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March 23 2014
Comment: Ten places that would welcome a Putin land grab
There are plenty of regions, territories and autonomous republics who
want to do to Russia what Crimea did to Ukraine: get the heck out of
there.
By Frank Jacobs
Vladimir Putin's trademark smirk, equal parts smugness and mischief,
was never more appropriate than March 18 in the Kremlin's St. George
Hall, when justifying Russia's lightning-speed annexation of Crimea.
Not only did Putin finally reverse his country's dramatic territorial
shrinkage post Soviet Union, he did it while thumbing his nose at the
West and its hypocrisy on what he called the "Kosovo precedent." How
dare the United States and its allies, who supported that Serbian
province's unilateral declaration of independence in 2008 in the face
of Moscow's furious but futile opposition, now deny the persecuted
Crimeans that same option?
Ironically, Putin's denouncement of the West's about-face also applies
to Russia's own change of heart. "You cannot call the same thing black
today and white tomorrow," he fumed.
But if a precedent that is imitated is no longer an exception, then
self-determination might be the new rule. And Putin might want to get
ready for a lot more instances of superpower-sponsored separatism.
Indeed, Russia is likely to remain the epicenter for these
geopolitical tremors. But -- and this might prove more painful for
Moscow soon -- there are plenty of regions, territories and autonomous
republics who want to do to Russia what Crimea did to Ukraine: get the
heck out of there.
Here are the 10 likeliest comers and goers in the Kremlin's new parlor game.
Top 10 on the way in
1. Transnistria
Cutting an unlikely figure, this phantom state of roughly half a
million people measures about 450 miles north to south, but is barely
15 miles across. It occupies the east bank of the Dniestr, the river
that separates it from the rest of Moldova, from which this
Russian-dominated region seceded in 1992 -- with a little help from
the Russian Army and Cossack irregulars. And yet not even Russia
recognizes Transnistria as an independent nation -- it entertains
diplomatic relations only with the three other members of the
Community for Democracy and Rights of Nations (CDRN), a losers' club
of post-Soviet puppet states (more on the other members Abkhazia,
South Ossetia, and Nagorno-Karabakh below). On March 17, the local
parliament appealed to the Russian Duma for this breakaway region to
also join Russia. That might be tricky, as it is completely wedged
between Moldova and Ukraine, sharing no border with Russia proper. But
it works for Kaliningrad Oblast, the Russian territory sandwiched
between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea, and it could work for
Transnistria, too.
2. Donbass
The Donets Basin, or Donbass, in Eastern Ukraine is twice the size of
Massachusetts, with about 7 million inhabitants. It was a crucial
industrial epicenter of the Soviet Union, a communist version of the
Ruhrgebiet, the beating heart of West Germany's Wirtschaftswunder.
Soviet posters proclaimed it Serdse Rossii -- the Heart of Russia. The
massive concentration of steel, coal, and other heavy industries
attracted Russians and other Soviet nationalities, producing a
pro-Russian majority in what is the most densely populated part of
Ukraine. This is the home turf of Victor Yanukovych, the former
Ukrainian president whose overthrow in February sparked the current
crisis, and it's the likeliest stage for any further Russian land
grabs in Ukraine.
3. New Russia
The area just north of Crimea on the Ukrainian mainland was called
Novorossiya, or "New Russia" after the Kremlin wrested it from Ottoman
control in the 18th century and opened it up for Russian colonization.
It is still heavily Russophone, especially in bigger cities like
Odessa and Dnipropetrovsk, and consistently voted for the Party of
Regions, whose mainstay was Yanukovych and other pro-Moscow
candidates. It could conceivably be persuaded to lean toward Moscow
rather than Kiev. And Russia's first military pinpricks, from Crimea
into New Russia, have already been reported, with Russia occupying a
gas pumping station in the town of Strilkove just north of Crimea in
mid-March.
4. Abkhazia
No more than 25 miles east of Sochi, the jewel in Russia's Olympic
crown, is Abkhazia -- the prettiest of the four "sleeping beauties" in
Russia's near abroad (the other three frozen conflict zones being
Transnistria, South Ossetia, and Nagorno Karabakh.) Like the others,
this too was effectively created by the Red Army, which in 1993 helped
the Abkhaz chase the Georgians from what nominally still is the
western extremity of that country. As with Transnistria and South
Ossetia, Abkhazia's independence is recognized by just a handful of
states. If Crimea fares well as part of Russia, Abkhazia -- which has
signaled approval for Crimea's secession -- might also be tempted to
join.
