In the opening decade of the twentieth century, the tsarist government embarked on an ambitious program of agrarian and administrative reforms that dramatically changed the rules of village politics. The most famous of these reforms, decreed on 9 November 1906 by Prime Minister Petr Stolypin, allowed peasants to claim their share of communal land as personal property and enclose it in a single parcel. This reform threatened to undermine the administrative and fiscal means through which the peasant commune had previously controlled its lands. Householders who obtained title to their land, even if they never undertook the second stage of consolidation but kept their scattered strips within the commune's open-field system, gained considerable autonomy from the village assembly of heads of household (skhod).

Vladimir Gromov was thirty-six years old when he was sentenced to death in 1935 for pretending to be someone he was not. Asserting the identity of a skilled engineer and award-winning architect, this man with only a middle school education once convinced the commissar of supply, Anastas Mikoian, to give him one million rubles. Now, the Moscow prosecutor and people's court insisted that he was a pretender, an impostor, a master con artist. Yet in his own mind, Gromov was an artist of a different sort. While in solitary confinement awaiting execution in Moscow's Taganka prison, Gromov wrote a play, complete with elaborate drawings and stage directions, which he submitted to the deputy procuratorgeneral of the USSR, Andrei Vyshinskii.

High above Nagaevo Bay, the city of Magadan affords an impressive panorama of rocky cliffs that fall precipitously into the Sea of Okhotsk. Beautiful and serene, the view typifies the natural scenery of this mountainous Pacific coasdine in the farthest reaches of northeastern Russia. But it also belies the tragic history of the region in the Stalin era, when the Soviet government sent upwards of one million prisoners to Magadan for servitude in the hard labor camps of the Kolyma and Chukodsa. In the national consciousness, the city has for many years held a unique and vexing significance, all the more intense because so many thed on the neighboring tundra. Standing as the most notorious center of the gulag, indeed as its "capital," Magadan became synonymous witii the Great Terror.

In the final diird of the nineteenth century, the Polish-Ruthenian (Ukrainian) borderland in the eastern Lublin and Siedlce gubernias of the Kingdom of Poland became a location of intense ethnic and religious rivalry, a situation not uncommon in numerous borderland regions throughout eastern Europe. At first, Russians and Poles competed for the nationally "malleable" population of the Chelm and Podlasie regions, as this territory was known. After the Russians were evicted from the Kingdom of Poland in 1915, Poles and nationally awakening Ukrainians saw not only distinct portions of the population but also the territory as "theirs."

Since the collapse of socialist regimes in 1989 few subjects in eastern Europe have attracted as much attention as nationalism. Detailed academic studies have been carried out from many disciplinary perspectives, by scholars native to the region as well as many from outside it. This is also a field in which governmental and nongovernmental organizations have undertaken numerous policy-oriented initiatives. Eastern European developments have figured prominently in global discussions of "ethnicity" and "identity politics," while a few scholars have used materials from this region to articulate more general frameworks of comparative analysis.