National Landscape with Lenin in the Background: Imagined National Communities in the Former Eastern Bloc

Abstract

The paper is a critical review of two recently published monographs on the subject of the everyday and banal forms of nationalism in the post-socialist countries of Europe and Asia. The authors of the monographs, drawing on the theories of national identity and nationhood by Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, Michael Billig, Michael Skey, Tim Edensor and others, showed their deep understanding of the processes of nation-building, while their ethnographic approach allowed them to gather original and non-obvious data on everyday practices and discourses by which citizens of the post-socialist countries reproduce and reconstruct their identities. However, both volumes display some shortcomings resulting from their renditions of the historical background, including the ethnic policies of the socialist states, as well as from constraints of the Western liberal perspective as applied to the social reality of the former Eastern Bloc.