This book examines the role of Russian and Serbian nationalism in different modes of dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in 1991. Why did Russia's elites agree to the dissolution of the ...Soviet Union along the borders of Soviet republics, leaving twenty-five million Russians outside of Russia? Conversely, why did Serbia's elite succeed in mobilizing Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia for the nationalist cause? Combining a Weberian emphasis on interpretive understanding and counterfactual analysis with theories of nationalism, Veljko Vujačić highlights the role of historical legacies, national myths, collective memories, and literary narratives in shaping diametrically opposed attitudes toward the state in Russia and Serbia. The emphasis on the unintended consequences of communist nationality policy highlights how these attitudes interacted with institutional factors, favoring different outcomes in 1991. The book's postscript examines how this explanation holds up in the light of Russia's annexation of Crimea.
A sologist analyzes the idea of Russian nationalism as it evolved under Lenin and Stalin. Based on a reconsideration of Soviet history and of Stalin's and others' published statements, the article ...reexamines the relationship between Soviet and Russian identity and nationalism. The article concludes with discussion of the implications of this historical legacy for Putin's Russia.
This article reviews four recent books on nationalist mobilization and ethnic violence in the former Yugoslavia. The focus on political elites as instigators of ethnic conflict is too narrow. A fully ...adequate causal explanation of ethnic violence requires closer attention to contextual
factors, especially competing nationalist narratives as elaborated by religious and secular intellectual elites. Because nationalist myths, symbols, and narratives play a greater role in nationalist mobilization than in class or issue-specific politics, causal explanations of nationalist mobilization
must satisfy Weber's requirement of "adequacy on the level of meaning." Theoretically driven generalizations have a limited explanatory potential in explaining specific instances of nationalist mobilization.
This article explores the ideological and institutional causes of the emergence of political coalitions between orthodox communists and extreme nationalists in the late communist and post-communist ...periods. The causes of the emergence of new forms of national socialist ideologies, parties, movements, and regimes are sought in the historically rooted ideological affinities between socialist and nationalist ideologies and the perceived necessity for communist cadres of defining a substitute “combat task,” coopting the nationalist intelligentsia, and attracting desperately needed popular support. Such attempts at “national-socialist” mobilization in the late communist and post-communist context face serious social-structural, institutional, and ideological constraints. Consequently, it is inappropriate to subsume these parties, movements, and regimes under familiar concepts such as fascism, totalitarianism, integral nationalism, populism, or sultanism. Instead, they should be seen as distinct subspecies of late communist and post-communist authoritarianism.
Contrasts the peaceful disintegration of the Soviet state with the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia. Seeks to isolate some of the causes for the different reactions of the `dominant' ...nations-Russians and Serbs-to the disintegration of the larger state. Also notes the significance of the historical role of diaspora communities in explaining different patterns of nationalist nationalization. Draws on Max Weber's writings on nation, nationalism and imperialism.
A sociologist whose area of expertise is communism & nationalism examines the causes of Soviet & Yugoslav dissolution, with special attention to political-cultural factors. The work of Serbian & ...Russian intellectuals is used as the basis for examination of the different political-cultural attitudes of Russians & Serbs towards the state, historically & during the twentieth-century breakups of these multinational states. 58 References. Adapted from the source document.
This article places Zaslavsky's contribution to the study of Soviet-type societies in the intellectual context of Soviet studies in the 1970s. It is argued that Zaslavsky's intimate knowledge of the ...Soviet system enabled him to transcend the limitations of totalitarian, modernization, and interest-group approaches to the study of Soviet politics. The core of Zaslavsky's original contribution lay in the development of a set of new concepts that he applied to the study of Brezhnev's "real socialism:" the neo-Stalinist state, organized consensus, state-dependent workers, closed enterprises, the internal passport system. With the help of these concepts Zaslavsky was able to illuminate the distinctive features of mature Soviet society better than competing approaches.
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