Ernest Renan argued over a century ago that belonging to a nation entails forgetting just as much as it required remembering past events. Certainly this is the case in East Central Europe, where not infrequently different nationalities create out of a single historical event utterly opposing historical memories. In the western borderlands of the Russian Empire, one historical event that has been variously interpreted by different nationalities is the Insurrection of 1863. To simplify somewhat, prerevolutionary Russian historians generally interpreted this key event as a mutiny against the established legal order—the term miatezh (mutiny) was always used in such accounts—while the Poles interpreted the uprising as perhaps naive and foolish, but in any case a noble attempt to regain rights usurped by the Russian occupiers. With such a sharply opposed memory of the uprising as a whole, it comes as no surprise that the figure who did the most to crush the insurrection in the Northwest (Lithuanian and Belarusian) provinces, Count M. N. Muraviev, should also be a controversial figure, praised by conservative Russians and demonized by Poles, Lithuanians, and liberals of all nationalities.

On 4 March 1914 the Young Czech party newspaper Národní listy published the startling accusation that a prominent Czech politician, the National Socialist Karel Šviha, was a paid informant of the Habsburg imperial police. The paper alleged that for several years Šviha, who was the chairman of the National Socialist party's parliamentary club, had exchanged information on the activities of his colleagues for a police stipend. In the weeks that followed, the public was treated to a daily diet of charge and counter-charge in the Prague newspapers, a carnival of mutual recrimination that concluded with an elaborately staged public trial of Šviha in an attempt to settle once and for all whether he was truly an informant. During the proceedings leading figures of most of the main Czech political parties either sat in judgement of Šviha or testified for one side or the other, many of them displaying for all to see a level of personal animosity previously reserved for the Bohemian Germans or the Imperial government. As one observer (a National Socialist) put it, by the summer of 1914, “there was no nation in Europe as internally disorganized as were the Czechs” and according to another (a Young Czech), political life in Prague had reached a state where it was “everyone against everything.”

In much of the already vast and expanding literature on nationalism there is an understandable emphasis on its political dimensions. It is generally seen as the ideological mobilization of an essentially cultural national identity—which may or may not be considered pre-existing—for the purposes of attaining sovereign state power, or in some other way influencing and affecting state power, for example attaining greater rights or autonomy within the state. Where there are no such demands directed at the state, such an understanding implies that either we are not dealing with a nation, or we are dealing with one that is still unconscious of its nationhood or that is satisfied without any political expression of that nationhood. None of these cases, in any event, would normally be considered examples of nationalism, since nationalism by definition must demand, indeed is the demand for such state expression or recognition of nationality. As John Breuilly puts it: nationalism is “above and beyond all else, about politics, and … politics is about power.”

This study examines attitudes towards language and ethnicity among nearly four hundred high-school students in the Teschen region of the Czech Republic and Poland. The borders of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia meet in this region of mountains, coal mines, and heavy industry which earlier in this century was bitterly contested by Poland and Czechoslovakia.

Jaroslav Durych, a popular Czech Catholic poet and essayist, began his weekly column in Lidové listy's (People's News) 10 May 1923 issue with the following proclamation: “The Czech Nation must be Catholic!” What did Durych mean by this puzzling statement? The majority of Czechs in the new Czechoslovak state considered themselves at least nominally Catholic. Yet Durych's article did not address the confessional status of Czechoslovakia's population, nor did it address religious differences between Czechs and Slovaks. Instead, Durych concerned himself with the representation of the Czech nation in popular mythology and official symbolism. He demanded that the Czech national symbols reflect the country's majority religion and not the Protestant experiment of the late Middle Ages.

