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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
While the national question in the USSR has received much attention in terms both of the regime's ideological approach to it and the nationalist response to that approach, the issue of the actual minority territories created in the period from the 1920s to the 1940s has attracted little attention in recent times. Disputes over the external frontier aspects of some of these territories have certainly become familiar, as in the case of the Baltic states and Moldavia, but it is less widely appreciated that disputed borders were created, and continue to exist, within the USSR itself. A number of factors may account for this. In the first place, frequent disdain has been shown in Western emigre writings toward the very relevance of the Soviet federal system and its division of the country into units based either on ethnic composition or on administratively convenient populations. So readily have these divisions been bypassed by the Communist Party's own organization, the KGB, the military, the economic planning organs, major industrial enterprises and combines, and, increasingly, the legal apparatus, that it seemed legitimate to accord the system little import. Then again, with the passage of time, it has come to be taken almost for granted that such boundaries as have been established are correctly and irrevocably drawn to delineate the peoples therein. Finally, it has often been assumed, not least by Soviet officialdom itself, that the borders are destined to prove more and more irrelevant in an era of increasing personal mobility, urbanization, industralization, mass communications, and, most especially, of progress toward the goal of full communism. Nevertheless, despite the opportunities afforded by the change of constitution in 1977 to eradicate them, the territorial units remain, along with the problems they create, many now of longstanding.
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