ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that ethnic-national identities, divisions and conflicts have played a decisive role both during the rise and fall of the Socialist and Communist revolutions and in the political systems which afterwards were established. All of the theories contain some truth although none of them is able to explain the downfall of the Communist System in East Europe. National unity was preserved or attained only through the use of external and internal military violence. In Russia and the USSR, throughout history, from the taking over of power by the Bolsheviks till the breakdown of the system in the 1990s, issues of ethnic-national cleavages have been of decisive importance. In the smaller, ethnic homogeneous countries of Central East Europe, economic inequality has always been modest and State Socialism may have made more of a difference in people's thinking about equality and inequality than in factual structures.
