“What next?” may not be an untimely question to ask as the map-makers scramble to keep up with the rush of events cascading a myriad of changes upon these custodians of the here and now. No sooner have they marked a new revision of a border, noted the latest alteration of a name or shift of a capital, than yet another tremor forces them to print anew a further updated edition to reflect the consequences of the most recent shock wave to effect an ever shorter status quo. Long gone are the days of Soviet “stability,” so long, in fact, that it is time to take stock and answer the gnawing question “Where are we?” more accurately than with the increasingly vague “In the ‘post-Soviet’ period.” “Quid tum? What next?” deserves a more precise reply.

“The history of Russia is the history of a nation that colonized itself.”

Russia's greatest historian has affirmed that the expansion of Russian rule, particularly its method, is of fundamental significance in understanding the course of Russian history, and the establishment of Russian power in the Caucasus has attracted as much scholarly attention as any other region where Russian imperialism spread in the last two centuries. Russia's finest literary figures, scholars of the most divergent bent, Russian participants in the conquest and, of course, native inhabitants themselves have examined geographic, political, military and economic, as well as cultural and other factors that would explain how the many non-Slavic peoples of this strategically critical region were incorporated into the tsarist empire. From such a literature a lengthy list of quite diverse tactics are testimony to the deep concern Russian leaders had about integrating its divergent societies in the Caucasus into the Russian empire. The tsarist ideal was stated in the simplest language when Nicholas I endorsed a report in 1833 that would force the native inhabitants of the Caucasus to “speak, think, and feel Russian.” Not surprisingly, one of the striking qualities of the tsarist, Soviet and, to a great degree, Western literature is that it often focuses, as does this essay, on the frustrations Great Russians experienced while attempting to conquer, pacify and assimilate the multi-ethnic peoples of the Caucasus within the Russian-dominated empire. In addition, while charting the demographic vagaries of the Caucasus most scholars have concentrated on the creeping in-migrations of Cossacks and others from the internal Russian provinces and on the relocation of mountain tribesmen (gortsy) from their inaccessible villages (auly) to valley floors where watchful Russians could “civilize” them. What is strikingly absent from such literature, part of what this essay attempts to provide, is an examination of the policy considerations that led to such decisions, particularly in the post-Crimean War period.

The Estonian Language Law, passed by the Estonian SSR Supreme Soviet on 18 January 1989, was the first of its kind in the Soviet Union. It helped launch a wave of similar legislation in other union republics and symbolized a new level of assertion of republican rights against Moscow and the tradition of centralized control. It is no coincidence that the Language Law was drafted and became available for public discussion at virtually the same time as Estonia's declaration on sovereignty (16 November 1988), also a first in Gorbachev's USSR. Indeed in late 1988 and early 1989 Estonia was leading the way in the movement for decentralization in the Soviet empire as the major political goal began to shift from autonomy to independence. This article will assess the origins and nature of the law itself as well as its implementation and impact over a nearly five-year period to late 1993.

Don—by which name I knew him since I became his graduate student in 1956—belonged to a rare breed of academicians: he was a devout man for whom the personal adventure of life and human history in its totality had a moral dimension; in his quest for understanding himself and others, there was always an underlying moral drama; there was not just the realm of the true and the false but also a fundamental layer of the right and the wrong. For Don, there was always the issue of good and evil. In the end, men and women, the lofty, such as Stolypin (about whom he wrote insightfully), and the humble, such as the Russian peasants in Siberia (to whom he also gave considerable scholarly attention), all were accountable for their individual and collective actions. We are all free moral agents, he observed, including Lenin (about whose early political struggles he wrote brilliantly). It is a perspective Don never abandoned as the Soviet Union dissolved into the amorphous and morally complex post-Soviet era, a characteristic which qualified Don as a persistent humanist. The individual human person endowed with the capacity to sustain immutable moral values was Don's ultimate interest as an historian and teacher.

