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How Stalin Created Russia's Modern Ethnic Conflicts

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  • How Stalin Created Russia's Modern Ethnic Conflicts

    The Atlantic
    March 1 2013


    How Stalin Created Russia's Modern Ethnic Conflicts

    By Robert Coalson
    Mar 1 2013, 2:45 PM ET

    >From bizarre border policies to the forced deportation of ethnic
    groups, Stalin oversaw the policies that gave rise to today's Central
    Asian strife.

    Eighty-one-year-old Nikolai Khasig was born in Sukhumi in 1932. It was
    just one year after Soviet dictator Josef Stalin stripped Abkhazia of
    its short-lived status as a full-fledged republic of the USSR and made
    it a region of Soviet Georgia.

    At the end of 1936, Lavrenty Beria -- at that time the head of the
    Transcaucasia region and later the sadistic head of Stalin's secret
    police -- invited the popular Abkhaz leader Nestor Lakoba to dinner at
    his house in Tbilisi. Lakoba died suddenly -- officially, of a heart
    attack, but it was widely believed that the former revolutionary
    comrade of Stalin's had been poisoned.

    In the repressions that began in 1937, the entire Abkhaz government
    was arrested and subjected to show trials. Soviet archives later
    revealed that Beria had ordered them all executed before the trials
    even began. Collectivization came to Abkhazia with a vengeance. Soviet
    publications began arguing that the Abkhaz were actually of Georgian
    origin in the first place.

    "Such violence, such humiliation, such abuse, such genocide," Khasig
    recalls. "Our people never experienced such things before."

    In a sense, World War II was something of a respite, but the work
    begun in the 1930s continued as soon as the war was over. By that
    time, Khasig was in high school.

    "In 1945, after the end of the war, Abkhaz schools were shut down and
    the policy of forced assimilation was begun," he says. "Our children
    -- we ourselves -- studied in the Georgian language and didn't know a
    single word [of Abkhaz]. We were simply cut off."

    When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, all this old resentment and
    more surged to the surface.

    In 1992, war broke out in Abkhazia -- with Abkhaz separatists joined
    in their struggle by representatives of other aggrieved Caucasus
    nations such as Chechens, Circassians, Ossetians, and Cossacks.

    The Abkhaz were also actively supported by the Russian military. An
    estimated 8,000 people were killed and as many as 240,000 ethnic
    Georgians were displaced.

    After the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia, Abkhazia's de facto
    independence was recognized by Russia and a handful of other
    countries. Georgia and most of the international community says the
    region is occupied by Russia. Khasig, despairingly, describes Abkhazia
    as "a Russian colony."

    Bizarre Border Policies, Wholesale Deportations

    The guns of war flared elsewhere as well in the former Soviet Union in
    the early 1990s. And these similar ethnic conflicts, many of which
    were exacerbated by Soviet polices six decades earlier, have come to
    be called "Stalin's time bombs."

    Such conflicts, spanning from Central Europe to the intricate
    patchwork of exclaves that comprises the borders of Central Asia, are
    in many ways direct legacies of the shifting nationalities policies
    that were often brutally implemented during the nearly 30 years that
    Stalin towered over the Soviet Union.

    These disputed places include the disputed ethnic-Armenian region of
    Azerbaijan called Nagorno-Karabakh, Russia's North Caucasus republic
    of Chechnya, its neighboring republics, and the breakaway Moldovan
    region of Transdniester.

    >From bizarre border policies and the wholesale deportation of ethnic
    groups to the mass importation of ethnic Russians to various regions,
    Stalin's policies created or aggravated conflicts that remain central
    to understanding Eurasia today.

    Under Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin -- and later in the early years of
    Stalin's rule -- the Soviet government argued that nationalism was the
    bane of the imperial system. They tried to develop policies that would
    transform the multinational Eurasian space into a unified Soviet,
    socialist state.