Right at the start, one word in the title of this special topic issue requires clarification: the word “minority.” We will not try to define the term here, but it is only fair to say that some of the groups which are mentioned or discussed are not recognized as minorities or have a rather dubious legal position, as, for example, the Kashubs and Lemkos in Poland or Macedonians in Greece. As to the notion of linguistic minority: it is a term very often used but rarely defined. That it is often used has to do with the fact that most minorities in Europe speak a language or a dialect or variant which discriminates them from the majority. As a matter of fact, the nationalist traditions in Europe seem to take more or less for granted that a minority without a separate language is not a real minority. Language questions have been in the forefront of most nation-building projects or ethnic mobilizations in Europe, and so it has become more or less axiomatic that every nation or ethnic group should have its own language. As an example, the Bosnian language may be cited. The Bosnians—or rather the Bosniaks—insist on naming the language they use Bosnian instead of, as before, Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian. They also insist on their right to standardize their language in their own fashion. Another good example is the Rusyn language, or rather—to be more precise—the Rusyn languages in the Carpathian area. As Rusyns, not Ukrainians, they are now trying to create their own standard language or languages on the basis of their own dialects. The Rusyns in Yugoslavia started this process earlier; consequently, the Rusyn language of Yugoslavia is now to be considered one of the standard Slavic languages.

A frequent assertion about the recent events and pervasive mood in Belarus—the apparent efforts to reunite with Russia, the virtual denial of a Belarusian identity by a Russophone president, official nostalgia for the time of the former Soviet Union— is that national consciousness is somehow retarded or delayed, and national development is lagging considerably behind that of its neighboring states, Lithuania and Ukraine. This article seeks to address the question of national self-awareness in Belarus from three angles: those of demography, culture, and language. Was development of the republic in the Soviet period different from that of the other republics, and is that development responsible for what has been described as the “national nihilism” of today? Is that mood likely to change with a new generation of Belarusians? How far is President Alyaksander Lukashenka, the first president of Belarus, who was elected in July 1994, responsible for the present situation and how far is he a symptom of the notable lack of self-assertion of Belarusians?

Before 1945, Masuria was part of Germany and known primarily as the scene of the 1914 Battle of Tannenberg and as an attractive summer vacationland of numerous lakes, extensive forests, and villages of characteristic wooden houses. Since 1945, Masuria has belonged to Poland, where it is known as the scene of the 1410 Battle of Tannenberg/Grunwald, and as an attractive summer vacationland. To students of nationalism and national identity, however, Masuria is interesting primarily because its predominately Polish-speaking population seems to present the clearest and best-documented example anywhere in Europe of national identity developing counter to native language. Although most Masurians spoke Polish and lived adjacent to Poland, they gave every indication over quite a long period of time of voluntary and virtually unanimous identification with the Prusso-German state and nation. They did so at a time when most of the rest of eastern Europe was increasingly subject to the influence of ethnolinguistic nationalism and the rest of the German–Polish borderlands were witness to one of Europe's classic ethnic-national rivalries. (see Maps 1 and 2)

In late February 1947, Stalin's trusted troubleshooter Lazar' Kaganovich arrived in Kiev as the Ukrainian Communist Party's new first secretary. Having served consecutively as the Soviet People's Commissar of Railroad Transport, Heavy Industry, and Construction Materials, the notoriously heavy-handed Kaganovich had earned the epithet of zheleznyi narkom (“iron minister”). His tenure at the head of the Ukrainian party organization in March–December 1947 was marked by intensified coercive intervention in the economy and ideological purges in culture and scholarship. In Ukraine, Kaganovich's brief rule is remembered primarily for his relentless attacks on the alleged remnants of “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism.” In the works of post-Soviet Ukrainian historians, the 1947 crusade against “nationalism” appears as a comprehensive campaign masterminded by Stalin, planned by his envoy Kaganovich, faithfully implemented by the servile republican functionaries, and submissively endured by the terrorized Ukrainian intellectuals. Clearly, modern Ukrainian historians have adopted the traditional Western concept of Stalinism as a successful totalitarian dictatorship, in which society was no more than a passive object of an all-powerful state.

Throughout Central and Eastern Europe, the collapse of communism has led to an unleashing of ethnic strife and a worsening of the economic conditions of the Roma, who by any measurement occupy the lowest rung of the social ladder. In the former Yugoslavia, the situation has been aggravated enormously by war, rampant nationalism, forced emigration, ethnic cleansing, and economic sanctions. The nearly four-year war in the region took a heavy toll on all the successor states except Slovenia.

