The relationship between the Jewish nation and the governing systems of Central and Eastern Europe has long fascinated, and bedeviled, contemporary observers and modern scholars alike. Numerous problems continually seem to defy convincing resolution. Among them are such key questions as these: Which factors can be used to define the Jews — i.e., linguistic, religious, ethnic lineage, custom and tradition — or a combination of these? Can the Jews become trusted loyal citizens of a secular state wherein they form a distinct ethno-religious minority? How can the government and/or its supporting majority determine at what point the Jews cease to be productive, contributing members of society, and become instead a harmful burden to the state and its people? Nowhere, it seems, has this collection of thorny issues, conveniently known as the “Jewish Question,” enjoyed such widespread attention and concerted concern from both official and general sources as in the lands ruled by the Russian tsars and, after 1917, by the Soviet commissars.

Yugoslav nationalism like other European nationalist movements is largely the product of the nineteenth century. The peoples of Yugoslavia were separated by cultural differences which seemed minor when compared with those of their occupiers, the Germanic Hapsburgs and the Ottoman Turks. The dream uniting the South Slavic peoples was the achievement of liberation from both foreign overlords. The conditions of the Balkans in the nineteenth century constituted the fertile ground in which the Yugoslav ideal flourished. The Yugoslav ideal became a uniting ideology which enabled all the Slavic peoples to play their role in the quest for liberation.

The dilemma of spontaneity versus formalization is more or less valid for all societies. Freedom as the availability of alternative courses of action has been a precious cultural and moral value in history. The functional requisites of societies, related to communication, production, distribution, defense, replacement of members, and social control (Lenski, Lenski, 1974:28) have provided a more or less convincing justification for the limitation of freedom. Specialization, hierarchy, rules, procedures, impersonality and cult of competence, all these bureaucratic characteristics have been treated for centuries as remedia for laziness, irresponsibility, and parochialism. The progress of formalization has historically contributed to the strengthening of authority, as a legitimized power which brings about compliance of people to behave according to the will of those who occupy crucial positions. However, rigidification of such structures has several negative side effects: dissolution of several important and useful human bonds, ineffectiveness against external change, internal struggle between various groups to preserve and enlarge their areas of discretion (Crozier 1963), keeping too much to the rules, over-adherence to organizational means (and not ends), spoiling of superiors by the power enjoyed by them, superiors spending too much of their time and effort in controlling subordinates, etc. Strict separation of office and incumbent, in the sense that the official does not possess his office, has been historically beneficial for the material well being of societies, but it also has limited the personal involvement of office occupants. In the bureaucracies people who occupy crucial positions tend to develop vested interests within the scope of their jurisdiction. The constituent parts of bureaucracies resist actions which do not serve their own purposes (the problem of recalcitrance), and people in control of these parts become the prime beneficiaries (Blau, Scott 1962) of them. The ‘rules of the game’ that apply to the bureaucratic organizations as human artefacts quite often prevent them from achieving a dynamic equilibrium, namely to react to forces of change in an adaptive manner. Those organizations easily transform themselves from goal-seeking entities into the security-seeking mechanisms. Following Etzioni (1965) it is possible to say that they follow a ‘survival model’ instead of an ‘efficiency model'.

Writing in 1862, the testy Slavophile publicist and editor Ivan Aksakov complained:

A number of general summaries have been written on the history of the Jewish Antifascist Committee in the Soviet Union, the single major Jewish structure in the Ussr during the following the Second World War. The Jewish Antifascist Committee (JAC) constituted a special phenomenon when compared with similar Soviet organizations. It started as an ordinary instrument of Soviet wartime propaganda, but prevailing circumstances transformed it into a meaningful Jewish structure. Following a few introductory remarks, I would like to discuss one specific aspect of this Committee, namely the nature of its membership. Most of the existing studies treat the JAC in a chronological manner. The purpose of this article is to examine the inner dynamics of the Committee and evaluate it as an elite leadership group of Soviet Jewry.

The Act of Ems of 1876 completely paralized the Ukrainian arts, including the theatre. The situation created with the enforcement of the Act in Urkaine was vividly described by the well known acter Marko Kropyvnytsky. During his visit to Kiev in 1879 he found the Ukrainian population of this city in such a state of fear, that, when he was asked to sing in Ukrainian at the house of Mykola Lysenko, a Ukrainian composer, someone stood watch outside. When strangers appeared on the street he was motioned to stop. Apparently, “volunteers” were ready to report any seditious activity to the Governor-General of Kiev, Alexander Drentelm.

By the end of the nineteenth century Russian legislation regarding Jews was a congeries of self-contractions and inconsistencies. On the one hand, Jews were hemmed in by numerous restrictions and repressive measures in regard to their residence rights, economic activities, communal organization, educational opportunities, and even religious practices. On the other hand, the limits of discrimination were often ill-defined, being expanded by some laws and contracted by others; in some cases important privileges were granted to various categories of Jews (for example, the right to live outside the Pale of Jewish Settlement) or to the Jewish community as a whole (for example, the right to collect certain taxes). In addition, the enforcement of this hodge-podge of rules and regulations varied from place to place and from time to time.

The final declaration of the Conference of Security and Cooperation in Europe has affirmed the duty of the various signatory states to observe the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief for all without distinction to race, language or religion.

Since its conception in 1898 the Communist Party of the Soviet Union has had to contend with the nationality question. The Party has had to formulate programs and make organizational and functional decisions pertaining to national rights. It has had to dwell on political aspects of the issue and adopt resolutions touching on the social, economic, and cultural problems of non-Russian nations in the Russian Empire and the Soviet State. What were these resolutions and what effect, if any, did ideological considerations, domestic power struggles, situational factors, and personal styles of the party leaders have on the resolutions?

It is often said that Western study of Soviet society is comparable to observing the tip of an iceberg. This analogy is not entirely appropriate since it ignores acts of deliberate camouflage and misinformation. This leads to a certain paradox. Although the greatest amount of available information covers the top of the iceberg, meaning Moscow, it also contains the greatest amount of deliberate misinformation. Information on areas such as Ukraine, however, is in shorter supply but at the same time it provides a more accurate picture, even if this picture is not an entirely clear one. This view suggests that sociology in Ukraine may reflect more accurately the state of sociology throughout the Soviet Union, even if it portrays a somewhat different picture than that generated by the Institute of Sociological Research in Moscow.

The year of 1948 was one of the most critical ones of the postwar period. The presence of the Cold War could no longer be denied. Berlin was under Soviet blockade; Yugoslavia had broken with the Cominform; in elections in Italy it was feared that the Italian Communist party would be widely successful; France was in the grip of Communist-inspired workers’ strikes; Mao Tse-Tung was triumphing in China. Above all, Czechoslovakia, a country which had enjoyed real democracy from its birth in 1918, until the tragic Munich Agreement in 1938, where its people treasured political and personal freedom above everything else, and at the same time entertained the friendliest possible feelings towards the Russians, lost its democracy and became a Soviet satellite with the connivance of Moscow. Dr. Eduard Beneš, who had returned to his country, via Moscow, as President of the Republic of Czechoslovakia, and who had been promised by Stalin and Molotov, on several occasions, that they would not interfere with the internal affairs of his country, lost his power to Gottwald and his communist group while Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Zorin, who “happened” to be in Prague at the critical moment on a trade mission, supervised the transfer of power to the new masters of Czechoslovakia.