Russia is at present seeking to define its national interest. A new foreign policy is in the process of being formed; in a debate that has run wild, the points of reference used when formulating foreign policy in the days of Soviet Marxism have been abandoned and replaced by notions about “the Russian national interest” (Rahr 1992; Crow 1992).

At the turn of the century a major social, economic and political transformation was taking place in Russia, which at the time was a vast trans-continental empire extending from Warsaw in the west to Vladivostok in the east. Many rival currents of thought and various political movements presented their solutions for Russia's political, social and ethnic conflicts. In 1917, adherents of one Marxist current, the Bolsheviks, seized power in Russia and after a prolonged and extremely bloody Civil War consolidated their regime in the early 1920s. Among the nations of the world Russia alone adopted as its guide for the solution of its problems and conflicts Marxist ideology, invented about seventy years earlier in Germany, an ideology that its founders thought offered a solution for all of the important problems of humanity at large. For, indeed, Marxism was a comprehensive system of thought, which claimed to explain the entire history of humanity and to offer a vision, a scientific blueprint, for humanity's future. In that blueprint the phenomena of conflict, power, and politics were to make room for totally new principles of social organization: solidarity, cooperation, and a rational management of resources and people, i.e., planning.

The formation of fifteen nation states on the territory of the former Soviet Union poses a series of challenges to specialists in Soviet nationalities. They are asked to pronounce on the degree of stability which the new states will enjoy and assess the dangers (mainly military) and the opportunities (mainly economic) that have arisen. The background of preconceptions about nationalism on which such judgements are based is usually characterized by an ambivalence, stemming from a feeling that the dissolution of the Soviet empire into nation states was somehow natural and inevitable, and also by the condescension of mature and powerful states which believe they have outgrown nationalism and the possibly dangerous antics of their younger brothers. Consequently, analysis of the post-Soviet scene produces tentative or confused results. This article attempts to apply a common framework of analysis across all the republics of the former Soviet Union to identify some of the broad but discrete trends which the future development of these states might take. The reader will quite reasonably question whether it makes sense to compare Estonia with Tajikistan or Russia with Moldavia. In reply, it could be argued that political scientists have been presented with an unprecedented opportunity to compare states with very different historical and cultural traditions but which, by virtue of their having been part of the Soviet Union, share remarkably similar political and social structures.

This study examines the transformation of policy toward Islam in Uzbekistan during the Gorbachev era. It considers both Moscow's policy and, as Uzbekistan began to achieve greater control over its own affairs, the policy of the republic's leaders. The article begins by placing the changes in policy toward Islam in the broader context of emerging Soviet policy toward religion during the middle of the 1960s. It then examines some of the All-Union and republic communist parties’ concessions toward Islam and attempts to use Islam in addressing the most pressing cultural, social, economic, and political problems facing Uzbekistan. The study pays particular attention to the official religious establishment and briefly explores its role in efforts by Uzbekistan's political leadership to maintain political control.

Since the end of World War II more than one million citizens of the USSR have emigrated to the West in a unique and unprecedented movement today called the “Third Soviet Emigration.” In contrast to two earlier flights of refugees from the Revolution and from World War II, the Third Emigration is a voluntary, legally-sanctioned process involving mainly three nationalities—Jews, ethnic Germans, and Armenians. The origin of the exodus goes back to the early postwar years, but the vast majority of the emigrants have left since 1971, when the Soviet government relaxed its historic antipathy to free movement by its citizens.

There is a savage irony at the core of Sovietology. Whereas the study of Soviet history and politics should have concerned itself with everything Soviet, it traditionally focused almost exclusively only on what was Russian. By ignoring the non-Russians as something not Russian and, thus, by implication, inconsequential, “Sovietology in one country” contradicted its own premises and, thereby, turned in upon, indeed even negated, itself. By setting the center over the periphery, by detaching the center from the periphery that defined the center as a center, Sovietology in effect emptied the center of its “centrality.” In so doing, Sovietology transformed itself into an inauthentic form of Russian studies—inauthentic in the sense of ostensibly being concerned with the Soviet Union, while, in reality, actually pursuing the study of something with which Sovietology was ostensibly unconcerned.

The essays in this collection marking the twentieth anniversary of Nationalities Papers have sought to come to grips with the sudden and rapid changes that continue to shake the ex-communist states, a process that is still in its initial stages and still far from attaining a new equilibrium, whose outlines are but vaguely defined even to an expert's eye.