For fifty years the Soviet Bloc constituted one pole of an essentially bipolar world power distribution. Although not unprecedented (consider Imperial Germany's defiance of most of the world during 1917–18, or later phases of Napoleon's challenge to Europe), bipolarism has usually been very brief. The sheer length of time the Soviet-American confrontation dominated world politics created, on the contrary, mind-sets and reflexes which only a conscious effort can overcome.

Over the past several decades the discipline of political science has, perhaps, degraded its competence and hence its eligibility for handling this issue by saddling itself with a flawed language, or, rather, flawed use of language for doing so. At any rate, that is true of political science as written and taught in English. Not that the other social-science disciplines are in better shape (perhaps History is). Still, political scientists have, for example, committed the following intellectual offenses:

As these pages are being written, a fragile cease-fire is holding in Croatia, and the Bosnian legislature is about to declare Bosnia-Hercegovina an independent state despite the strenuous opposition of close to forty percent of the population. When hostilities began in Croatia, the Serb insurgents there called themselves cetniks and referred to their enemies as ustasa, World War II labels which the Serb media promptly adopted. Bosnian Serbs might call themselves cetniks too, should it come to open hostilities in that republic, but they will have trouble finding a label that would be applicable not only to their Croat, but also to their Muslim enemies.

“We Serbs must militarily defeat our enemies and conquer the territories we need.”

Vojislav Maksimovic, Member

Bosnian Serb Parliament

“I don't see what's wrong with Greater Serbia. There's nothing wrong with a greater Germany, or with Great Britain.”

Bosnian Serb Leader

Radovan Karadžić

The break-up of Yugoslavia has come about as a result of national, economic and political conflicts which by the end of 1987 had taken on unprecedented dimensions. At that point, latent political conflicts between various republics came into the open. More specifically, the conflict between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo had turned into a low-intensity war. Under Slobodan Miloševićs leadership in Serbia, the Serbo-Slovenian conflict over Kosovo deepened, forcing other republics and provinces to take sides. The Slovenian leadership opposed a military solution to the Serbo-Albanian conflict in Kosovo. By 1990 the Serbo-Slovenian conflict had spilled over into Croatia, completely polarizing the Yugoslav political elite into two distinct camps; one encompassed Slovenia and Croatia, the other Serbia and Montenegro, with Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina playing the role of unsuccessful mediators.

The national minorities question in Romania has been one of crises and polemics. This is due, in part, to the fact that Greater Romania, established at the end of World War I, brought the Old Romanian Kingdom into a body politic (a kingdom itself relatively free of minority problems), with territories inhabited largely by national minorities. Thus, the population of Transylvania and the Banat, both of which had been constituent provinces of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, included large numbers of Hungarians and Germans, while Bessarabia, a province of the Russian empire, included large numbers of Jews. While the Hungarian (Szeklers and Magyars), Germans (Saxons and Swabians), and Jewish minorities were the largest and most difficult to integrate into Greater Romania, other sizeable national minorities such as the Bulgarians, Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars, Serbians, Turks, and Gypsies also posed problems to the rulers of Greater Romania during the interwar period and, in some cases, even after World War II.

Nachkriegspolen kannte bis zum Ende der Herrschaft der Parteinomenklatura keine Probleme mit nationalen Minderheiten—so schien es zumindest nach außen. Seit den 1950er Jahren gab es keine Nationalitätenstatistik mehr, und man versuchte den Eindruck zu erwecken, als ob das Zusammenleben im polnischen Staat wenigstens in diesem Bereich völlig problemlos sei. Dies ist zunächst verwunderlich, denn auf der anderen Seite war die polnische Regierung stets bereit zuzugeben, daß der Staat in wirtschaftlicher, aber auch in außenpolitischer Hinsicht in nicht geringen Schwierigkeiten steckte. Nur auf dem Gebiet der nationalen Minderheiten war man zurückhaltend.

There are no differences between the Czech and Slovak governments’ views on the forms of the future coexistence and relations between the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. Our positions are literally identical.

Vladimir Meciar, Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic (August 1990)

Since our democratic revolution, the situation [in relations between the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic] has never been as serious and precipitous as it is today.

Vaclav Havel, President of the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic (September 1991)

On 9 June 1992 came the shattering announcement by newly elected Czech Republic Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus, that the Czechoslovak federation was no more. An interim (but trimmed) federal government was to be set up to preside over the hasty dismantlement of the 74-year old state. By 30 September, the Czechoslovak Republic was to be completely split in two. And by January 1993, the finances of state are supposed to be completely divided.

There have been few areas of the world during the past 150 years that have been as shaped by Jewish influences as East Central Europe. The prominent Czech writer Milan Kundera observed seven years ago that in the years before Hitler, the Jews were the “intellectual cement,” the essentially cosmopolitan and integrative element that forged the spiritual unit of this region. It was this small nation par excellence which added the quintessentially European color, tone and vitality to great cities like Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Budapest, not to mention Cracow, Lemberg and Czernowitz further to the east. The Nazi mass murder of the Jews, to which Stalin added his own macabre postscript after World War II, brought about the disappearance of this fructifying Jewish leaven and crushed for forty years the independence of the smaller East European nations sandwiched between Russia and Germany. Since the European revolutions of 1989, these nations, re-emerging from a semi-totalitarian deep freeze, have been recovering their national identities and historical roots long repressed under Communist rule.

