Since the early 1980s, the crisis of Yugoslav society has been brought to public awareness through discussions in the mass media, both within Yugoslavia and outside of the country. While the causes of the crisis were initially analyzed within the framework of the ideology of Yugoslav self-management socialism, the past several years have seen increasing use by politicians and writers from the northwestern parts of the country of an orientalist rhetoric that relies for its force on an ontological and epistemological distinction between (north)west and (south)east

On January 1, 1938 virtually every trace of anything Finnish, including the language, disappeared in the Karelian ASSR, where until the day before Finnish had been one of the two official languages (with Russian) and the language of instruction in schools and of a wide variety of published materials—newspapers, literary journals and almanacs, J educational texts, translated belles lettres (both Russian and foreign) and official documents.

The history of Finnish in the Karelian ASSR dates from the Peace of Tartu (1920) which established the Finnish-Soviet border. It also stipulated that the "language of administration, legislation and public education" in the newly formed Karelian Workers Commune should be the "local popular language and designated Finnish that language. This might seem strange, since in 1923 there were in Soviet Karelia only 1,051 Finns, half of whom lived in the capital, Petrozavodsk.

In 1890, Anton Chekhov traveled all the way across Siberia, spending five months in transit and three more in residence, to visit the penal colony on Sakhalin Island. The trip was enormously eccentric—it was dangerous, arduous, ill-advised for someone of Chekhov's delicate constitution and uncharacteristically adventuresome for someone so sedentary. Its eccentricity is heightened by the battery of cavalier explanations advanced by the writer, who justified his trip first as an attempt to erase a portion of his life, then as an effort to produce the only halfyear worth remembering, now as a mere change of pace, then as a pressing need to flee a romantic entanglement, at times as a scientific enterprise, at other times as a symptom of "Sakhalin mania."

In the mid-1920s the Soviet government singled out about 150,000 ; citizens for an administrative category designated the "small peoples of the north." These were the indigenous inhabitants of the Arctic and sub-Arctic zones of the Soviet Union who subsisted on hunting, fishing and reindeer herding and who were seen by bolshevik officials as the most backward peoples of the new republic, languishing in a pitiful and unacceptable state of "semi-savagery and outright savagery." As such, they needed to be understood as a peculiar phenomenon and governed differently from their more "cultured" countrymen.

The idea of the "good tsar" originated in Muscovite times and obviously has since become a commonplace of Russian political culture. However, Gorbachev's statement does not really define a "good tsar" but what should instead be called a "reforming tsar," a term that more aptly characterizes the changed expectations of a ruler in the Imperial period of Russian history

The pivotal year 1905 posed an unwelcome challenge for Russian conservatives. Disturbed by mounting social and political unrest, they found it appalling that the Tsar should bend to oppositionist demands by granting an elected legislative assembly in the form of a State Duma. Even if they refused to admit it, they knew that this change in state structure meant limiting the Tsar's autocratic power. Fearful that further concessions would lead ultimately to the end of monarchical rule, many loyalists faced the prospect of taking action on their own to preserve what seemed to be a tottering autocracy.