This special issue of Nationalities Papers presents an attempt to provide a fresh perspective on Serbia’s and Yugoslavia’s “antibureaucratic revolution” of 1988 and 1989. The 30th anniversary of this turbulent episode provides an opportunity to rethink our interpretation and offer a new appraisal of the event as well as open several new avenues of potentially productive research. This special issue builds on older research (Vladisavljević 2004, 2008; Vujačić 1996, 2003) and is part of a series of more recent as well upcoming contributions (Musić 2016; Musić forthcoming; Archer et al. 2016; Grdešić 2016; Grdešić forthcoming; Vujačić 2017; Archer and Musić 2017). Given the complexity of the event, the contributions collected here cannot exhaust all of the antibureaucratic revolution’s many facets. We do, however, hope that these contributions cover some of the main lacunae in the scholarship published so far. We also hope that this special issue will spark researchers to turn to this immensely interesting and deeply important event.

Recent political events have forced an examination of ideologies of populism and nationalism in politics. In this piece, I examine literature on the post-2016 political context to illustrate why the rise of identity-based politics has surprised analysts. An understanding of identity-based parties requires a focus on both the forms by which they navigate electoral and party systems, and the content of their rhetorical appeals to publics. I consider the electoral and party systems literature, and indicate some reasons that majoritarian electoral systems are more likely to foster the dominance of identity-based politics. In such systems, large parties might become weaponized by extremist elements, and lack the potential for checks from new parties. In addition, presidential systems lack a mechanism for no confidence votes, and might also have weak checks on an extremist executive. In terms of content, populism and nationalism might draw differing boundaries to include or exclude perceived elites. However, they can otherwise align in terms of their stances against “Others,” and against individualistic or technocratic stances that may fall under the label of “liberalism.” Nationalism and populism are not simply ideologies, but can be used as strategies by elites who can successfully deploy these mobilizing rhetorical appeals.

This article introduces a special issue on Ukrainian statehood. Based on the conference “A Century of Ukrainian Statehoods: 1917 and Beyond” at the University of Toronto, the special issue examines the relationship between the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1920 and the Soviet Ukrainian state over the long term. The authors survey the history of the Ukrainian SSR and propose two points of emphasis: the need to study the promises of “national” and “social” liberation in tandem and the persistent presence of an “internal other” in Soviet Ukrainian history.

Many scholarly studies of the Ukrainian conflict look at its origins, focusing either on the international level (external interference) or the domestic one (including ethnic, linguistic, economic, and regional tensions) (Pikulicka-Wilczewska and Sakwa 2015). The international level of analysis draws attention to external factors, namely Russia’s conscious decision to fragment Ukraine and make it a “failed state” in order to avoid its moving closer to the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Even though Moscow denies playing any role in the conflict, several international and independent Russian sources have confirmed the direct involvement of Russian regular troops (Urban 2015; Sutyagin 2015; Yashin and Shorina 2015). For scholars who emphasize the primacy of the international aspect of the conflict, the current war in Donetsk and Luhansk is not a civil war but a war orchestrated and directed from Moscow against Ukraine via Russian proxies (Motyl 2014; Kuzio 2015).

This special issue builds on empirical research to provide new insights into the interrelations between collective memory and legacies of political violence in the Balkans. The contributions pay particular attention to two major issues: First, they explore the ways in which individuals and groups respond to and cope with violent pasts by investigating commemorative practices including public performances, narratives, and negotiations of counter-memories. Second, they make explicit how people select and reassemble collective memories through remembering violent pasts to create and disseminate novel forms of identity. Through interdisciplinary lenses, the studies reveal how the legacies of political violence and their lived experience become important means for people to create and mobilize collective memories that are influential enough to shape nationalistic and political realities on the ground. On a theoretical level, the articles demonstrate various ways in which collective memories enable critical discussions around a wider set of issues including national identity, nationalism, making of history, and local power games. By engaging with these concepts, the contributions question dominant framings of past events as they investigate how counter-memories and counter-powers emerge in the process of negotiating established versions of history, official narratives, and hierarchies of power.

