Major events concerning national minorities continue to occur on a daily basis. Long lingering issues surface throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, often after decades of official denial and repression.

After its establishment in 1918–1919, Czechoslovakia was a multinational state and some of its minorities protested against their being included into it. The nationality problem was related to the collapse of the First Czechoslovak Republic in 1938 and the loss of some of its territories to Germany, Poland, and Hungary. It may be pointed out that the 1920 Constitution did not recognize a separate Slovak national identity and that the Czechs and Slovaks were termed “Czechoslovaks.” The post-Munich Second Republic recognized a separate Slovak nationality; however, the state came to its end in March 1939. In 1945, after its reestablishment as a national state of the Czechs and Slovaks, the country's government attempted to liquidate the national minorities' problem in a drastic manner by transfer (expulsion) of Germans and Hungarians.

The uneven course of Hungary's domestic politics and its relations with its socialist neighbors, which have large Magyar populations, has deeply affected the evolution of its minorities' policies since 1948. Initially, the minorities question seemed to be an insignificant issue, since 1949 census figures showed that only 128,758 people out of a total population of 9,204 799 chose something other than Hungarian as their primary language.

Mykhailo Hrushevsky (1866–1934) was one of the most important Ukrainian public figures of modern times. In the realm of scholarship, he was the greatest of Ukrainian historians whose ten-volume History of Ukraine-Rus' charted the saga of the Ukrainian people from antiquity to modern times. He was a prolific writer and essayist whose personal bibliography lists over 2,000 titles. He was also the principal organizer of an unofficial Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Austrian Galicia—the Shevchenko Scientific Society—and towards the end of his life became the single most important cultural figure in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Mass deportations of native populations (Jews included) from territories annexed by the USSR in 1939–40 in amicable division of spoils with Nazi Germany and its allies had everywhere the same historical background and followed roughly the same procedure. Territories in question included the states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in their entirety, parts of Finland, nearly one-half of pre-1939 Poland, and the formerly Romanian regions of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina.

The conventional distinction between Soviet and Western uses of the term democracy juxtaposes socioeconomic against political considerations— that is, for the former the stress is upon social equality and economic security, whereas for the latter it is upon civil liberty and political freedom. The tone and character of the Bolshevik approach to institutions which in the West are associated with liberal, parliamentary democracy can best be captured in the words of Lenin himself:

Until Gorbachev's glasnost', Soviet treatment of nationalities problems within the USSR ranged from carefully worded ethnographic studies to utterly dishonest articles in the political press. Much of this has changed, and we are now able to read some revealing works in the pages of avant-garde Soviet publications. Among the latter, Vikukaar (Tallin) and its Russian Raduga edition (which is not the exact twin of its Estonian counterpart), are remarkable by their frankness.

Bilingualism is the ability of an individual to use two languages to an equal or near equal degree. A completely bilingual person can switch from one language to another instantaneously.