It has been said that the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 but the wall around Greece is still standing. It is ironic that, while the governments of Albania, Bulgaria and Rumania have, in recent years, taken measures to safeguard the rights of national minorities, the Greek government continues to stonewall on its own national minorities while fomenting rebellion among those in other countries. Nevertheless, the end of the Cold War has benefited the Macedonian minority in Greece. Greece has lost its paramount strategic importance for the western countries, which are now less likely to cast a blind eye on human rights abuses in that country. Conditions for the Macedonians in Greece have improved somewhat as individual members of the minority have become emboldened to demand their rights in public in recent years. They have attracted the attention of the U.S. State Department, Amnesty International and the Human Rights Watch/Helsinki Watch, all the more so due to the heavy-handed attempts by the Greek authorities to silence recalcitrant members of the minority, as described below. The U.S. Department of State (1995: Greece 12) notes that the Greek government “continues to harass and intimidate some of these people.”

This article explores the status of Turks in Bulgaria under the transition from Communism to post-Communism. After a summary of the demography of the Turkish population in Bulgaria, the paper focuses on developments in three specific areas: religious, political, and educational issues. For each issue a brief historical background is given but the emphasis is on developments since 1989. Since the article is an expanded version of a presentation on East European Linguistic Minorities, the issue of Turkish language and Turkish language education in Bulgaria is discussed in greater detail than religious and political issues. This in no way implies that the latter are any less important.

This article is based on the preliminary results of a project on “Islam, Ethnicity and Nationalism in Post-Soviet Tatarstan and Dagestan,” which began in March 1997 and ended in September 1999. These two out of Russia's 21 autonomous republics were chosen for comparative research because, although they are both Muslim, there are obvious geographical, ethnic, cultural, and political differences between them. Each republic also represents a distinctive model of the evolution of Muslim society and its relations with Russian culture in general and with the Russian political center in particular.

In exploring the history of the Russian minority in Estonia during 1918–1940, one is inevitably drawn to the figure of Professor Mikhail Anatolevich Kurchinskii (1876–1939). An academic and journalist, Kurchinskii was also an important political actor devoted to the quest for a satisfactory resolution of the nationality question in Estonia and Europe. It is with good reason that Kurchinskii has been called “the most important theoretician and practical advocate of cultural autonomy amongst the [interwar] Russian minority in Estonia.” From 1927 he also served as a leading member of the Congress of European Minorities (CEM), which became the main promoter of the cultural autonomy concept on the wider European stage. During the same period he took a deep interest in the work of the Pan-Europe movement and the quest for a durable settlement of European affairs following the traumas of World War I. Until very recently, however, Kurchinskii has remained a neglected figure among historians, even within the narrow field of Baltic studies. This neglect is symptomatic of the lack of attention devoted to the political history of the Russian minority more generally. As the first group to implement Estonia's celebrated 1925 law on cultural autonomy, the interwar German minority has already formed the object of a number of studies. By contrast, Kurchinskii's failure to realize the autonomy project means that he—and, indeed, the Russian minority as a whole—barely receives a mention in most histories of Estonia. Just as Kurchinskii's aspirations regarding cultural autonomy were never realized during his lifetime, so his vision of building a “New Europe” faded against the background of economic depression and a retreat into inward-looking national particularism during the 1930s. The tragic fate that befell central and eastern Europe after 1939 has in turn tended to obscure many of the ideas and positive achievements of the interwar minorities movement. This article uses Kurchinskii's career to illuminate issues relating to the sociopolitical development of the Russian minority between the wars. In particular it compares Kurchinskii's thinking on minority issues with that of his rival Aleksei Janson (1866–1940), a socialist politician and pedagogical expert who served as Russian National Secretary in the Estonian Ministry of Education from 1922 to 1927. Finally, by linking Kurchinskii's quest for cultural autonomy to his broader thinking on the “New Europe,” the article assesses the relevance of these ideas to contemporary debates on the nationality question.