This article examines the attempts by left-wing Ukrainian nationalists to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable: Ukrainian nationalism and Soviet socialism. It describes how leftist Ukrainian parties active during the Revolution and Civil War in Ukraine 1917–1921 advocated a soviet form of government. Exiled members of the two major Ukrainian parties, the Social Democrats and the Socialist Revolutionaries, then took this position further, arguing in favor of reconciliation with the Bolsheviks and a return to their homeland. After the Entente recognized Polish sovereignty over Eastern Galicia and Soviet Ukraine introduced a policy of Ukrainization in 1923, many West Ukrainian intellectuals took up this call. The Great Famine of 1932–1933 and the Bolsheviks’ purge of Ukrainian Communists and intellectuals all but ended the position. However, it was more the Soviet rejection of the Sovietophiles that ended Ukrainian Sovietophilism than any rejection of the Soviet Union by leftist Ukrainian nationalists. Thus, an examination of the Ukrainian Sovietophiles calls into question the accounts of the relationship between Ukrainian nationalism and the Soviet Union that have common currency in today’s Ukraine.

This article critically reexamines how Germans understood Polish national identity during World War I, and how their perceptions affected German proposals for ruling Polish territory. Recent historiography has emphasized the impact of colonial ideologies and experiences on Germans’ imperial ambitions in Poland. It has portrayed Germans as viewing Poland through a colonial lens, or favoring colonial methods to rule over Polish space. Using the wartime publications of prominent left liberal, Catholic, and conservative thinkers, this article demonstrates that many influential Germans, even those who supported colonialism in Africa, considered Poland to be a civilized nation for which colonial strategies of rule would be wholly inappropriate. These thinkers instead proposed multinational strategies of imperialism in Poland, which relied on collaboration with Polish nationalists. Specifically, they argued that Berlin should establish an autonomous Polish state, and bind it in permanent military and political union with the German Empire. The perception of Poland as a civilized nation ultimately structured Germany’s occupation policy and objectives in Poland throughout the war, much more than stereotypes of Polish primitivity.

Fifteen years after the 1999 NATO bombings, a number of emblematic buildings in Belgrade still lie in ruins and are at the center of debates surrounding their reconstruction. This article examines the collective memory and narratives of the NATO bombings through a spatial lens, looking at how architectural discourses of reconstruction relate to multiple understandings and narratives of the bombings themselves. It focuses on how architects in Belgrade discuss and envision the reconstruction of buildings such as the Generalštab in relationship to the collective memories of political violence and war. The article explores the continuum between calls for full restoration and memorialization, by discussing how architects relate to the bombing of 1999 on personal and professional levels, and how narratives of the bombing influence architectural visions for the reconstruction itself. All in all, the article argues that architectural reconstruction, collective memory, and national identity shape each other. On the one hand, reconstruction responds to collective memory as architects make sense of the collective memory of war; on the other hand, reconstructed urban space reshapes memory by creating a new cadre matériel for remembrance.

This paper compares nationalism in the two ex-Czechoslovak countries—the Czech and Slovak republics. The aim is to analyze the measurement of nationalism in the 1995, 2003, and 2013 International Social Survey Program (ISSP) National Identity surveys. According to the nationalism measures from the ISSP survey – which are frequently used by authors analyzing nationalism—both countries experienced a significant rise in nationalism in the 1995 to 2013 period. Moreover, invariance testing of the nationalism latent variable confirms the possibility of comparing levels of nationalism between Czechia and Slovakia over time. However, the associations between nationalism, as measured in the study, and concepts related to nationalism—such as xenophobia, protectionism, or assertive foreign policy—suggest that what is measured as nationalism in 1995 is very different from what is measured in 2013. This is explained by a change of context which occurred in both countries between 1995 and 2013. While answering the same question had a strong nationalistic connotation in 1995, this was not the case in 2013. Based on our findings we advise against using the analyzed “nationalism” items as measurement of nationalism even beyond the two analyzed countries.

How to cope with the end of utopia? How to move from making history on a day-to-day basis to capitalizing on a legend? That is the dilemma Russian veterans of the Donbas insurgency have faced since the exalting atmosphere of Novorossiya faded away. In this article, I trace the transformations of the Novorossiya utopia from the point at which Russian volunteer fighters began to return to Russia and found themselves compelled to reinvent themselves in a new context. I first look at the difficult reconversion from war to politics of Donbas heroes such as Igor Strelkov and Aleksandr Borodai and how their efforts to launch new structures based on their war legitimacy have succeeded or failed. I then turn to investigate the birth of new heroes, such as the writer Zakhar Prilepin, who wave the metaphorical flag of Donbas at a time when exaltation of the war has declined. After that, I explore how Novorossiya has become a literature genre that occupies the shelves of Russian bookstores, spanning from Novorossievedenie—the “science of Novorossiya”—to the rich subgenre of war memoirs and veteran diaries.

