Nation-state building in Central Asia in the Post-Soviet period has been marked by a combination of authoritarianism and the construction of nationhood ideologies. The latter are created by the mythologization of national history and self, and biased toward ethnocentrism and the political exclusion of ethic minorities. This practice has been partly inherited from Soviet national policy, especially its reliance on titular nations as the cornerstone of the Soviet type of federation. In the Soviet past, domestic nationalism was counter-balanced by the dominance of the Communist ideology and promotion of the Soviet supra-national identity. After the dissolution of the USSR, however, the domestic nationalism that was unleashed has been one of the causes of social, cultural and economic dissection of Central Asia.