Bob Hayden is the unusual kind of scholar who makes us confront our darker side. Our choice examples of civic culture and democratic functioning seem to emerge less shining as a consequence of his exposition. When put into a perspective that includes contemporary ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, both Steven Spielberg's Hollywoodized Oskar Schindler and Vaclav Klaus's Czech Republic lose some of their luster.

A significant factor in the history—and one of the bones of contention in the historiography—of the Slovene minority in the Austrian province of Carinthia is what is known as the Windischentheorie. This pseudoacademic “theory“ was developed, on the basis of popular beliefs, during the interwar years and promulgated by those with fascist, later Nazi, sympathies and was an apparently very effective weapon in the Germanization process. The Windischentheorie changed over time; according to what may be called its “canonical” version, the language of the Carinthian Slovenes was quite different from Standard Slovene and the Carinthian Slovenes themselves were therefore ethnically distinct from Slovenes in Slovenia. Other versions of the “theory” are described below. The meaning of the word Windisch, which had been used by German speakers to mean “Slav” for many centuries, was thereby changed radically and with important political effect.

The complex interaction between religion and atheism in the former Soviet Union continues to attract scholarly interest. Recent studies of Russian Orthodox Church history during the early Soviet era have broken new ground, yet institutional and political concerns continue to dominate the discussion. Exceptions to this trend place religion in a broader social framework, thereby yielding new insights into religion as a cultural system that the Bolsheviks attacked.

Mikhail Zoshchenko spent his literary life playing discourses off against one another. In his early miniatures, the cacophony of peasant brogue, tradesmen's dialects, propaganda clichés and bureaucratese was controlled and masterful. In his longer works, the mixture of scientific style and mundane or satirical anecdote often seemed to take on a life of its own. Nowhere is this more true than in Before Sunrise.

In his discussion of The Double,Joseph Frank remarks that Dostoevskii's decision to change the original subtitle from The Adventures of Mr. Goliadkin (Prikliucheniia Gospodina Goliadkina) to A Petersburg Poem (Peterburgskaia poema) had, among other things, the “advantage of correctly assigning The Double its place in the Russian literary tradition initiated by The Bronze Horseman.“ If The Double is truly in the Petersburg tradition of The Bronze Horseman, it is curious that no one has studied the relationship between these works, each of which features a minor civil servant (chinovnik) who goes mad. The few comparative analyses of the Petersburg theme in Pushkin and Dostoevskii have invariably focused on the more obvious relationships between The Queen of Spades and Crime and Punishment. Scholars have often compared The Double with other works—for example, the tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Gogol'’s “Notes of a Madman,” “The Nose,” and Dead Souls but not with those of Pushkin.

The Russian revolution was intended to remove all limits to women's equality. Collective organizations were to take over the kinds of tasks–childcare, cooking, and cleaning–that had traditionally restricted women and limited their full participation in economic life, while legislative actions mandated equal economic, marital, and civil rights. Accompanying these changes was a "sexual revolution" (preached most famously by Aleksandra Kollontai) that encouraged equality in love and sex as well as in economics and politics.

When World War II came to an end, vast portions of Germany and Poland lay in rubble. And, as if this were not enough, both countries were immediately inundated by large waves of migrants. In the years from 1944 to 1949, displaced persons, refugees, and expellees made up more than one-fifth of the populations of Poland and Germany. For the purpose of this article, expellees (or forced migrants) are Germans or Poles who had been living in the eastern territories of both countries as defined by their borders in 1937 and who were forcibly and permanently removed from their homelands between 1944 and 1949.

As far as the Russian state and most educated Russians were concerned, assimilation in the eastern borderlands of the Russian empire in the late imperial period was supposed to be a one-way street. “Backward” eastern peoples were generally supposed to become more like Russians, while Russians, for their part, were expected to change others while themselves maintaining their language, customs, religion, and overall Russianness. In reality, of course, things were rarely so straightforward. In the mixed settlement worlds of the borderlands, both Russians and non-Russians influenced one another in multiple ways, and Russian influences were not always strongest. In fact, in certain cases, contrary to official and elite expectations, it was not so much the Russians who “Russianized” the “natives” as the “natives” who “nativized” the Russians. By the late imperial period, “nativized” Russians of one kind or another could be found throughout the imperial east. In the northern Caucasus, for example, whole Russian villages looked and lived like gortsy; in the Volga-Ural region, other Russian peasants performed “pagan” sacrifices like Voguls and Maris; on the Kazakh steppe, still others had converted to Islam; and on just about every frontier one came across supposedly “Russian” cossacks who lived according to native ways and preferred to speak native languages.

The world consists of nations. Nations are communities united by a common name, state, language, territory, culture, and physical type. Nations are defined by their origins. Yet the origins of the name, state, language, territory, culture, and physical type may have nothing to do with each other. Such was the Great Ethnological Predicament, discovered and sometimes discussed by eighteenth-century scholars as they pursued Jean Le Rond D'Alembert's “art of reducing, as far as possible, a great number of phenomena to a single one which can be regarded as the principle of them.”