Tweet
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/
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/