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In the 1920s, a large influx of immigrants from Czechoslovakia came to Canada in search of industrial work and available land for agriculture. Interwar ethnic associations were predominantly led by individuals of Slovak origin. Czechoslovakia maintained contact with its nationals in Canada through its diplomatic officials. Their consular offices promoted loyalty to Czechoslovakia’s policies in the hopes that Slovaks and Czechs would adopt their home government’s pro-“Czechoslovak” ideology, and eventually defend their homeland in the event of a war. The Czechoslovak Consulate General in Montreal oversaw all diplomatic activity between Prague and its nationals in Canada. With Slovakia’s declaration of independence and Germany’s occupation of the Czech lands in March 1939, the Czechoslovak Consulate General in Montreal used its local diplomatic discretion in an attempt to unite Slovaks and Czechs as a “Czechoslovak” national community. However, although nationalist Slovaks supported Canada’s war effort, they opposed the Czechoslovak Consulate General’s pro-Czechoslovak agenda. Czechoslovak diplomats lobbied the Canadian government for political recognition of the Edvard Beneš-led Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London to legitimize their efforts to re-establish a postwar Czechoslovak Republic. After British recognition, Canada became the last Dominion to recognize the London government-in-exile. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most literature on ideology in the late Soviet period notes the progressive de-ideologization of Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) politics under Mikhail Gorbachev. Looking specifically at the legitimating functions of ideology, the article contests this generalization. In doing so, it proposes the concept of ideological interpellation to clarify the relationship between doctrine and regime legitimation. The author argues that interpellation – the construction of the ideal Soviet subject, in a way that sustained therelations of domination and production– was a consistent goal throughout the last decade of communist rule. However, while the party approached interpellation in different ways, it was unable to resolve official ideology’s rigidity and narrowness of appeal. These conclusions are supported by a discourse analysis of the 26th, 27th, and 28th CPSU congress proceedings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As Russian Orthodoxy in the late imperial period faced new pressures for freedom and democratization in society, the state, and the Church, Orthodox churchmen sometimes looked to the West -- its culture and its religious confessions -- as either cautionary tale or inspiration. This article examines how clergy and ecclesiastical academy scholars in the borderland diocese of Kyiv analyzed the West in the diocesan press. Their views of the West and of Russia helped to shape the Church's varied responses to modern culture, political change, and calls for Church reform. Some contributors praised Western political freedom and law, but many experienced a fraught relationship with modernity. The Slavophile ideal of communal wholeness, which contrasted with Western impersonal legalism and atomization, and a reluctance to cede authority constrained the Orthodox response to modernity's pressures. Retaining the Church's role in society while addressing Western material vitality, modernist influences, and demands for freedom of conscience proved challenging. Some cautiously welcomed the Duma as a brake against bureaucracy but only as a consultative body, lest it curtail the tsar's autocratic power. Rejecting the divisive individualism of Protestantism, they sought to soften Church hierarchy through conciliarism but stopped short of radically laicizing authority in the parish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1920s and 30s, mass conversion movements to "Russian" Orthodoxy emerged among Greek Catholics in Czechoslovakia and Poland, comprising a new chapter in a continuing saga of conversion which began in the late nineteenth century, in what was then Austria-Hungary. Pre-1914 conversion movements arose in large part due to transatlantic migration -- especially return migration -- between Austria--Hungary and the Americas. Americanists have generally treated the 1920s and 30s as the era when transnational migration's impact waned owing to US immigration restrictions, while East Europeanists have minimized or ignored the impact of transnational migration upon East European regions. Interwar Catholic-to-Orthodox conversions, however, are not merely attributable to historical legacy: transatlantic migration continued to influence the dynamics of conversion as an active, contemporary force. As had been true prior to World War I, returning migrants and their families comprised the most significant constituency of the movements after the war; migrants remaining in the Americas supported the East European movements with economic and social remittances, and activists on either side of the Orthodox/Catholic divide treated the conversions as transnational phenomena. This essay analyzes the impact of transnational migration upon shifting ethnoreligious identifications, in the context of shifting social, national, and geopolitical circumstances, 1918-1939. