This article endeavors to open a new critical space for Soviet studies and for nationalities studies more generally. Through analyses of recent trends in Soviet studies, the article dismantles the frequently used opposition between subjective and objective approaches to Soviet empire and suggests instead that truths and categories, whether considered “subjective” or “objective,” are constructed discursively, through legitimizing certain interpretive models over the others. The article also argues against disciplinary avoidance of “what is” questions (e.g. “what is a nation?”) and claims that an excessive concern for (re)producing essentialism should not hinder scholarly inquiry. Several new lines of inquiry for the study of the Soviet empire are suggested and also applicable in nationalities studies more generally: research on the role of symbolic violence in manufacturing consent and research concerning the role of affect in producing linkages between the performative life of a singular human being and the pedagogical discourse of a nation or empire. The article also offers an analysis of the Soviet Union as an empire in becoming and it advocates for postcolonial approaches within Soviet studies. The practical dimensions of Soviet rule are exemplified with data from the Baltic borderlands in the postwar years.

The present article deals with international law problems that have arisen in the process of legal clarification of the state crimes committed during the Soviet occupation in the three Baltic states. Following the restoration of their independence in 1991, the Baltic states have sought to establish the historical truth about the mass crimes committed during the Nazi and Soviet occupations – Estonia's International History Commission recently published its first report which is analyzed in this article. Moreover, the courts in the Baltic states have convicted deporters of 1941 and 1949 for crimes against humanity and/or genocide. By discussing different definitions of ‘genocide,’ the author attempts to answer the question whether the general context of the Stalinist mass repressions in the Baltic states permits to qualify the occupant's policy as ‘genocide.’