The following paragraphs are not intended to give a review of theories of nation building. Rather their aim is to highlight the most salient features of the modernist and primordialist position on nation formation. The central assumptions of a couple of influential theories will serve only as an illustration of these features and are supposed to help the reader obtain a clearer picture of the two positions, without the pretension to compare or contrast different theories of nation formation. The first step, however, will be an effort to give an exact assessment of the context of the modernist‘-primordialist dichotomy.

In June 1990, following the example set by Boris Yeltsin and the Russian Republic, the Supreme Soviet in Chişinău declared Moldova sovereign. Henceforth, Moldovans would recognize only those laws approved by their own parliament and maintain relations with the other republics only within “an association of sovereign states.” Formal independence came a year later, on 27 August 1991, following the failure of the Moscow coup that sought to unseat Mikhail Gorbachev and preserve the Soviet Union. In the heady times that followed, Moldovans debated basic questions of political organization and, inevitably, the difficult issue of Moldova's relationship with neighboring Romania.

The collapse of communism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was accompanied by ethnopolitical conflicts that erupted “with unusual cruelty and violence” but without much warning and were soon recognized as a major threat to peace, security, and development in the post-Cold War era. Can one be alerted to the Nagorno-Karabakhs, Bosnias, Rwandas, and Tajikistans of the world—in time to take decisive preventive action?

In early 1989, the Soviet Germans established the Wiedergeburt (“Rebirth”) All-Union Society. An umbrella-organization originally designed to protect and advance ethnic-German interests in the USSR, the “Rebirth” Society adopted the most effective legal means by which it could confront the regime—namely, political dissent based on Lenin's notion of national self-determination. The “Rebirth” movement evolved in this context and represented the fifteenth-largest Soviet nationality numbering more than two million in the 1989 Soviet census. By 1993, official membership in the “Rebirth” Society included nearly 200,000 men and women. Ironically, at the very moment the Soviet Germans became more politically conscious, the Soviet Union and the ethnic-German community were disintegrating.

In a recent article in Ulitsa, Moscow journalist Denis Dragunsky asked whether Russia was an Asian or a European country. Much the same question could be asked about Kazakstan (the land of the Kazaks), particularly given its long historical ties with Russia. And it is not an easy question to answer. While Kazakstan's history is a blend of Mongol, Turkic, Islamic, and Russian heritages, there are Cossacks and Russians both in and outside of Kazakstan who feel that parts of Kazakstan belong historically to Russia. While such claims have been long and vocal, the Kazak response has been forcibly silent during most of this century. However, with the emergence of Kazakstan as not only an independent country, but a potentially powerful regional player, Kazaks have begun to reclaim their history from the Russians. And with questions about how to construct a nation come queries about ethnicity and history. What is a Kazak? Given that the Russians referred to them as the Kirgiz during most of the period that they dominated the Kazaks, and thus robbed the Kazaks of their most basic linguistic identification term, there is much to be explored and reclaimed before this people and nation can truly define itself in the context of its rich history.

The huge Russian diaspora created in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse creates a great challenge to nation builders throughout the “near abroad.” Especially in Lithuania, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Ukraine, by virtue of their size, Russian populations must be integrated into new political communities where they now have minority status. The building of cohesive, unified nation states requires that the identities and loyalties of these Russians be directed toward their new states. If Russians can identify with the broader community dominated by the titular ethnic group and simultaneously maintain a strong ethnic consciousness and loyalty toward the Russian Federation, then national integration can proceed in a relatively straightforward manner. But if creating a state-wide, national identity entails the weakening of Russian ethnic identity and the breaking of emotional and physical attachments to Russia, then national integration will be a much more conflictual and difficult process. Unfortunately, social scientists have paid little theoretical and empirical attention to the question of whether ethnic and national identities complement one another or compete with one another. Likewise, we do not know how a diaspora's relations with its homeland affects its ability to adopt loyalties to its host state. And if scholars are uncertain about these issues, then so likely are ethnic groups themselves; logically the political consequences of this uncertainty also merit study.