In the 1992 elections to the national legislature, Lithuania became the first country in Eastern Europe to return its former communist party to power. Headed by Algirdas Brazauskas, the former First Secretary who had led the party in its split from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in December 1990, the party had rejected the Soviet past and renamed itself the Lithuanian Democratic Labor Party (LDLP). Declaring itself a social-democratic party, the LDLP supported democracy and a free market “with a human face.” In the 1992 elections the LDLP campaigned as a party of experienced, competent administrators capable of managing the reforms in such a way as to lessen their social impact. As a result the party won a resounding victory in the elections of that year to the national legislature, winning 73 of the 141 seats in the Seimas.

If until recently Western investigations of “the nationalities question” in Russia and the Soviet Union focused almost exclusively on the larger and more visible “nations” that enjoyed union-republic status in the Soviet period, scholars have now begun to devote more sustained collective attention to the history of smaller ethnic groups that received only “autonomous” units within the Russian republic itself. For many of these peoples, subjected to Russian imperial rule and cultural domination for the entirety of their modern history and endowed with fewer of the opportunities for national development available to titular nationalities in the union republics, the problem of maintaining their particularity and of articulating a vision of collective cohesion has been especially acute both historically and in more recent times. Yet the fact that some of these groups are now threatened with eventual disappearance as distinct linguistic and cultural communities should not blind us to the complex, contingent, and inherently messy nature of their assimilation. Indeed, close scrutiny reveals that the very processes of assimilation contain within themselves possibilities for the emergence of hybrid cultural configurations and the appropriation of dominant conceptions for the transformation of indigenous culture along new trajectories.

The Roma or Gypsies entered Romania's historic provinces, Wallachia and Moldavia, in the twelfth century. Over the next 200 years, the Roma, who had come to the Balkans from northern India, were enslaved. By the fifteenth century, the practice of Gypsy slavery was widespread throughout the two provinces. In part, their enslavement came about as a means of securing Gypsy skills as craftsmen, metalsmiths, musicians, and equine specialists. Over time, a complex body of laws was passed in Wallachia and Moldavia to strengthen the control of Romanian noblemen over their Gypsy slaves (robi). However, by the eighteenth century, some mild efforts were undertaken to better the plight of Romanian Gypsy slaves.

At the beginning of the 1990s, when the former Soviet republics declared sovereignty, the questions of their national histories, long neglected in the Soviet period, once again became important. In taking up the national and cultural traditions of the pre-Soviet era, as well as a literary language that had been reduced to folklore, the post-Soviet national intelligentsias began to develop their own versions of the Belarusian past. As the old Soviet empire declined, new “historical” nations developed against a background of diverse ethnicity and political struggles for power. Western scholars have discussed in detail the changes in historical writing since the emergence of glasnost'. The post-Soviet intelligentsia not only faced a crisis in historical writing and history generally within the late Soviet Union, but were confronted with what Aaron Gurevich has called a “vacuum of historical vision.”

Ukraine's independence signaled the end of the post-war Russification of the school system and the beginning of a large scale Ukrainization of the educational sector. From the 1990–1991 school year to the 1997–1998 school year, the national authorities raised the proportion of Ukrainian-instructed school children from 47.9% to 62.8% nationwide. As the language of instruction in Ukraine's schools almost exclusively is either Ukrainian or Russian, the relative percentage of Russian-instructed school children, conversely, declined from 51.4% to 36.4% during the same period. Ukraine is not the only Soviet successor state that has promoted the language of the titular nationality in the sphere of education at the expense of Russian. In Kazakhstan, for example, the proportion of pupils receiving their education in Kazakh grew from 32.4% in 1990–1991 to 40.1% in 1993–1994, and the percentage of Russian-instructed children, accordingly, fell from 65.0% to 57.2%. In Moldova, the number of pupils studying exclusively in Moldovan increased from 424,000 to 447,000 between 1989–1990 and 1992–1993, while the number of pupils studying exclusively in Russian dropped from 290,000 to 262,000.