This article attempts to reconstruct the khod myshleniia (thought process) of the ultra-nationalist, ultra-conservative camp, not just because it is interesting in and of itself but also because of the way that some of their ideas, concerns, and ways of seeing Russia and the world are shared by a growing number of people in the middle of the political spectrum. The extremists' ideas about russifikatsiia may not spread very far, but russkost' is a powerful and attractive concept.

This article seeks to analyze the ideology of the RNE as represented by its undisputed leader Barkashov and by the RNE Council which he dominates. Particular attention is paid to RNE's relation to Russian ethnicity. The first part discusses Barkashov and his organization's policies with regard to the russkii (ethnic Russian) nation and to Russian nationalism. Then follows a critical review of the RNE's relation to nazism and fascism. The article then considers the RNE's ideas about how the new Russian state should be shaped, i.e., its political and economic program. Finally, the RNE is placed in the wider Russian political landscape by means of a discussion of its political friends and foes.

Late Imperial Russian society experienced a time of profound social and cultural change in spite of the fact that aristocratic privilege and monarchical power endured until 1917. Contemporary writers bear witness to an emerging working-class consciousness in the cities, a peasant culture increasingly in contact with the wider world of the city and beyond, and a literary culture shaped by the latest currents in the experimental modernism of the West.1 Scholars have long explored the Russian variant of interest group politics that emerged in the wake of the Great Reforms, such as technological innovation and the Russian Navy, the development of a legal consciousness, new cultural expectations about the city and the process of urbanization, the modern aspirations and ambitions of a thriving popular culture, and even an emerging modern set of assumptions about individual sexual autonomy.2

The study of politics is popular in Russian history; the examination of Russian politics in its regions is not, at least, not yet. The spectrum of interpretations about autocratic politics includes the parading of litanies of imperial arbitrariness and/or manipulation of interest groups against each other, incidents of ministerial incapacity to restrain the autocrat, examples of the inordinate power of favorites, the failure to establish regularizing institutions that would restrain autocrats, and a series of interesting categories including such wonderfully suggestive terms as “free floaters” proposed in Alfred Rieber's important article on the subject. Whether one is wedded to the notion that tsars decided all in the nineteenth century, or advocate some scheme that emphasizes the plurality of conflicting interests at play in decisionmaking, however, the pattern of scholarly production suggests that regional politics has been of secondary importance, and that in any event documentation often is lacking; in short, such approaches are not seen as ideal lines of inquiry. This article seeks to make a contribution to the debate about the politics of autocrats by examining a localized question where documentation is rather complete and where ministerial/bureaucratic lines may be traced fairly closely, in an attempt to shed added light on Russia's leadership in a time of great crisis, specifically the aftermath of the humiliating defeat in the Crimean War and the tension surrounding the preparations and implementation of the Emancipation and other reforms. To be specific as well as anticipatory, it is argued that there are regional questions of great national, indeed international, importance to autocrats, that the Caucasus was so recognized in the post-Crimean War period, and that those involved in the region affected policy decisions in ways that rivaled, as well as displaced, senior officials in the capital.

In a famous article during the Soviet period, Walker Connor once asked, rhetorically:

The first disagreements between Russia's Provisional Government and the Ukrainian Central Rada emerged in the spring and summer of 1917, right after the proclamation of the Rada's First Universal and the formation of the Ukrainian executive body, the General Secretariat. The arrival in Kiev in July 1917 of the Russian governmental delegation, consisting of Alexander Kerensky, Irakly Tsereteli and Mikhail Tereshchenko, and the attempts to work out a compromise—which found their embodiment in the Second Universal—led, in fact, to the political crisis in Petrograd. The majority of the Kadet ministers refused to approve the results of the negotiations in Kiev and tendered their resignations.

Since achieving independence in December 1991, Kazakhstan has made cautious progress in assuring political rights and freedoms for all its citizens by stressing, among other things, the equality of the different ethnic groups in society, and the equality of individuals before the law. However, an observable outflow of the non-Kazakh population2 from the territory of Kazakhstan has caused a certain hesitation about this. It has received a fairly consistent international response in the scholarly literature and press.3 In almost all cases, the emphasis is on emerging Kazakh nationalism as the most obvious reason for the emigration of the non-native population. It has also been suggested that the Kazakhs would have little to gain from it, given the allegedly dominant economic role of Russians, in particular, within the country, and given also their external dependence on Russia.

The question of the national minorities of East Central Europe has again become a major topic of debate, as it was at the Paris Peace Conference 75 years ago. In 1994 and 1995, as the Horn government has attempted to hammer out bilateral treaties with Slovakia and Romania, the Hungarian minority populations have been a subject of public debate. The debate takes place in two forums. The interstate debate revolves around the same problems discussed in Paris; the question of the legal protection of minority rights in states in which the nation was declared to belong to the majority, and the further question of whether rights should be protected on an individual or collective basis. The second forum is that of the larger Hungarian community and concerns the nature and cohesion of the fifteen million Hungarians throughout the world. The implicit question is who actually belongs to the Hungarian community and what should be the relationship between so-called “minority” Hungarians and the Hungarian state.

Russia's policy towards the Cossacks may prove detrimental to the development of federalism in Russia. Their rehabilitation is important for the rebirth of Russian culture. Yet, the Cossacks as a social-military institution, may further harm the relations between ethnic Russians and non-Russians in the Caucasus, which may revive the dispute over the preservation of the ethnic principle in Russia's federalism.

A religious minority of Bulgarian-speaking Muslims, the Pomaks now live dispersed in five Balkan countries: Bulgaria, Macedonia, Greece, Albania and Turkey. A living legacy of the complexities of Balkan history, the Pomaks represent a perfect case to study interstate political intricacies around the unsettled identity of small inter-communal groups. An examination of this community should enrich the knowledge about the nature of Balkan Islam that stands on the periphery of the Arab-Iranian-Turkic Islamic heartland, the three peoples who carried the major burden of Islamic history.

In his recently published article, “The Turks of Bulgaria: The Struggle for National-Religious Survival of a Muslim Minority,” Kemal H. Karpat addresses an important and sensitive topic. The manner in which he undertakes to explore it, however, leaves much to be desired.