5. South Ossetia
Another chunk out of Georgia, carved from the northern part of the
country in a short, sharp Russo-Georgian war in August 2008 that saw
Georgia's pro-Western president Mikheil Saakashvili nervously eat his
tie on television -- literally -- as Russian tanks approached the
capital Tblisi. Numbering just 55,000, the South Ossetians constitute
the smallest of Russia's unofficial protectorates. (Fun fact: They are
the descendants of the Alans, an Indo-Iranian tribe that may be the
etymological source for the English name Alan.)
South Ossetia, too, is increasingly turning from Georgia to Russia.
And if Crimea's absorption goes well, Russia might swallow South
Ossetia for dessert.
6. Belarus
What communist apparatchik still hogs the presidency of a post-Soviet
republic, stubbornly choosing imperial nostalgia over ties to the
outside world? Welcome to Belarus, formerly aka White Russia and
Belorussia, ruled since 1994 by Alexander Lukashenko, a mustachioed
Statler to Putin's Waldorf. This Slavic country is such a close
political and cultural match with Russia that in 1999 the two
countries signed a treaty to form a confederation (though it soon lost
steam.) Any new merger would likely be sanctioned by a referendum, but
in a country often dubbed "Europe's last dictatorship," such a
plebiscite would be as questionable as the recent Crimean one.
7. Northern Kazakhstan
Russia remains the world's largest country, but it's down considerably
in size from the days of the Soviet Union. This is mainly due to the
secession of the Central Asian 'Stans, of which Kazakhstan -- with an
area of more than 1 million square miles, clocking in at four times
the size of Texas -- is the largest. In Soviet times, Russians
outnumbered Kazakhs in their own republic. That's no longer the case,
but Russians remain in the majority in northern Kazakhstan, an
enormous zone of dry, flat steppe adjacent to the Russian border. Like
Crimea, this region was part of Russia proper before the Soviets
transferred it. The return of that prodigal region could stir some
emotions on the steppe. After all, this is the location of Russia's
vital Baikonur spaceport; and no less an authority than Alexander
Solzhenitsyn advocated Russia's annexation of these lands.
8. Russians in the Baltic
If and when Putin wants to pick a fight with the European Union, there
is little doubt where the trouble will start -- in the three Baltic
states, the only former republics of the USSR that are now EU members.
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have reinvented themselves as tech-savvy
mini-states, Scandinavian in ambition rather than encumbered by their
Soviet past. But each is home to sizeable Russian minorities, which
are in the majority in some regions and cities, and whose heartfelt
nostalgia and genuine frustration are feared by the Balts and
treasured by the Russians as pent-up reservoirs of political friction.
9. Nagorno Karabakh
Back in 1989, this is where the Soviet Union started to unravel, when
fighting broke out between the ethnic Armenians of this enclave and
the majority Azeri of the republic from which they wanted to secede.
Months of vicious fighting and reciprocal massacres finally led to a
stalemate that continues today, with the phantom state of Artsakh
established by the victorious Armenians, in a region that officially
is still part of Azerbaijan. This untenable situation has been
maintained for a quarter of a century. Could Russia come to the aid of
the encircled Armenians?
10. Brighton Beach, Brooklyn
Putin is only partly right when he says that Russia has a historical
claim on Crimea. Russia's history in the region is only three
centuries old -- before that, the Turks and Tatars ruled the roost.
Perhaps a better formula for the Putin Doctrine is this: Russia has
rights wherever Russians live in significant numbers. Who says that
this policy needs to stop at the borders of the former Soviet Union?
Maybe a few Russian trikolori burning in Brighton Beach is all the
reason Vladimir Vladimirovich needs to send a few gunboats from
freshly conquered Sevastopol to round the tip of Breezy Point...
* * *
Top 10 on the way out
1. Chechnya
The Caucasus is a quilt of cultures, languages, religions, grudges,
and vendettas -- none so deadly as the one between Chechens and
Russians. With the Soviet Union imploding, Chechnya made the mistake
of trying to "do a Kosovo" by declaring its independence from Russia.
