Questions of collective identity and nationhood dominate the memory debate in both the high and popular cultures of postsocialist Russia, Poland and Ukraine. Often the 'Soviet' and 'Russian' identity are reconstructed as identical; others remember the Soviet regime as an anonymous supranational 'Empire', in which both Russian and non-Russian national cultures were destroyed. At the heart of this 'empire talk' is a series of questions pivoting on the opposition between constructed 'ethnic' and 'imperial' identities. Did ethnic Russians constitute the core group who implemented the Soviet...