A photograph of Pope John Paul II shaking hands with Ján Čarnogurský, First Deputy Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia, at the Vatican appeared in full color on the cover of the February 1990 issue of Rodinné spolocčenstvo. Čarnogurský symbolizes the speed of Czechoslovakia's political revolution and the important role that individuals who had gained political experience as dissidents played in Czechoslovakia's post-Communist government. Just 2 months before meeting with the Pope, Čarnogurský, a Roman Catholic activist in Slovakia, had been awaiting trial in Bratislava for editing the Slovak secret church's most politically-oriented samizdat periodical. Hundreds of demonstrators, organized by the Slovak secret church, had already been protesting his arrest for several weeks when the Velvet Revolution began in Prague on 17 November 1989.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union in December 1991 led to the de-colonization of the world's last remaining empire. Taking this into account, this article seeks to argue two points. Firstly, many of the imperial policies imposed by the imperial core in the Soviet empire were similar in nature to those imposed by imperial powers in Ireland, Africa, and Asia. Secondly, the nation and state building policies of the post-Soviet colonial states are therefore similar to those adopted in many other post-colonial states because they also seek to remove some—or all—of the inherited colonial legacies. A central aspect of overcoming this legacy is re-claiming the past from the framework imposed by the former imperial core and thereby creating, or reviving, a national historiography that helps to consolidate the new national state. All states, including those traditionally defined as lying in the “civic West,” have in the past—and continue to—use national historiography, myths, and legends as a component of their national identities.

In 1913, an article in a Russian missionary journal compared two “very typical representatives” of Islamic studies in Russia: İsmail Bey Gaspıralı (1851–1914) and Nikolai Ivanovich Il'minskii (1822–1891). Nothing could better symbolize the two opposing points of view about the past, present and future of the Muslims of Russia in 1913. Il'minskii was a Russian Orthodox missionary whose ideas and efforts had formed the imperial perceptions and policies about the Muslims of the Russian empire in the late Tsarist period, while Gaspıralı was a Muslim educator and publisher whose ideas and efforts had shaped the Muslim society per se in the same period. Il'minskii, beginning in the 1860s, and Gaspıralı, beginning in the 1880s, developed two formally similar but inherently contradictory programs for the Muslims of the Russian empire. Schooling and the creation of a literary language or literary languages constituted the hearts of both of their programs. Besides their own efforts, both Gaspıralı and Il'minskii had a large number of followers that diligently worked to put their programs into practice among the Muslims of Russia. As a result of the inherent contradiction of these programs, a bitter controversy developed between what we may call the Il'minskii and Gaspıralı groups, which particularly intensified after the revolution of 1905. In this article, I will discuss the underlying causes and development of this controversy by focusing on the role of language in the programs of Gaspıralı and Il'minskii. Then, I will conclude my article with an evaluation of the legacies of these two individuals in their own time and beyond.