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With a focus on Gintaras Beresnevičius's book The Making of an Empire (2003) and the marketing and consumption of "Soviet" sausages, this article explores the rise of national ideologies that promote an "eastern" and "Soviet" identity in Lithuania. Both during the nationalist movement against the Soviet Union and later in the 1990s and 2000s, the west and Europe were seen as sites of prestige, power, and goodness. Recently the reinvented "east" and "Soviet" have become important competing symbols of national history and community. In this article Neringa Klumbytè argues that nationalism has become embedded in the power politics of Europeanization. National ideologies are shaped by differing ideas about ways of being modern and European rather than by simple resistance to European Union expansion. The resulting geopolitics of provinciality, a nationalist politics of space, thus becomes an integral part of the story of European modernity and domination within a global history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

So far in the twenty-first century, triumphalism has dominated Russian culture. As manifest in popularized history and film, this wave has often been described by recourse to interpretive paradigms derived from a neo-Soviet or neo-socialist realist orientation, particularly when the subject is war. While understandable, this interpretive practice cannot account for salient productions that upstage Soviet conventions by reconfiguring the Russian historical experience along a narrative trajectory anchored by two scenarios that constitute the alpha and omega of national achievement and pride: Aleksandr Nevskii and the Time of Troubles. Tapping into deep structures of myth, contemporary reproductions of these two tie their significance explicitly to the post-Soviet period. Supported by the state and church, their increasing traction in war narratives facilitates a new discourse of nationalism that supersedes Soviet precedent, reconfigures traditional domains of triumphalism, and sets a standard for future constructions of Russian history that eclipses key problems of the real or imagined past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the limits and utility of the concept of "empire." It argues that empire needs to be understood, not as a clearly bounded transhistorical model, but as Wittgensteinian "family resemblance" whose meaning and referents have altered significantly over time. The article explores the ways the concept of empire has been re-deployed in the Soviet context, addressing the particular the role of nationalism in the making of empire.

Examines the nationalities policy in the Soviet Union under Stalin, specifically during the period of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Possibility that the publication of articles that dealt with nationality issues was part of a propaganda program originated by state policy.