Trieste is located at the extreme end of the northern coast of the Adriatic, where the arm of the sea reaches most deeply into the European continent. By its position Trieste is thus a part of Central Europe no less than of the Mediterranean area — if we take into account the fact that the distance between Vienna and Trieste is less than that between Trieste and Rome. On the other hand, Trieste is in an area where the Apennine peninsula meets the Balkan, where for millenia two cultural spheres have been juxtaposed: the Eastern — Greek, Byzantine and Slavic — and the Western — Latin, Romance and German. The complexity of the geographical and cultural circumstances is further increased by the national heterogeneousness of the inhabitants, Italians and Slovenes. Italians predominate in the town, Slovenes in the countryside.

The impact of modernization is seen by scholars as one of the main problems met by minority communities. Essentially, it is similar to the main problem of ecology, which deals with the impact of modern means on natural environment, whereas the former studies the impact of such means on traditional cultures, which should be preserved for the future. Case studies are interesting here, as these problems have many sides, and new description may open new views or confirm old ones. This is all the more true if we are lucky enough to have quantitative data.

This essay concentrates on the psycho-sociological and socio-cultural aspects of relations among ethnic groups in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia Region, especially between Slovenes and the other ethnic groups. Therefore it will not deal with the following two points: the ethno-minority problem of the Slovenes in Italy in demographic and ecologic terms (such as, for example, the number of members in a specific group, their territorial dislocation, etc.), or the problem of their socio-professional relations and of their institutional structures (such as, the distribution of minority group members in the professional stratification, the existence of economic, political and cultural structures within the minority groups, etc.).

If one may judge by Soviet political humor on Radio Armenia, the so-called “socialist internationalism” among the many nationalities in the USSR has reflected less than a perfect “friendship of peoples” in the past: Question: What is the “friendship of peoples”? Radio Armenia: It's when an Armenian takes the hand of an Uzbek, an Uzbek that of a Latvian, a Latvian that of a Russian, a Russian that of a Kazakh, a Kazakh that of a Ukrainian, and then they all go and beat up a Georgian.

Dissent in the USSR has become a phenomenon which cannot be ignored either in the West or in the USSR. The authorities in the USSR, though upset, are compelled to recognize the existence of dissidents in the country and the troubles they cause. The attempts to stifle dissent which are mainly in the form of harsh and repressive measures undertaken by the authorities generally fail to achieve the desired results. The dissidents according to circumstances prevailing change the tactics of their struggle, but the phenomenon of dissent — the resistance to the regime — continues.

The colonial dependence of nations and their arbitrary de-nationalization in our time can neither be approved nor tolerated by democratic countries. It is also impossible to speak of human rights in countries where basic freedoms do not exist, and one basic human right is the right of every nationality to independence. Nevertheless, colonial-imperialistic relations continue to exist in today's world, and a glaring example is in the USSR.

Siberia, apparently, is an inhospitable region as far as Communist Party members are concerned. According to T. H. Rigby, both in 1939 and in 1961, a significantly smaller proportion of the CPSU membership was to be found in the Urals and Western and Eastern Siberian regions of the RSFSR than of the general Soviet population. This is surprising, he points out, in view of the area's “relatively small rural population” and its key industries being mining and metallurgy. Beyond the suggestion “that the general comfort and pleasantness of an area is an independent factor in its party membership levels,” one is immediately intrigued by the implications this may have for the political recruitment opportunities of ethnic minorities in these regions. Does it mean that native, non-European minorities have better chances to become party members because Europeans are reluctant to move there? Or, conversely, does it mean that Europeans, because of their higher levels of education, tend therefore to displace the non-Europeans? Is there evidence of any sort of “affirmative action” on behalf of ethnic minorities in Siberia insofar as recruitment into the party, and concurrently access to the better jobs, is concerned?

October 1819 was a key month in the history of relations between the Slavs. Alexander I spent the early part of it in Warsaw, drawing on the contitution of the Congress Kingdom of Poland and putting the finishing touches to his project for a pan-imperial constitutional charter. In Tsarskoe Selo the conservative historian N. M. Karamzin reacted with horror to the tsar's concurrent plan for the revivification of Poland. On 9 October, in the hope of securing official support for his archaeological and ethnographic studies, the Pole Zorian Dolega Chodakowski arrived in St. Petersburg. His first publication in Russian, which appeared later in the month in Moscow, argued that before the coming of Christianity the Slavonic peoples were ‘everywhere and in all respects’ identical. Behind these three events — Alexander's charter, Karamzin's sense of outrage, Chodakowski's arrival — lay three approaches to the bringing-together of the Slavs: the federal, the Russifying, and what I shall call the cultural. In various hands, these approaches were long-lived in pre-revolutionary Russia. Chodakowski's significance lay in the impetus he gave to the third of them.