With his contingent of geographers, historians, and other academic “experts” collectively known as The Inquiry in tow, Woodrow Wilson arrived in Paris in January 1919 to redraw the map of Europe. Wilson wanted to fulfill his Fourteen Points and guarantee national self-determination to the peoples of Europe. A peaceful community of ethnically homogeneous nation-states was to replace the great multinational empires (defined by central European nationalists as prisons of the peoples) that had previously dominated central and eastern Europe. During the inter-war period, the governing elites of central Europe, their new “nation-states” legitimated by the post-war settlement, created new national holidays, national anthems, and nationalist school text books lauding the history and achievements of the state-bearing nation. These simple and seemingly coherent national narratives elided the messy, confusing, and jumbled past of multiple identities, mingled ethnic groups, and alienated social orders, and legitimized political, economic, and territorial claims made in the name of the “national community” lending its name to the new state.

The Mordvins are the largest and the southernmost Finno-Ugrian nationality in Russia. Their titular autonomous unit, the Mordovian Republic, is located in the southern part of the Volga-Viatka economic region, on the border between the forest and forest-steppe zones. The ethnic composition of today's Mordovia is mixed. According to the 1989 census Russians constituted 60.8% of the population, Mordvins stood in second place with 32.5% and Tatars ranked third with 4.9%.

The so-called “national,” or ethnopolitical questions, whose existence has long been denied in Russia, is a significant issue in the Udmurt Republic. The Soviet propaganda machine long advanced the theme of friendship among all the peoples of the multinational USSR until glasnost', when this notion began to be questioned by society. In the minority areas ethnic questions finally emerged at the end of the 1980s and since then have occupied a prominent place in the mass media, in Udmurtia and elsewhere. This article highlights the polemic character of the debate on ethnic issues in Udmurtia, which is located in the Volga-Urals region, against a background of the particular local historical and demographic factors.

For decades the residents of Taos, New Mexico have been afflicted by a low frequency humming—sometimes louder, sometimes almost inaudible—but never completely absent. On almost every college campus in North America, the buzz about using technology in teaching can be almost as annoying—and with each passing year, it gets louder. Although recent events in the American stock market have taken a good deal of the shine off of the idea that the Internet will fundamentally transform the economy, in higher education there seems to be no corresponding waning of enthusiasm for the infusion of new media into the educational experiences of students.

During the second half of 1991, the final stage of the disintegration of the Soviet Union brought momentous political changes to the citizenry of the country. From the beginning of the post-Soviet period, the new Russian government commenced economic reforms which resulted in the freeing of retail prices, the devaluation of the ruble, and the disastrous depreciation of household savings. In daily life across the state, these events represented a turning point for Russian citizens, including those in the Komi Republic.

On 26 February 1925, the Soviet government, or the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, passed a resolution that, in effect, ensured the continuation of the separate development of the southern and the northern Komi, that is, the Komi-Permiaks and the Komi-Zyrians. In more detail, the Presidium decided,

In the administrative usage of the Soviet Union, the category “minor peoples of the North” embraced 26 ethnic groups of the North and the Far East. According to 1989 data, the populations of these groups ranged from 179 to 34,190 and together totaled 181,500. In addition to being small in numbers, the common denominators of the groups include a northern location and dependence on such sources of livelihood as hunting, reindeer herding, and fishing. Furthermore, some of these peoples remain nomadic or semi-nomadic.