The Russians would have none of it, but it took two wars to pummel the
Chechens back into the fold: a ploddingly ineffective one under
Yeltsin in the 1990s, and a viciously effective one under Putin over
the last decade. But despite its pro-Russian leadership, separatism
grows like weed in Chechnya; when Moscow directs its attention
elsewhere for a while, it will blossom again. And perhaps in a more
virulent form: a small, hard core of Wahhabi Chechens has been willing
to use violence to establish an Emirate of the Caucasus, that would
include other restless areas such as Dagestan and Ingushetia.
2. Tatarstan
The Volga is one of the great Russian landscapes, but that river laps
the shores of a decidedly non-Russian entity: Tatarstan, the
northernmost outpost of Islam in the world. Like many nationalities in
the Soviet Union, the Tatars had their own republic, in which they
were purposely made a minority. However, they now constitute just over
half of the republic's 2 million people -- and it continues to grow
more Muslim and Turkic, and less Russian. This has energized Tatar
nationalism beyond the safe zones of social, cultural, and religious
issues, even though separatism would be more than a bit tricky for a
province entirely encircled by Russia.
3. Idel-Ural
The Tatars are numerous enough to contemplate going it alone, but the
other non-Russian ethnicities in the wider area tend to dream of an
independent Idel-Ural (Volga-Ural), the collective name for Tatarstan
and five other tiny republics: Udmurtia, Mordovia, Chuvashia,
Bashkortostan, and Mari-El. Their religions include Islam, Orthodoxy,
and paganism and only some of their languages are mutually
intelligible. But they share one important common trait: They're not
Russian!
4. Kalmykia
Europe's only Buddhist state, this Russian republic of roughly 300,000
people on the western shores of the Caspian Sea is populated by the
descendants of Siberian herders. The Kalmyk's unique ethnic and
religious status within Russia -- and their forced russification,
collectivization, and deportation -- has kept their sense of
"otherness" alive. The capital, Elista, is a well-known venue of
high-profile chess matches, and the Kalmyk president, Kirsan
Ilyumzhinov, the head of FIDE, the International Chess Federation, is
also famous for the tour of the galaxy he claimed he took in 1997 on a
UFO.
Could a resurgent Asian power reach out and loosen Moscow's grip on Chessland?
5. Kaliningrad
The northern part of what used to be East Prussia, Germany's
easternmost province, is now Russia's westernmost district. Few
Germans remain, and the region's nearly half-million people are mostly
Russian. But being surrounded by prosperous EU member states may be
going to their heads. Some Kaliningraders have even taken to calling
their capital by its old name of Königsberg again, more to stress
distance from Moscow than proximity to Berlin. Hence also the Baltic
Republican Party, whose aim was greater autonomy and possibly
independence, which Moscow abolished in 2003, though it has since
re-formed as a "public movement."
6. Karelia
Karelia is the name of a Russian territory bordering a Finnish
territory with the same name, and a shared history. Much of Russian
Karelia (aka East Karelia) was Finnish before the Soviets took it from
them in the Winter War of 1939-40; its inhabitants are now mainly
non-Finnish newcomers. Still, some Finnish groups like ProKarelia are
eager to reclaim the area, which they see as the Finnish heartland.
And the fall of communism has enabled a renaissance of Finnish culture
in the region, in large part fuelled by émigré Karelians, who could be
crucial in steering the region toward a vote to loosen its ties with
Moscow.
7. Komi Republic
The nomadic Komi make up barely a quarter of the million inhabitants
of this Iraq-sized, mineral-rich republic in the northern reaches of
European Russia. But the Russians are newbies: mainly former convicts
and their descendants. If the Komi could persuade them to depart for
sunnier climes, or go native and work toward an independent homeland,
this mass of frozen tundra (which claims to have reserves of 242
billion tons of coal, over 600 million tons of oil and over 140
billion cubic meters of gas) could be the Saudi Arabia of the North.
8. Circassia
Before Sochi was Russian, it was the capital of the Circassians.
