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Raspad—The Political Crises in Post-Soviet Caucasia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Henry Huttenbach*
Affiliation:
The City College of New York

Extract

A year ago it was still possible to review events within the regional confines of Transcaucasia. The three republics constituted a logical sub-unit of the Soviet Union. Subsequent events, however, no longer permit such a tidy delineation. A revolution is taking place: the Raspad, or Great Collapse, of which the dissolution of the USSR was but the beginning of a major political reshufflement throughout Eurasia, a continuing process that is still playing itself out in the entire Caucasian region. The demise of the trans-continental Soviet empire has left the three Transcaucasian successor states separated by international borders from the Russian Federation, Iran, and Turkey as well as from one another. Nevertheless, the dynamics of ethnic-fueled fragmentation, which initially helped bring down the power of Moscow, continues to gnaw away in defiance of any artificial frontiers, most of which cut through ethnic communities. Revisionist ethnic activities thrive on either sides of frontiers, especially those shared by Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Iran, and the Russian Federation, thereby forcing one to consider the whole of Caucasia as the proper area of evaluation for the crucial year 1991-2. North and south of the mountainous divide, ethnic-driven politics proves all too clearly that the energies of the Raspad are anything but spent.

Type
Part II: Afternoon Session
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by the Association for the Study of the Nationalities of the USSR and Eastern Europe, Inc. 

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References

1 Despite the fact that the Armenians have had greater success in mounting such operations, it should be noted that both sides have been guilty of emptying entire villages.Google Scholar

2 The blockade of fuel and building materials is in retaliation for the unrelenting Armenian attacks in support of the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave.Google Scholar