ABSTRACT
All over the world today, but most interestingly and frighteningly in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, men and women are reasserting their local and particularist, their ethnic, religious, and national identities. The tribes have returned, and the dream of their return is greatest where their repression was most severe. It is now apparent that the popular energies mobilized against totalitarian rule, and also the more passive stubbornness and evasiveness that eroded the Stalinist regimes from within, were fuelled in good part by ‘tribal’ loyalties and passions. How these were sustained and reproduced over time is a tale that waits to be told. The tribes-most of them, at least, and all the minorities and the subject nations-were for several generations denied access to the official organs of social reproduction: the public schools and the mass media. I imagine tens of thousands of old men and women whispering to their grandchildren, singing folk songs and lullabies, repeating ancient stories. This is in many ways a heartening picture, for it suggests the inevitability of totalitarian failure. But what are we to make of the songs and stories, often as full of hatred for neighbouring nations as of hope for national liberation?