Afterward, it became the graveyard of those who couldn't or wouldn't
flee overseas. The expulsion of the Circassians from their homeland in
the northwestern Caucasus is one of the lesser-known tragedies of the
19th century -- at least outside the Muslim world. Their descendants
now live in Turkey, and throughout the Middle East. A nascent
nationalism among these millions demands the restoration of their
ancient homeland.
9. Karachay-Balkaria
A classic example or Soviet Russia's divide-and-rule policy: place the
ethnically-related Balkar and Karachay peoples in "national" republics
with other, less-related ethnicities. The nationalist agenda in the
region reads like a DIY manual: first, divide Kabardino-Balkaria into
a Kabardin and a Balkar republic and Karachay-Cherkessia into a
Karachay and a Cherkess republic. Then, assemble the Balkar and
Karachay parts into a single republic. Still with me? After this,
unite both ethnicities into a single one. And finally, if anyone is
still up for it, get the newly united Turkic republic to unite with
Turkey itself -- just a short ride away across the Caspian Sea.
10. Birobidzhan
Before the Jews had Israel, they had this area of Siberia to call
home, and Joseph Stalin to thank for it. Birobidzhan, east of Mongolia
and bordering China, was to become the Jewish homeland. While that may
not exactly have gone to plan, the republic is still officially
designated the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, and Yiddish is still
co-official language with Russian. There's even still about 6,000 Jews
living there. Perhaps it would be wise for World Zionism to develop
this option, in case something serious happens to Plan A. Another big
plus: it's well outside the range of Iranian missiles.
Bonus round! Siberia
The Big One. Continent-sized. Resource-rich. And it's only lightly
sprinkled with Russians -- yes, it's 40 million, but that's only about
two per square mile. Already busily exploited by the resource-poor and
space-starved Chinese. For now, the Chinese are siphoning off oil and
hauling south lumber strictly under Russian licenses. But geopolitics
abhors a vacuum. And Beijing is much richer and closer by than Moscow.
What's to stop China from playing the Crimea scenario on two thirds of
Russia?
Jacobs an author and journalist who writes about curious cartography
and intriguing borders.
http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2014/03/23/comment-ten-places-would-welcome-putin-land-grab
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
March 23 2014
Comment: Ten places that would welcome a Putin land grab
There are plenty of regions, territories and autonomous republics who
want to do to Russia what Crimea did to Ukraine: get the heck out of
there.
By Frank Jacobs
Vladimir Putin's trademark smirk, equal parts smugness and mischief,
was never more appropriate than March 18 in the Kremlin's St. George
Hall, when justifying Russia's lightning-speed annexation of Crimea.
Not only did Putin finally reverse his country's dramatic territorial
shrinkage post Soviet Union, he did it while thumbing his nose at the
West and its hypocrisy on what he called the "Kosovo precedent." How
dare the United States and its allies, who supported that Serbian
province's unilateral declaration of independence in 2008 in the face
of Moscow's furious but futile opposition, now deny the persecuted
Crimeans that same option?
Ironically, Putin's denouncement of the West's about-face also applies
to Russia's own change of heart. "You cannot call the same thing black
today and white tomorrow," he fumed.
But if a precedent that is imitated is no longer an exception, then
self-determination might be the new rule. And Putin might want to get
ready for a lot more instances of superpower-sponsored separatism.
Indeed, Russia is likely to remain the epicenter for these
geopolitical tremors. But -- and this might prove more painful for
Moscow soon -- there are plenty of regions, territories and autonomous
republics who want to do to Russia what Crimea did to Ukraine: get the
heck out of there.
Here are the 10 likeliest comers and goers in the Kremlin's new parlor game.
Top 10 on the way in
1. Transnistria
Cutting an unlikely figure, this phantom state of roughly half a
million people measures about 450 miles north to south, but is barely
15 miles across. It occupies the east bank of the Dniestr, the river
that separates it from the rest of Moldova, from which this
Russian-dominated region seceded in 1992 -- with a little help from
the Russian Army and Cossack irregulars. And yet not even Russia
recognizes Transnistria as an independent nation -- it entertains
diplomatic relations only with the three other members of the
Community for Democracy and Rights of Nations (CDRN), a losers' club
of post-Soviet puppet states (more on the other members Abkhazia,
South Ossetia, and Nagorno-Karabakh below). On March 17, the local
parliament appealed to the Russian Duma for this breakaway region to
also join Russia. That might be tricky, as it is completely wedged
between Moldova and Ukraine, sharing no border with Russia proper. But
it works for Kaliningrad Oblast, the Russian territory sandwiched
between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea, and it could work for
Transnistria, too.