Sovietology's gross neglect of the nationality issue is now embarrassingly evident. It was, indeed, a blunder of vast proportions, one that raised doubts about the basic assumptions that dominated the field and the sound judgement of many of its leaders. By analyzing the Soviet past and present, Sovietologists attempted to predict Soviet behavior in the future. For this purpose they produced a variety of models, approaches and scenarios. But if there was one scenario or prognosis which they regularly discounted, it was the one that actually occurred: the disintegration of the multinationalist USSR due to the forces of nationalism.

*“Democracy is next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities.”

—John Stuart Mill

“I have no doubt that this great Eastern Slav empire … has entered the last decades of its existence … Marxist doctrine has delayed the break-up of the Russian Empire—the Third Rome—but it does not possess the power to prevent it.”

—Andrei Amal'rik

Our times do not make much of prophets. The Soviet dissident, Andrei Amal'rik, went to the Gulag for his prophecy, which nevertheless turned out to be remarkably correct.

Russia is at present seeking to define its national interest. A new foreign policy is in the process of being formed; in a debate that has run wild, the points of reference used when formulating foreign policy in the days of Soviet Marxism have been abandoned and replaced by notions about “the Russian national interest” (Rahr 1992; Crow 1992).

At the turn of the century a major social, economic and political transformation was taking place in Russia, which at the time was a vast trans-continental empire extending from Warsaw in the west to Vladivostok in the east. Many rival currents of thought and various political movements presented their solutions for Russia's political, social and ethnic conflicts. In 1917, adherents of one Marxist current, the Bolsheviks, seized power in Russia and after a prolonged and extremely bloody Civil War consolidated their regime in the early 1920s. Among the nations of the world Russia alone adopted as its guide for the solution of its problems and conflicts Marxist ideology, invented about seventy years earlier in Germany, an ideology that its founders thought offered a solution for all of the important problems of humanity at large. For, indeed, Marxism was a comprehensive system of thought, which claimed to explain the entire history of humanity and to offer a vision, a scientific blueprint, for humanity's future. In that blueprint the phenomena of conflict, power, and politics were to make room for totally new principles of social organization: solidarity, cooperation, and a rational management of resources and people, i.e., planning.

The formation of fifteen nation states on the territory of the former Soviet Union poses a series of challenges to specialists in Soviet nationalities. They are asked to pronounce on the degree of stability which the new states will enjoy and assess the dangers (mainly military) and the opportunities (mainly economic) that have arisen. The background of preconceptions about nationalism on which such judgements are based is usually characterized by an ambivalence, stemming from a feeling that the dissolution of the Soviet empire into nation states was somehow natural and inevitable, and also by the condescension of mature and powerful states which believe they have outgrown nationalism and the possibly dangerous antics of their younger brothers. Consequently, analysis of the post-Soviet scene produces tentative or confused results. This article attempts to apply a common framework of analysis across all the republics of the former Soviet Union to identify some of the broad but discrete trends which the future development of these states might take. The reader will quite reasonably question whether it makes sense to compare Estonia with Tajikistan or Russia with Moldavia. In reply, it could be argued that political scientists have been presented with an unprecedented opportunity to compare states with very different historical and cultural traditions but which, by virtue of their having been part of the Soviet Union, share remarkably similar political and social structures.

This study examines the transformation of policy toward Islam in Uzbekistan during the Gorbachev era. It considers both Moscow's policy and, as Uzbekistan began to achieve greater control over its own affairs, the policy of the republic's leaders. The article begins by placing the changes in policy toward Islam in the broader context of emerging Soviet policy toward religion during the middle of the 1960s. It then examines some of the All-Union and republic communist parties’ concessions toward Islam and attempts to use Islam in addressing the most pressing cultural, social, economic, and political problems facing Uzbekistan. The study pays particular attention to the official religious establishment and briefly explores its role in efforts by Uzbekistan's political leadership to maintain political control.

Since the end of World War II more than one million citizens of the USSR have emigrated to the West in a unique and unprecedented movement today called the “Third Soviet Emigration.” In contrast to two earlier flights of refugees from the Revolution and from World War II, the Third Emigration is a voluntary, legally-sanctioned process involving mainly three nationalities—Jews, ethnic Germans, and Armenians. The origin of the exodus goes back to the early postwar years, but the vast majority of the emigrants have left since 1971, when the Soviet government relaxed its historic antipathy to free movement by its citizens.

There is a savage irony at the core of Sovietology. Whereas the study of Soviet history and politics should have concerned itself with everything Soviet, it traditionally focused almost exclusively only on what was Russian. By ignoring the non-Russians as something not Russian and, thus, by implication, inconsequential, “Sovietology in one country” contradicted its own premises and, thereby, turned in upon, indeed even negated, itself. By setting the center over the periphery, by detaching the center from the periphery that defined the center as a center, Sovietology in effect emptied the center of its “centrality.” In so doing, Sovietology transformed itself into an inauthentic form of Russian studies—inauthentic in the sense of ostensibly being concerned with the Soviet Union, while, in reality, actually pursuing the study of something with which Sovietology was ostensibly unconcerned.