issues of nationalist concern: traditional Slovak patriarchy, women's education, and Western feminism. It demonstrates that in Slovakia, gender was not the primary factor determining women's loyalties; there were other connecting allegiances and loyalties to the nation and the community. Slovak women developed their own unique concept of gender equality that aided Slovak nationalist efforts. In doing so they employed the language of motherhood, domestic duties, and religious commitment.

Around the turn of the century, a small group of Slovak women intelligentsia attempted to reconcile their own agenda with contemporary nationalist, social, and political currents. Spurred by nationalist efforts of the Slovak male intelligentsia, middle-class women tried to determine what type of new nationalist woman should replace the traditional woman. This question was answered by five women, in four very distinct ways: (1) Ľudmila Ríznerová-Podjavorinská portrayed the goals of Western feminism as a danger to Slovaks; (2) Elena Maróthy-Šolthésová and Terézia Medvecká Vansová encouraged the growth of Christian feminism; (3) Marína Ormisová-Maliaková favored the introduction of pragmatic feminism in Slovak nationalist efforts; and (4) Hana Lilge-Gregorová argued for the establishment of Western feminism as the basis of social and national development. Although the personal lives of these five women represent the social and national distress of the Slovak people, they also show women's fight for the acceptance of new ideas which would improve the fate of their sisters and their nation. Yet this small collection of feminist intellectuals could not and did not effect Slovak public opinion in any substantial way. Their influence, except perhaps that of Hana Lilge-Gregorová, did not stretch beyond the Slovak urban middle-class milieu.

In an essay published in September 1962, poet Pavle Stefanovic announced that in the next census he would identify himself as a Yugoslav rather than a Serb. Writing down “Serb” on official forms, Stefanovic said, had always made the sweat break out on his forehead, plunging him into “the nightmarish vision of an individual identity imposed upon me rather than chosen by my own will, one which fills me with polar opposites: pride and shame … a feeling of innocence and of culpability.” Mixed with his pride in parts of his Serbian heritage, he explained, was horror at the atrocities committed in the name of Serbdom by the Chetniks, the Serbian monarchist forces of the Second World War. Stefanovic emphasized that he was not rejecting Serbian identity because he thought the Serbian past was worse than others. Rather, he wished to throw off the symbolic weight attached to all national pasts. By declaring himself a Yugoslav, he thought, he could show that he considered nationality merely “a sort of historic-genetic address, a fact about one's origin,” and not a primary or sacred identity. In his eyes, choosing the Yugoslav identity meant asserting his own free will against the unchosen national collective, expressing his commitment to internationalism, and separating the future from a nightmare-ridden past.

In sweeping away the Tsarist political empire, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 also challenged a way of life. It provided opportunities for women in Siberia, the Sibiriachki, and in the rest of Russia, to change their lives. The revolution's democratic and Marxian socialist policies, carried to these women by the zhenotdel, determined officials in the women's department of the Communist Party, created wide possibilities for change. This essay examines Siberian women's responses—both negative and positive—to the revolution's teachings about women's rights and their equality with men. Women's cultural backgrounds—ethnic, educational, urban and rural—influenced their responses to the revolutionary call to claim their rights, their successes and failures in efforts to defend themselves from violence, their efforts to achieve health care and education, and their progress toward greater political and economic equality. This essay also explores conditions on the eve of the revolution, illustrating the variety of strata existing in Siberia's vast lands. It discusses the significant advances in women's self-awareness and their changing activities in the early and mid-1920s. The Party's political mobilization of women expanded into a critique of the social status quo. Subsequently, in the late 1920s and 1930s, the context for their activities was radically altered: political and social criticism were no longer acceptable. For women the gains of the revolution were corrupted and women lost more than they had previously gained. While one can see the throttling of the women's revolution as an indication of its fundamental weakness, one can also see it as the Party's response to a movement that was gaining strength and raising questions about the Party's primacy.

In addition to rapid economic decline and the persistent political violence in the province of Kosovo, in the 1980s Yugoslavia experienced a veritable renaissance of nationalist ideologies of the “dominant nation” type. According to this kind of national ideology, its target nation is historically predetermined to be politically dominant on a given territory which is then chosen by the national ideology in question. From 1971–1972, when the Croat nationalist movement and the Serbian liberal communist elite was suppressed by Tito until the early 1980s, publication of any nationalist writings was effectively banned in all parts of Yugoslavia, except in Kosovo. While ending public polemics by national ideologues, the ban confined nationalist polemics to the closely watched realm of intellectual dissidence. At that time, intellectual dissidents aimed primarily at the delegitimisaton of the communist regime in Yugoslavia. For this purpose, nationalist—as opposed to liberal—dissidents argued that the Yugoslav communist regime not only intentionally belittled and disadvantaged their respective nations, therefore benefiting the competitor nation(s), but also that it had betrayed their respective nations’ national goals. However absurd these claims may appear when taken together, they reveal how limited the target of each national ideology was: it targeted only “its” nation, in the attempt to prove that the communist regime had failed that nation alone and should not have the right to rule over it. These “dominant nation” ideologies stood in sharp contrast to the official Yugoslav Communist Party ideology of “equal nations,” which maintained the equality of all nations and nationalities in all parts of Yugoslavia; according to the official ideology, no nation in Yugoslavia was, in theory, politically dominant in any part of Yugoslavia.

From May to August, 1991, the author distributed 250 questionnaires among Poland's Lemko minority. The questionnaire is part of a dissertation being written on the long-term impact on the Polish Lemko community of the 1947 “Vistula” Operation population resettlement. To date, 52 questionnaires have been returned.

Literature in many languages (documentary, monographic, memoir-like and periodical) is abundant on the sovietization of Czechoslovakia, as are the reasons advanced for it. Some observers have argued that the Soviet takeover of the country stemmed from an excessive preoccupation with Panslavism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by a few Czech and Slovak intellectuals, politicians, writers and poets and their uncritical affection and fascination for everything Russian and Soviet. Others have attributed the drawing of Czechoslovakia into the Soviet orbit to Franco-British appeasement of Hitler's imperial ambitions during the September 1938, Munich crisis. At Munich, Czechoslovakia lost its sovereignty and territory, France its honor, England its respect and trust; and the Soviet Union, by its abstract offer to aid Czechoslovakia (without detailing how or in what form the assistance would come) gained admiration. Still others have pinned the blame for the sovietization of Czechoslovakia on machinations by top leaders of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, who, as obedient tools of Moscow, supported Soviet geopolitical designs on Czechoslovakia, who sought and received political asylum in the USSR during World War II, and who returned to Czechoslovakia with the victorious Soviet armed forces at the end of World War II as high-ranking members of the Soviet establishment. Finally, there are some who maintain that the sovietization of Czechoslovakia commenced with the 25 February 1948, Communist coup, followed by the tragic death of Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk on 10 March 1948, and the replacement, on 7 June 1948, of President Eduard Beneš by the Moscow-trained, loyal Kremlin servant Klement Gottwald.