2. Donbass
The Donets Basin, or Donbass, in Eastern Ukraine is twice the size of
Massachusetts, with about 7 million inhabitants. It was a crucial
industrial epicenter of the Soviet Union, a communist version of the
Ruhrgebiet, the beating heart of West Germany's Wirtschaftswunder.
Soviet posters proclaimed it Serdse Rossii -- the Heart of Russia. The
massive concentration of steel, coal, and other heavy industries
attracted Russians and other Soviet nationalities, producing a
pro-Russian majority in what is the most densely populated part of
Ukraine. This is the home turf of Victor Yanukovych, the former
Ukrainian president whose overthrow in February sparked the current
crisis, and it's the likeliest stage for any further Russian land
grabs in Ukraine.
3. New Russia
The area just north of Crimea on the Ukrainian mainland was called
Novorossiya, or "New Russia" after the Kremlin wrested it from Ottoman
control in the 18th century and opened it up for Russian colonization.
It is still heavily Russophone, especially in bigger cities like
Odessa and Dnipropetrovsk, and consistently voted for the Party of
Regions, whose mainstay was Yanukovych and other pro-Moscow
candidates. It could conceivably be persuaded to lean toward Moscow
rather than Kiev. And Russia's first military pinpricks, from Crimea
into New Russia, have already been reported, with Russia occupying a
gas pumping station in the town of Strilkove just north of Crimea in
mid-March.
4. Abkhazia
No more than 25 miles east of Sochi, the jewel in Russia's Olympic
crown, is Abkhazia -- the prettiest of the four "sleeping beauties" in
Russia's near abroad (the other three frozen conflict zones being
Transnistria, South Ossetia, and Nagorno Karabakh.) Like the others,
this too was effectively created by the Red Army, which in 1993 helped
the Abkhaz chase the Georgians from what nominally still is the
western extremity of that country. As with Transnistria and South
Ossetia, Abkhazia's independence is recognized by just a handful of
states. If Crimea fares well as part of Russia, Abkhazia -- which has
signaled approval for Crimea's secession -- might also be tempted to
join.
5. South Ossetia
Another chunk out of Georgia, carved from the northern part of the
country in a short, sharp Russo-Georgian war in August 2008 that saw
Georgia's pro-Western president Mikheil Saakashvili nervously eat his
tie on television -- literally -- as Russian tanks approached the
capital Tblisi. Numbering just 55,000, the South Ossetians constitute
the smallest of Russia's unofficial protectorates. (Fun fact: They are
the descendants of the Alans, an Indo-Iranian tribe that may be the
etymological source for the English name Alan.)
South Ossetia, too, is increasingly turning from Georgia to Russia.
And if Crimea's absorption goes well, Russia might swallow South
Ossetia for dessert.
6. Belarus
What communist apparatchik still hogs the presidency of a post-Soviet
republic, stubbornly choosing imperial nostalgia over ties to the
outside world? Welcome to Belarus, formerly aka White Russia and
Belorussia, ruled since 1994 by Alexander Lukashenko, a mustachioed
Statler to Putin's Waldorf. This Slavic country is such a close
political and cultural match with Russia that in 1999 the two
countries signed a treaty to form a confederation (though it soon lost
steam.) Any new merger would likely be sanctioned by a referendum, but
in a country often dubbed "Europe's last dictatorship," such a
plebiscite would be as questionable as the recent Crimean one.
7. Northern Kazakhstan
Russia remains the world's largest country, but it's down considerably
in size from the days of the Soviet Union. This is mainly due to the
secession of the Central Asian 'Stans, of which Kazakhstan -- with an
area of more than 1 million square miles, clocking in at four times
the size of Texas -- is the largest. In Soviet times, Russians
outnumbered Kazakhs in their own republic. That's no longer the case,
but Russians remain in the majority in northern Kazakhstan, an
enormous zone of dry, flat steppe adjacent to the Russian border. Like
Crimea, this region was part of Russia proper before the Soviets
transferred it. The return of that prodigal region could stir some
emotions on the steppe. After all, this is the location of Russia's
vital Baikonur spaceport; and no less an authority than Alexander
Solzhenitsyn advocated Russia's annexation of these lands.
