Ever since its emergence as a phenomenon, nationalism has been the political process that creates the context for the production of nations. These nations and nationalism then become the backdrop for new elites-desired salient identities galvanized by nationalism.1 This structuring is done either by significantly altering or upgrading the previous identity (e.g., as in the recent case of modern Russia after the USSR, or that of the USSR after Tsarist Russia) or by creating a completely new identity (e.g., the cases of Israel, Turkey, Italy, Algeria, Eritrea, and post-Soviet Central Asian states). As Ernest Gellner (2006) famously elaborated, “It is nation-alism which engenders nations and not the other way around” (54).2 The societal changes and identity signifiers brought forward by nationalism are revealed not just through the usual change of name of a group and its members—an act which by itself is important enough to be accounted for by researchers3—but also through changes of context, circumstances,and the roles each member of those groups claiming nationhood has per-formed or may perform. Although this research will not observe all those aspects of change, it will show that changes of context and circumstances create a new reality which so significantly shapes the societal and indi-vidual awareness of self and the signifiers for identification that they alone prove the claim that a new salient identity emerges after the experience of nationalism.