De par leur but et leur destination, les traductions, dans l'Union soviétique, sont étroitement unies à la politique promue par les autorités dans le domaine de la langue, en tant que “partie composante de la politique nationale”. Sous cet aspect, elles s'encadrent de manière naturelle dans la fameuse formule-triptique de l'historiographie de l'URSS: “épanouissement — rapprochement — fusion” des nations soviétiques, et, implicitement, de leurs langues et cultures.

The Soviet regime's contention that the nationalities problem has been solved can no longer be taken seriously. At his speech honoring the fiftieth anniversary of the formation of the Soviet Union on December 21, 1972, party chief Leonid Brezhnev claimed:

By now … solving the nationalities problem, overcoming the backwardness of previously oppressed nations, is … habitual for the Soviet people. We must remember the scope and complexity of the accomplishments, in order to appreciate the wisdom … of the party, which took upon itself such a task — and accomplished it.

After the military defeat of April 1941, the Axis powers divided Yugoslavia. The Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH) received the lion's share of the defunct state. At least in theory — since the NDH could claim no sovereignity in several regions — the new state included Croatia, Slavonia, Dalmatia, parts of the Littoral, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Srem (Sirmium), and parts of Vojvodina. It sheltered most of the nationalities inhabiting the old Yugoslavia, while conferring the honor of the state-making nation on Croatians only. Minorities, albeit not recognized as nationalities, expanded the list of non-Croatian people living in the NDH. Without a regular census, which was never taken in the country, we do not possess exact data for the population; furthermore, the published statistics were twisted to support nationalistic ambitions.

Today's Yugoslav policy toward a score of national minorities, officially called nationalities, essentially amounts to what the ruling League of Communists of Yugoslavia publicly says and what is actually done by the appropriate organs at the federal, republic, provincial, and commune levels with respect to ethnically non-Yugoslav citizens. Although the Yugoslav national minorities (nationalities) make up only twelve percent of the entire population, their real impact on the Yugoslav multinational society is much stronger. This is due to the uneven economic and cultural development of various geographical regions in the past and to the compact settlement of national minorities in the sensitive border regions, where in some cases, they de facto enjoy the status of majority.

Very few people outside Slovakia ever heard of Alexander Dubček prior to his elevation to the position of the First Secretary of the Communist party of Czechoslovakia in January 1968. A few years later, after a shortlived prominence, his name fell into oblivion, appearing only occasionally as a symbol of the “Prague Spring” and “socialism with a human face.”

The amount of writing relevant to the short career of Dubček and the developments in Czechoslovakia in 1968 is tremendous; yet it is not possible to write a “definitive” study on the “Prague Spring” and Dubček's role in it, for the story of those events is still unfolding. Also, interpretations of the Dubček phenomenon will continue to vary due to bias of authors and the lack of hard evidence. Finally, the archives of the Communist parties of the Soviet bloc countries and private papers of Communist party officials are not accessible. It is not possible, for political, personal, security or other reasons, to obtain the one particular piece of evidence — the one vital letter, memorandum of conversation, revealing diary, or a note of personal communication — which would explain conclusively why Dubček rose and fell.

The earliest extant dramatic texts written in Ukraine date from the sixteenth century. I shall discuss dramatic texts that were written in Ukraine and not “Ukrainian texts” because in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and even partly in the eighteenth, works were written for the stage in Ukraine in several languages: Church Slavonic (Western version), the colloquial Ukrainian language (various dialects), and Polish. But all the dramatic works which will be our subject were written chiefly for the Ukrainian Orthodox audience and thus without doubt belong to Ukrainian culture.

The determination with which Communism has attacked religious institutions and theology has resulted in considerable loss of power for the Church in virtually all of the satellite countries. There appears to be one notable exception to this phenomenon, namely, the Polish Church.

In the spring of 1939, negotiations commenced between the British and the Soviet Governments with the proffered goal of an agreement on the containment of Germany; it was essential that the negotiating powers agree on the identity of the border states to be guaranteed. The guaranteed states would then form a potential cordon sanitaire against Hitler's future expansionary policies.

Any society sufficiently cohesive to evolve even the most rudimentary political structure will also, as a matter of course, develop a set of shared concepts about the nature of that society and a justification of its political structure. Scholars usually ascribe the word “Ideology” only to a set of values which is highly abstract, rational, and articulated in the form of theoretical treatises, so that in the modern period liberalism or Marxism is considered as an ideology, but this is not entirely warranted. Medieval states frequently expressed their social and political myths through the medium of ceremonial and symbol, hence the considerable attention to artistic evidence given by the great scholar of medieval political theology Ernst Kantorowicz or by his student Michael Cherniavsky, whose field was Medieval Rus',1 Even in medieval western Europe, but overwhelmingly in medieval Rus', much political thought, like our current symbolic respect for the “flag,” was expressed in extremely laconic terms. Phrases, concepts, and titles served in lieu largely of theoretical treatises, and ideologues demonstrated their creativity and originality in the manipulation of these phrases, concepts, and titles, not the elaboration of intellectual definitions of their significance. Such definitions were superfluous to contemporaries who all understood the shared vocabulary of political discourse, what we might call a political culture, but their absence compels the modern-day historian to rely upon his informed imagination to decode such social and political myths in order to establish their intended meanings. This is not to imply that modern political ideologies lack overarching myths. Indeed the very opposite is exactly the case; in Russian history the myth of the “people” (narod) in Populist thought and the myths of the proletariat or (later) the Party in Marxist/Bolshevik writings spring readily to mind. The lack of elaborate theoretical discussions of comparable myths in pre-Petrine history inevitably requires different methods of study from those one can apply to subsequent centuries.