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, based on documents from a Kyiv archive, explores the preconditions of famine in Ukraine through the 3rd All-Ukrainian Party Conference of July 1932, convened to discuss the grain crisis in the republic. It discusses recent historiography on the subject and the findings of Ukrainian historians. It argues that the causes of the famine may need to be broadened and that the argument that the famine should be regarded as genocide based on ethnic cleansing of Ukrainians is too narrow. Other factors that need to be considered are ignorance of local conditions, based in part on administrative restructuring during the time of the grain procurements campaign, lack of farming experience on the part of plenipotentiaries sent to the villages, overuse and misuse of land, a dramatic drop in livestock prior to 1932-1933 linked to collectivization, and above all the incompetence of Soviet party and government leaders at all levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows how the Cossacks developed the concept of a united Cossack Ukraine on both banks of the Dnipro as their "fatherland" and began viewing this "fatherland" as an object of common identity, loyalty, and reverence. It demonstrates that in a period of two decades the Cossack elite underwent a major shift in group identity from considering as its fatherland the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in favour of a Cossack Ukrainian/Little Russian polity. It further indicates that all major political actors in Cossack Ukraine accepted and adopted this concept and that by the late 1680s the idea of a Ukrainian/Little Russian fatherland had become entrenched in early modern Ukrainian political culture. Finally, it points to the long-term consequences of this identity shift on relations with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Muscovy/Russia, and the emergence of a modern Ukrainian identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this article is to complicate the existing scholarly account of Russian policies toward the hajj, which heretofore have been studied primarily as an aspect of the tsarist state's relations with Islam and empire building. This article demonstrates that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the hajj came to be understood by many educated Russians within and outside the government as a highly complex and contested "pilgrim question" which engaged a broad range of difficult issues: problems of governance, such as an aspiration for more effective regulation of increased mass mobility, identification of border-crossers and sanitary control, as well as issues of empire, socio-political and confessional order, and economic development. The essence of the"question" was how to order the travel of Muslim pilgrims to the holy places outside of the empire's borders. Imperial expansion, the growth of the empire's Muslim population, and the development of long-distance transportation all contributed to an increasing number of Muslim pilgrims from Russia. In response, and inspired by new conceptualizations of the role of a modern state in relation to its subjects, some Russian officials sought to take greater control of the hajj. By focusing on the Russian government and public debate on how to regulate the hajj, this article examines why and how educated Russians increasingly came to see the annual Muslim pilgrimage as a "question." It discusses the different dimensions of this problem and what the proposed regulation entailed. Finally, the article suggests why the "pilgrim question" remained a contested issue in late imperial Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes a detailed look at the way in which the Habsburg Monarchy's policy towards Serbia subtly shifted between 1881, when the Monarchy forced a secret treaty of alliance on the Serbian government, and the end of the Serbo-Bulgarian War of November 1885. Gustav von Kálnoky, the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, inherited a policy largely shaped by his Hungarian predecessor, Count Gyula Andrássy, which relied on controlling Serbia through the person of its ruler, the wayward Milan Obrenović. The Austrophile and highly unpopular Milan, however, was a disastrous instrument of Austro-Hungarian control, and by the end of the Serbo-Bulgarian conflict, by which point Milan was pleading to be allowed to abdicate, Kálnoky had come to the conclusion that this "personal policy" was a failure, and that the Monarchy was better off relying on the outright coercion of Serbia. The article reconsiders some of the key stages in this development, in particular Andrássy's memorandum of 24 November 1885, and Kálnoky's reassessment of the value of the secret treaty of 1881, which depended solely on the guarantee of the Serbian monarch and, as a result, threatened to become worthless without his presence on the throne. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]