But there were other things to say about it as well. In the nineteenth century, nationalism had been considered a liberal movement, intimately and inextricably connected to democracy, and in the former Soviet Union this remained, in some instances, the case. After all, in order for democracy to work at all, citizens of the post-Soviet republics needed to vote for local and national leaders, not distant Russians in Moscow; in order for new institutions to gain credibility, they could not only be Soviet institutions with new names. The freedom to speak native languages, to read native literature, to discover the truth about national history also went along with the freedom to participate in local politics, and in the early 1990s, a cultural revival on a vast scale engulfed the nations which lay on the borders of Russia. What some called nationalism others called patriotism, and still others called freedom: the stability so beloved of international statesmen had also been a prison.

While it was true that the republics of the Soviet Union had ostensibly been at peace with one another, that peace had also been a fiction, enforced by terror, lies, and the traditional Russian belief in «divide and rule»; make little nations hate one another, the theory went, and they will have less energy to rebel against a large one; make minorities resent the majority and they will be unable to join together to rebel against Russian rule. Undoing the terror, setting straight the lies required precisely the sort of re-examination of history which the nationalists were calling for. Equally, the Soviet era could not be erased: however artificial, hatreds implanted in both the Russian colonisers and the non-Russian colonies during the seventy years of Soviet power remained. A man who has lived in a given town for forty years feels he has as much right to it as a man whose family lived in the same town for two thousand years, but has lived elsewhere for forty.