Like most nineteenth-century historians, Michal Bobrzyński directed his research to the study of his nation's past and especially to the development of political institutions. History, for him, served to enhance a sense of nationhood among his readers by deriving lessons from the experience of the national community and providing a basis for present political activity. As a politically engaged historian, Bobrzyński faced serious issues of the need to reorient Polish national identity and to refashion the historical imagination to meet the needs of his people in the face of the political situation in the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

The emergence of a strong Cossack movement has great implications for the future of Russia and the post-Soviet space. It is at once the glorification of a mythical past and a powerful alternate vision of the future. Old questions of Cossack identity are once again being debated and a Cossack presence is strongly felt in the cities of southern Russia. In the volatile North Caucasus region the Cossack revival has increasingly assumed many of the features of national movements in other areas of the former Soviet Union.

In December 1995, Kazakstan celebrated its fifth anniversary as a sovereign state, although the rich, tumultuous history of the Kazaks themselves encompasses more than five centuries. The complexity of this history is revealed in a statement by Kemal Akishev, a well-known archeologist: “Kazakstan reveals itself through territorial contact, where, beginning in ancient times, infiltration and aggression, immigration and ethnic immigration, the integration and spreading of culture, and racial and linguistic palimpsests took place.” The ethnogenesis of the Kazak people can be divided into three periods: the pre-Turkic, the Turkic, and the Turko-Mongolian periods. The development of modern Kazakstan likewise falls into three periods: the pre-revolutionary, the Soviet, and the modern republic.

The spirit of environmentalism generated some of the most memorable images of the eastern and central European independence movements of the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1988, protesters formed a human chain around the Ignalina nuclear reactor in Lithuania. That same year, thousands of Hungarians marched through downtown Budapest to rally against their government's prospective participation in the construction of a dam on the Danube River. The environmental movements in the former eastern bloc marked the beginning of the end of Soviet era communism in Europe. However, many commentators have implied that environmental protest was a proxy for other, more politically explosive grievances. Environmentalism was decisive, it is argued, because it provided a release valve for pent-up frustrations and repressed nationalistic ardor. Re-examining the independence movement in Estonia, this article contends that environmentalism was not incidental to citizens’ larger aims. The specific, environmentally destructive activities people condemned embodied many of the features of the Soviet system that people despised generally. Resource-intensive and pollution-prone projects proposed by Moscow provoked a broadly conceived environmental revolt rather than environmental protest “in name only.” The environmentally related constituents of Estonia's independence movement included citizens’ opposition to pollution of the environment and waste of natural resources; perceived “mindlessness” of industrial policy in Estonia; the promise of new Russian-speaking immigrants to work in environmentally unfriendly industries; and economic exploitation of natural resources in Estonia for the benefit of other Soviet republics, especially the Russian RSFSR.

The Enlightenment instilled European and European-rooted societies with certain fundamental principles which are generally taken for granted; among the most important are democracy, education, and human equality. Not all of mankind experienced this period of cultural history, but in those areas that the Enlightenment touched, a tautology functions in the collective subconscious that where there is democracy and where there is an educated people, there will be equality. Western nations—their politicians, scholars, and common folk alike—believe that a preordained consequence of the system of democratic rule in a developed country is open-mindedness and tolerance; in contrast, it is generally maintained that non-democratic governments where knowledge is evidently censored and controlled, such as those of the former Soviet Bloc, produce narrow-mindedness and intolerance.

In Kazakstan, as the meaning of Soviet citizenship recedes into the past, the question of Kazak identity comes to the fore. The framing of Kazak national identity is generally configured in relation to the Three Zhuzes, in common parlance referred to as “hordes” but more properly translated “hundreds.” Multiple means of defining Kazak ethnicity emerge either to challenge or reinforce legacies of the past. Traditional concepts of the past may alternately reinforce or break away from stereotypes informed by Russia, by the “civilizing” factors of Islam, or by the nineteenth-century imperial West, depending upon external conditions of military or financial power.