    "It was only by transforming the economic and social bases -- and the
    cultural basis, because [Stalin] paid a lot of attention to that -- of
    the nationalities that they would become fully integrated into a
    single socialist state," says Stephen Blank, a professor of national
    security studies at the U.S. Army War College and the author of a book
    on Stalin's time as Soviet nationalities commissar. "And the
    overwhelming thrust of his policies [was] to create that centralized,
    socialist system and that, he believed, would answer the nationalities
    problem."

    Terry Martin, director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian
    Studies at Harvard University and coauthor of "A State Of Nations:
    Empire And Nation-Building In The Age Of Lenin And Stalin," agrees,
    but adds that the Soviets created problems from the beginning by
    trying to draw borders too precisely along ethnic lines in places
    where ethnic identities were still evolving.

    "If they did anything that created ethnic conflict, they created
    ethnic conflict by trying to draw the borders too precisely," he says.
    "That is, they created a lot of ethnic mobilization around borders in
    the 1920s as people lobbied to get one border and lobbied various
    people to identify with their nationality and not with another in
    areas where nationality was very fluid, like Central Asia. Most of the
    modern nationalities that we have [today] hadn't even been formed
    yet."

    According to Martin, as the Stalin era wore on and the Soviet Union
    embarked on a phase of intense, centralized economic modernization,
    the nationalities policy shifted.

    "In the mid-1930s you start to get the notion of Russians as being the
    first among equals," he says. "And you get this kind of formalized
    under the slogan of the 'friendship of the peoples.' So, at this
    point, there is a friendship in which Russians are the big brother or
    the dominant player."

    Less Bloody Than Previous Collapses

    Historians are still arguing about many of the fateful decisions of
    the Stalin era. Consider Nagorno-Karabakh, the ethnic-Armenian region
    nestled in the heart of Azerbaijan. Paul Goble, who served as an
    adviser on Soviet nationalities to U.S. Secretary of State James
    Baker, says the region was given to Azerbaijan as a way of cementing
    Moscow's role as arbiter between Baku and Yerevan.

    Martin believes the decision to give the territory to the Turkic
    Azerbaijanis was made in part to mollify neighboring Turkey at a time
    of Soviet geopolitical vulnerability.

    And Russian ethnographer Anatoly Yamskov has argued the decision was
    made so that shepherds could move between highland and lowland grazing
    grounds without crossing a republican border.

    Whatever the logic of its origins, Karabakh continues to be an
    intermittent flashpoint in the Caucasus and has defined relations
    between the South Caucasus countries (and their relations with Russia)
    since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

    Likewise, conflicts in the Georgian regions of Abkhazia, South
    Ossetia, and Ajara have crippled Georgia's post-Soviet development.
    The same is true of Moldova's Transdniester region and Russia's
    restive North Caucasus.

    The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has spent a
    great deal of time and effort at resolving the conflicts since its
    establishment as a permanent organization in 1994.

    Although the conflicts stemming from Stalin's time bombs have left
    tens of thousands dead and hundreds of thousands displaced and have
    drained the political and economic resources of many post-Soviet
    countries, Martin points out that the collapse of the Soviet Union, so
    far at least, has been less bloody and less violent than the collapse
    of many other empires.

    "If you compare it to the collapse of the British Empire in India,
    again, the question is why were things so calm?" he asks. "If -- as I
    did once for a conference -- you compare the collapse of the Russian
    Empire in Kazakhstan to the collapse of the Soviet Union in
    Kazakhstan, the question again was why did things go so calmly in
    Kazakhstan."

    Such arguments are little comfort to people like Ludmila Cusariov.

    In 1992, she was a teacher in the village of Cocieri. Although living
    on the eastern bank of the Dniester River, Cocieri's inhabitants
    fought against the separatist forces of Transdniester. Cusariov's
    husband and uncle were killed in the fighting.

    "My mother was also injured during this conflict," she says. "They
    bombed us and shot at us from two directions -- from the villages of
    Dubasari and Roghi. When the firing stopped from one direction, it
    started from the other."

    http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/03/how-stalin-created-russias-modern-ethnic-conflicts/273649/

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