8. Russians in the Baltic
If and when Putin wants to pick a fight with the European Union, there
is little doubt where the trouble will start -- in the three Baltic
states, the only former republics of the USSR that are now EU members.
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have reinvented themselves as tech-savvy
mini-states, Scandinavian in ambition rather than encumbered by their
Soviet past. But each is home to sizeable Russian minorities, which
are in the majority in some regions and cities, and whose heartfelt
nostalgia and genuine frustration are feared by the Balts and
treasured by the Russians as pent-up reservoirs of political friction.
9. Nagorno Karabakh
Back in 1989, this is where the Soviet Union started to unravel, when
fighting broke out between the ethnic Armenians of this enclave and
the majority Azeri of the republic from which they wanted to secede.
Months of vicious fighting and reciprocal massacres finally led to a
stalemate that continues today, with the phantom state of Artsakh
established by the victorious Armenians, in a region that officially
is still part of Azerbaijan. This untenable situation has been
maintained for a quarter of a century. Could Russia come to the aid of
the encircled Armenians?
10. Brighton Beach, Brooklyn
Putin is only partly right when he says that Russia has a historical
claim on Crimea. Russia's history in the region is only three
centuries old -- before that, the Turks and Tatars ruled the roost.
Perhaps a better formula for the Putin Doctrine is this: Russia has
rights wherever Russians live in significant numbers. Who says that
this policy needs to stop at the borders of the former Soviet Union?
Maybe a few Russian trikolori burning in Brighton Beach is all the
reason Vladimir Vladimirovich needs to send a few gunboats from
freshly conquered Sevastopol to round the tip of Breezy Point...
* * *
Top 10 on the way out
1. Chechnya
The Caucasus is a quilt of cultures, languages, religions, grudges,
and vendettas -- none so deadly as the one between Chechens and
Russians. With the Soviet Union imploding, Chechnya made the mistake
of trying to "do a Kosovo" by declaring its independence from Russia.
The Russians would have none of it, but it took two wars to pummel the
Chechens back into the fold: a ploddingly ineffective one under
Yeltsin in the 1990s, and a viciously effective one under Putin over
the last decade. But despite its pro-Russian leadership, separatism
grows like weed in Chechnya; when Moscow directs its attention
elsewhere for a while, it will blossom again. And perhaps in a more
virulent form: a small, hard core of Wahhabi Chechens has been willing
to use violence to establish an Emirate of the Caucasus, that would
include other restless areas such as Dagestan and Ingushetia.
2. Tatarstan
The Volga is one of the great Russian landscapes, but that river laps
the shores of a decidedly non-Russian entity: Tatarstan, the
northernmost outpost of Islam in the world. Like many nationalities in
the Soviet Union, the Tatars had their own republic, in which they
were purposely made a minority. However, they now constitute just over
half of the republic's 2 million people -- and it continues to grow
more Muslim and Turkic, and less Russian. This has energized Tatar
nationalism beyond the safe zones of social, cultural, and religious
issues, even though separatism would be more than a bit tricky for a
province entirely encircled by Russia.
3. Idel-Ural
The Tatars are numerous enough to contemplate going it alone, but the
other non-Russian ethnicities in the wider area tend to dream of an
independent Idel-Ural (Volga-Ural), the collective name for Tatarstan
and five other tiny republics: Udmurtia, Mordovia, Chuvashia,
Bashkortostan, and Mari-El. Their religions include Islam, Orthodoxy,
and paganism and only some of their languages are mutually
intelligible. But they share one important common trait: They're not
Russian!
4. Kalmykia
Europe's only Buddhist state, this Russian republic of roughly 300,000
people on the western shores of the Caspian Sea is populated by the
descendants of Siberian herders. The Kalmyk's unique ethnic and
religious status within Russia -- and their forced russification,
collectivization, and deportation -- has kept their sense of
"otherness" alive. The capital, Elista, is a well-known venue of
high-profile chess matches, and the Kalmyk president, Kirsan
Ilyumzhinov, the head of FIDE, the International Chess Federation, is
also famous for the tour of the galaxy he claimed he took in 1997 on a
UFO.