Popular protest, which repeatedly occurred in Communist regimes, turned into massive mobilizational waves in the late Communist period. Why did some protests result in state cooptation and particularist nationalism (Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union), and others in state-society polarization (Poland) and protest containment (China), when these states shared important historical, political, and institutional legacies? Political regimes with origins in indigenous popularly-based revolutionary movements are more resilient to popular protests and other major crises than other authoritarian regimes. Protracted ideological armed struggle largely overlaps with broader patriotic causes, such as liberation wars or struggles against foreign intervention. The revolutionary regimes thus acquire patriotic credentials, while boundaries between partisan and patriotic identities become blurred, which strengthens their elite unity and popular base. Popular protests thus facilitate a complex political game of old and new actors that may result in regime survival or transformation. In other regimes, popular unrest tends to produce state-society polarization and, ultimately, regime delegitimation and breakdown. Popular contention in complex multinational institutional settings, if there is no major external threat, highlights old and triggers new conflicts along these structural and institutional divides and, where dual political identities prevail, facilitates identity shifts in particularist direction.

Most studies of the antibureaucratic revolution have focused on political elites and activists in Serbia, Montenegro, and the autonomous provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo. Recent scholarship has focused on individual participants, often workers, and takes their agency seriously. Building upon such research, this article explores the antibureaucratic revolution as a particular manifestation of a larger sociocultural process, constitutive of long-term structural changes across the whole of Yugoslavia. An analysis of workplace documents and local newspapers in northwest Croatia demonstrates that antibureaucratic sentiment was not the prerogative of Serbian and Montenegrins but of Yugoslav citizens more generally. Yugoslavs were conditioned by the party-state to be critical of bureaucracy. Workers began to admonish the expansion of administrative positions, which they blamed for their falling living standards. Despite decentralizing and autarkic tendencies in political and economic life in late socialist Yugoslavia, working class discontents (and representations of it) remained remarkably similar across republican boundaries. In Rijeka and its environs, a shift does not occur until in mid-1988. Condemnations of nationalism become more urgent and a skepticism toward the mass protests occurring in Serbia is palpable from this point onward.

The article examines a key attribute of Russian national identity—national pride—as it is reflected in mass consciousness. To trace the dynamics of multiple facets of national pride and related phenomena from 1996 to 2015, we use data from five surveys. The results demonstrate a substantial growth in Russian national pride in specific country achievements and general pride in Russian citizenship over the last 20 years. This change is the result of the population’s and state’s need for positive social identity as well as from both real and imagined progress in the Russian economy and political influence, and it started long before the Crimea mobilization and Olympics of 2014. The structural difference in pride in various achievements persisted for the 20 years examined here, but became less distinct. Across the years examined here, Russian national pride has become more strongly related to belief in the superiority of the country and is therefore increasingly competitive.

In the Soviet Union theatre was an arena for cultural transformation. This article focuses on theatre director Les Kurbas’ 1929 production of playwright Mykola Kulish’s Myna Mazailo, a dark comedy about Ukrainianization, to show the construction of “Soviet Ukrainian” culture. While the Ukrainian and the Soviet are often considered in opposition, this article takes the culture of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic seriously as a category. Well before Stalin’s infamous adage “national in form and socialist in content,” artists like Kulish and Kurbas were engaged in making art that was not “Ukrainian” in a generic Soviet mold, or “Soviet” art in a generic “Ukrainian” mold, but rather art of an entirely new category: Soviet Ukrainian. Far from a mere mouthpiece for state propaganda, early Soviet theatre offered a space for creating new values, social hierarchies, and worldviews. More broadly, this article argues that Soviet nationality policy was not only imposed from above, but also worked out on the stages of the republic by artists, officials, and audiences alike. Tracing productions of Myna Mazailo into the post-Soviet period, moreover, reveals a lingering ambiguity over the content of culture in contemporary Ukraine. The state may no longer sponsor cultural construction, but theater remains a space of cultural contestation.

