The article examines the controversy triggered by the “Victory Tour” of Russia’s high-profile biker organization, the Night Wolves, to mark the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany. The tour provoked important questions about the relationship between European borders and the politics of World War II commemoration. The article argues that the international public discourse around the Night Wolves illuminates how state borders are being transformed both as hard, territorialized borders and as “soft,” symbolic boundaries. The analysis compares how print and online media in Russia, Poland, and Germany framed the Night Wolves’ tour across Europe. It emphasizes the construction of borders as a narrative project and maps the symbolic boundary-drawing strategies mobilized by various actors. It shows how cross-border commemorative tours can serve as a tool of transnational memory politics that shapes the very meaning and salience of state borders and regional divisions.

This article is part of the special cluster titled Bukovina and Bukovinians after the Second World War: (Re)shaping and (re)thinking a region after genocide and ‘ethnic unmixing’, guest edited by Gaëlle Fisher and Maren Röger. This article explores ways in which Habsburg nostalgia has become an important factor in contemporary place-making strategies in the city of Chernivtsi, Western Ukraine. Through the analysis of diasporic homecomings, city center revitalization, and nationalist rhetoric surrounding the politics of monuments, I explore hybrid and diverse ways in which Habsburg nostalgia operates in a given setting. Rather than a static and homogenous form of place attachment, in Chernivtsi different cultural practices associated with Habsburg nostalgia coexist with each other and depending on the political context as well as the social position of the “nostalgic agents” manifest themselves differently. Drawing from my long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that in order to fully understand individuals’ attachment to space, it is necessary to grasp both the subtle emotional ways in which the city is experienced by individuals as well as problematize the role of the built environment in the visualization of collective memory and emotions of particular groups. The focus on changing manifestations of the Habsburg nostalgia can bring then a better understanding of the range and scope of the city’s symbolic resources that might be mobilized for various purposes.

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The hidden minority? Dilemmas around the status of the russophone Ukrainians in contemporary UkraineUkraine, as one of the states which became independent in 1991, can be perceived as an example of the typical transition of Soviet Socialist Republics into democratic states centered on the issue of nationalizing policies and processes. However, there are also differences which make this country a very interesting case study for investigation. Mainly, Russians here form the biggest national group concentrated in the East and South of the country. The persistence and reuse of the “myth of two Ukraines” led to the widespread conclusion that Ukraine is a country which is divided between Ukrainophone West and Russophone East. This article is focuses on the third group, which is somehow hidden in the mainstream linguistic debates, namely the Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine who define themselves as ethnic Ukrainians. Based on the examples of Donbas and Crimean regions, it tries to define whether one can perceive them as a national minority.

he Lemko community is one of the most important and widely described ethnic minorities in Polish sociological and anthropological literature. In the over four-hundred-page book under review, Patrycja Trzeszczyńska makes the argument that there is still much to say about the history and culture of this group of Carpathian highlanders-the Lemkos. At one time, these inhabitants of the Lower Beskyd Mountains-categorized variously by scholars as a Polish ethnic minority, a Ukrainian ethnographic group, or part of the Rusyns-became the subject of violent postwar politics, which resulted in their deportation and dispersion across western Poland and parts of Ukraine. Through a substantial and well-crafted study of the village of Komańcza and the memories of its previous inhabitants, Trzeszczyńska also strives to tell a bigger story, namely that of remembrance and recognitionthe struggle of many minority groups in that part of Europe after the fall of Communism. Yet the broader context of traumatic experience and identity formation, of remembering and forgetting, shared by so many groups-such as the Vlachs in Romania, the Crimean Tatars, and the Bosniaks in the former Yugoslavia, just to mention a few-is somewhat absent in her analysis. The main focus of Łemkowszczyzna Zapamiętana (The Lemko Land Remembered) is the construction of the collective and cultural memory of the Lemko community from the village of Komańcza. Through a careful and reflective examination of 66 diaries and 57 interviews with current and former residents of the village, now living in Poland and Ukraine (mostly in the Tarnpolin district), Trzeszczyńska shows how the Lemkos remember their past and represent their own identity (118). According to her, the past is not "a scarce resource"-to use Arjun Appadurai's formulation-but a lived part of the present. Throughout five dense chapters, she argues that the members of the Lemko community in Poland and Ukraine developed different, diverse, and very often contradictory mnemonic strategies, which, at the same time, all centre on the traumatic experience of deportation. In this regard, the narrative community (the term that Trzeszczyńska prefers to use instead of collective memory) of the Lemkos shares a memory of the Lemkos' ancestral land-Lemkovyna. This almost mythical region seems to be at the centre of the Lemkos' representation and image of themselves as a group. Thus, Trzeszczyńska suggests that, in the case of the Lemkos, space T 212