Could a resurgent Asian power reach out and loosen Moscow's grip on Chessland?
5. Kaliningrad
The northern part of what used to be East Prussia, Germany's
easternmost province, is now Russia's westernmost district. Few
Germans remain, and the region's nearly half-million people are mostly
Russian. But being surrounded by prosperous EU member states may be
going to their heads. Some Kaliningraders have even taken to calling
their capital by its old name of Königsberg again, more to stress
distance from Moscow than proximity to Berlin. Hence also the Baltic
Republican Party, whose aim was greater autonomy and possibly
independence, which Moscow abolished in 2003, though it has since
re-formed as a "public movement."
6. Karelia
Karelia is the name of a Russian territory bordering a Finnish
territory with the same name, and a shared history. Much of Russian
Karelia (aka East Karelia) was Finnish before the Soviets took it from
them in the Winter War of 1939-40; its inhabitants are now mainly
non-Finnish newcomers. Still, some Finnish groups like ProKarelia are
eager to reclaim the area, which they see as the Finnish heartland.
And the fall of communism has enabled a renaissance of Finnish culture
in the region, in large part fuelled by émigré Karelians, who could be
crucial in steering the region toward a vote to loosen its ties with
Moscow.
7. Komi Republic
The nomadic Komi make up barely a quarter of the million inhabitants
of this Iraq-sized, mineral-rich republic in the northern reaches of
European Russia. But the Russians are newbies: mainly former convicts
and their descendants. If the Komi could persuade them to depart for
sunnier climes, or go native and work toward an independent homeland,
this mass of frozen tundra (which claims to have reserves of 242
billion tons of coal, over 600 million tons of oil and over 140
billion cubic meters of gas) could be the Saudi Arabia of the North.
8. Circassia
Before Sochi was Russian, it was the capital of the Circassians.
Afterward, it became the graveyard of those who couldn't or wouldn't
flee overseas. The expulsion of the Circassians from their homeland in
the northwestern Caucasus is one of the lesser-known tragedies of the
19th century -- at least outside the Muslim world. Their descendants
now live in Turkey, and throughout the Middle East. A nascent
nationalism among these millions demands the restoration of their
ancient homeland.
9. Karachay-Balkaria
A classic example or Soviet Russia's divide-and-rule policy: place the
ethnically-related Balkar and Karachay peoples in "national" republics
with other, less-related ethnicities. The nationalist agenda in the
region reads like a DIY manual: first, divide Kabardino-Balkaria into
a Kabardin and a Balkar republic and Karachay-Cherkessia into a
Karachay and a Cherkess republic. Then, assemble the Balkar and
Karachay parts into a single republic. Still with me? After this,
unite both ethnicities into a single one. And finally, if anyone is
still up for it, get the newly united Turkic republic to unite with
Turkey itself -- just a short ride away across the Caspian Sea.
10. Birobidzhan
Before the Jews had Israel, they had this area of Siberia to call
home, and Joseph Stalin to thank for it. Birobidzhan, east of Mongolia
and bordering China, was to become the Jewish homeland. While that may
not exactly have gone to plan, the republic is still officially
designated the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, and Yiddish is still
co-official language with Russian. There's even still about 6,000 Jews
living there. Perhaps it would be wise for World Zionism to develop
this option, in case something serious happens to Plan A. Another big
plus: it's well outside the range of Iranian missiles.
Bonus round! Siberia
The Big One. Continent-sized. Resource-rich. And it's only lightly
sprinkled with Russians -- yes, it's 40 million, but that's only about
two per square mile. Already busily exploited by the resource-poor and
space-starved Chinese. For now, the Chinese are siphoning off oil and
hauling south lumber strictly under Russian licenses. But geopolitics
abhors a vacuum. And Beijing is much richer and closer by than Moscow.
What's to stop China from playing the Crimea scenario on two thirds of
Russia?
Jacobs an author and journalist who writes about curious cartography
and intriguing borders.
http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2014/03/23/comment-ten-places-would-welcome-putin-land-grab
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress