Creating New Identities, New Nations, New States

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Notes

Notable exceptions by writers in the ‘dissident’ mode were Ivan Dzyuba, Internationalism or Russification? A Study of the Soviet Nationalities Problem (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968); and Vyacheslav Chornovil, The Chornovil Papers (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968). Andrei Amalrik suggested circumstances in which the Soviet Union might fall apart because of nationalist pressures: see his Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984? (London: Allen Lane, 1970).

See, inter alia, Walker Connor, The National Question in Marxist–Leninist Theory and Practice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, Decline of an Empire: The Soviet Socialist Republics in Revolt (New York: Harper & Row, 1979); Michael Rywkin, Moscow's Muslim Challenge (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1982); Robert Conquest, Soviet Nationalities Policy in Practice (London: Bodley Head, 1967), and The Nation Killers (London: Macmillan, 1970); Alexandre Benningsen and Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay, Islam in the Soviet Union (New York: Praeger, 1967); Alexandre Benningsen and S. Enders Wimbush, Muslims of the Soviet Empire: A Guide (London: Hurst, 1985); Alexander J. Motyl, Will the Non-Russians Rebel?: State, Ethnicity, and Stability in the USSR (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), and Thinking Theoretically about Soviet Nationalities: History and Comparison in the Study of the USSR (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). See also Bohdan Nahaylo and Victor Swoboda, Soviet Disunion: A History of the Nationalities Problem in the USSR (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1990); Rasma Karklins, Ethnic Relations in the USSR: The Perspective from Below (Boston, MA: Allen & Unwin, 1986). Other scholars produced works on particular nations, countries and regions. As the titles of some of the works listed above indicate, some of these writers used their scholarship for anti-communist purposes. Meanwhile, the study of ethnicity was not part of the mainstream of communist studies.

See, in particular, Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983); E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); E.J. Hobsbawm and Eric Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), and National Identity (London: Penguin, 1991); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983, 1991); and Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995).

See, for example, the series Authoritarianism and Democratization in Postcommunist Societies, edited by Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Ian Bremmer and Raymond Taras (eds.), New States, New Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Mark R. Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Other important works include Ray Taras (ed.), National Identities and Ethnic Minorities in Eastern Europe (Macmillan, 1998); and Graham Smith, Vivien Law, Andrew Wilson, Annette Bohr and Edward Allworth, Nation-building in the Post-Soviet Borderlands: The Politics of National Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). There has been an explosion of interest in this theme in the past two decades, and a comprehensive bibliography would take many pages.

See Ronald J. Hill, ‘Coping with Independence: States and Nationalities in the CIS’, in David Dusseault (ed.), The CIS: Form or Substance? (Helsinki: Kikimora, 2007), pp.48–77.

Billig, Banal Nationalism.

See the work of Peleg, discussed below.

See James Mullen, ‘Is There a Moldavian Language?’, Irish Slavonic Studies, No.10 (1989), pp.47–62; more generally, Charles King, The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1999).

For an elaboration of this argument see Ronald J. Hill, ‘Managing Ethnic Conflict’, in Stephen White, Rita di Leo and Ottorino Cappelli (eds.), The Soviet Transition: From Gorbachev to Yeltsin (London: Cass, 1993), pp.57–74; Ronald J. Hill, ‘The Dissolution of the Soviet Union: Federation, Commonwealth, Secession’, in John Coakley (ed.), The Territorial Management of Ethnic Conflict, 2nd edn (London: Cass, 2003), pp.199–228.

On Moldovan identity, see in particular King, The Moldovans; also Wim van Meurs, ‘Carving a Moldavian Identity out of History’, Nationalities Papers, Vol.26, No.1 (1998), pp.39–56.

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Notes on contributors

Ronald J. Hill

Ronald J. Hill is former Professor in the Department of Political Science at Trinity College, Dublin.