The Crimean question developed as one of the major crises of the post-Soviet period among the two largest Slavic states of the former Soviet Union. It is an issue with several dimensions: the historical background; the case of the Crimean Tatars as an ipso facto aboriginal population deported en masse toward the end of the Second World War; the military-strategic question, with Crimea as the base for the Black Sea Fleet; economic and social developments; and the legality of the 1954 transfer of the peninsula from the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) to Ukraine in 1954.

The grassroots environmental movement of the late 1980s in the former Soviet Union played a key role in reform politics, making or breaking candidates in the 1989–1990 contested local elections across the nation. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the social and economic crises in its successor states were significant factors in the decline and shifting focus of this mass movement. The purpose of this study is to examine the history, ideology and the current direction of Russian environmentalism in the context of the former Soviet Union, and to see how it is being reshaped in Russia today.

Minority language rights in Georgia, which are inseparable from economic, social and educational inequalities among the different ethnic groups, run along two axes: Georgian's relation to Russian and Georgian's relation with its own minority languages. Since the late 1980s, Moscow's diminishing power and the republic's internal fragmentation have shifted the emphasis from the first to the second. Newly independent Georgia, which is 70% Georgian, now confronts a problem familiar to many post-colonial states: what status should the multiplicity of languages in the republic have? Should Georgian be the only official language, and if so, in what contexts can non-Georgians use their native language? Such issues are part of larger questions about domination, entitlement and ethnic status, issues which have bedeviled the successive Georgian governments' attempts at state-building. In the last two years, language conflicts in Georgia have been overwhelmed by violent secessionist struggles, and the state language program which was perceived as vital to Georgia's future when it was adopted in August 1989, has become secondary today. But if the ethnically based wars are to end, language relations must be settled. As it stands, the language program is unlikely to help.

Estonia enjoys a very delicate geographic position. It is located not just in the neighborhood of Russia, which is modernizing or Westernizing with fluctuating success, but it is situated strategically on the border of two civilizations reminiscent of Samuel P. Huntington's thought-provoking article in the journal Foreign Affairs. However, Estonia has not become a borderland in the classical meaning of the term since the country belongs historically and integrally to the sphere of the so-called Lutheran-German civilization. For centuries this has blocked attempts from the East to incorporate the northern Baltics (which include Finland) into the Orthodox-Slavic Eastern civilization. In the context of conflicting civilizations, each such invasion has been not so much an ethnic matter but rather one of clashing civilizations and of a choice between two competing civilizations. In the last couple of years, Europe has once again witnessed the failure of one more Eastern assault that was launched with the signing in 1939 of the Hitler-Stalin agreement, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

Nineteen eighty-nine appeared to be an annus mirabilis in Soviet language policy; during that year, nine of fifteen Soviet republics adopted laws that championed the language of the titular nationality. Among these was Kyrgyzstan, a small Central Asian republic where Russian had increasingly marginalized the language of the Kyrgyz.

1. Introduction

Until the October 1991 Soviet coup, Moldova, previously known as Bessarabia and the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, had known independence only briefly, having been part of the Russian Empire, Romania, or the Soviet Union for almost its entire history. As a result of shifting foreign influences and borders, Moldova, like most modern political entities, has a multiethnic population. The conflicting perspectives and demands of Moldova's different ethnic groups underlie many of today's controversies.

Unlike the Habsburg Empire, the Republic of Austria established in 1918 saw and sees itself basically as an ethnically homogeneous state—as did the Weimar Republic and Federal Republic of Germany. Austria's constitution of 1920 made German the official language, just as Hungarian became the official language in Hungary. The relatively high degree of ethnic homogeneity in Austria and Hungary were a result of the collapse of the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire and the new borders of these two successor states. Before 1918, the German-speaking and Hungarian-speaking population of the Empire were politically dominant, but. from a quantitative point of view, “minorities.” It was only the borders established by the Entente in the peace treaties of Saint-Germain and Trianon that reduced Austria and Hungary geographically to two territories, in which the German-speaking population on one side and the Hungarian on the other also became numerically superior, while creating large German and Hungarian minorities in the neighboring countries of Italy, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and SHS-Yugoslavia.