Among the Russian citizens who fought in eastern Ukraine on the side of the separatists are representatives of Russian nationalist groups and organizations. After briefly reviewing the details of their participation in the war, this article looks at the various paths open to former militants upon their return from the war. This article identifies such options as continued military training and organization of military camps, participation in the war in Syria, participation in attacks on political opponents in Russia, racially tinged vigilantism, and attempts to return to political activities. Nationalist fighters who have returned from the war found themselves with limited options given the current decline of the radical far-right in Russia. The following three important conclusions can be made: (1) the return of deeply disappointed militants from the Donbas, especially those who had previously participated in radical groups, was perceived as a significant threat, but this threat has not yet materialized; (2) their return had no significant effect on the nationalist movement as a whole; and (3) some groups of former militants nevertheless remain potentially dangerous in the event of political destabilization.

The aspirations of religious minorities in Iraq for becoming recognized ethnonationalist entities have rarely been investigated from a historical perspective, particularly in the case of the Yazidis. This article addresses changing attitudes about the Yazidi religious minority identity across different historical periods. Yazidi identity is examined as an ancillary undercurrent to the ethnonationalist identity conflict between the central government of Iraq and the Kurdish movement. This contrasts with identity as a religious minority in prior eras, when religious minorities preserved their distinct core identities based on their own social and religious customs and idiosyncrasies, making them self-defining communities bound together by coherent religious identities. In the case of the Yazidi minority, despite the multiplicity of theories and hypotheses about the origins of the Yazidi people and their national and ethnic affiliations and increasing rumors about Yazidis related to their existence as a potential sub-ethnicity or ethno-religion, the important truth is that Yazidis consider themselves religiously, culturally, and historically distinct from other ethnonationalist groups and communities in Iraq.

In August 2015 the municipality of Sinj, located in the Dalmatian hinterland, celebrated the 300-year anniversary of a historic victory against the troops of the Ottoman Empire, one that is legendarily attributed to the divine intervention of the Virgin Mary. The Sinj Tourist Board launched an unprecedented campaign in organizing and advertising the various events - ranging from historical re-enactments, film and music productions, folkloristic performances, sports events, exhibitions, and fashion shows, to religious processions and conferences. Using a variety of media formats, these efforts were aimed at creating a new national epic, expanding the meaning of the miraculous battle of 1715 from a local narrative to a nation-wide symbol, representing Croatia in a European and global context. This article focuses on various theatrical re-enactments of the historic battle and the alleged Marian apparition, assessing the role of nostalgia and authenticity in contemporary living history performances. While one of the underlying motifs in the case of Sinj is to enhance the region’s attraction as a tourist destination, the article also theorizes the re-enactment’s epistemological and political claims by proposing that these interactive engagements with history take an active stance in promoting and/or re-inventing heroic olden times to advance socio-political conditions in the present (Gegenwartsbewaltigung).

This article explores the relationship between memory, political violence, and identity among the Roma minorities in Kosovo. In the aftermath of the 1998–1999 conflict in Kosovo, countless Roma were forced to escape Albanian retaliation, accused of being Serb collaborators. Many had to resettle in enclaves near Fushë Kosovë on the outskirts of Kosovo’s capital Prishtina, others left for Serbian-controlled northern Kosovo or to neighboring countries or to Western Europe. Through an ethnographic investigation with displaced Roma families around Prishtina and in Prizren, the article examines how the communities mobilize collective memories of the violent past to adapt to a new political situation, find their place, and navigate their present within Kosovo’s social, economic, and political landscape. It shows that the past is a constant reminder of compromised loyalties toward the majority group, which in turn dictates their (non)relations. Roma voices and narratives about the violent past are not part of the dominant and official discourse; they are counter-memories, telling a story that is silenced and unrecognized by the majority.

This article looks at the rehabilitation of the early history of the Communist Party of Ukraine and the Ukrainian SSR during the Thaw. It argues that the post-Stalin political moment offered the Ukrainian Party and academic establishments the opportunity to revalorize their republic’s founding narrative. In order to popularize this narrative, they produced publications on the revolution in Ukraine and early party history, rehabilitated Ukrainian Communists from the 1920s who had fallen victim to repressions, and constructed a set of monuments that embodied the new historical paradigm. These efforts aimed to de-Stalinize the country’s history as well as promote a Soviet Ukrainian patriotism that would make Ukrainians feel more integrated into the Soviet whole. Based on archival research, newspapers, and memoirs, the article suggests that rehabilitating this narrative was a strategy for the legitimization of the party within Ukraine.