Vestnik Kavkaza held the first round-table in a series of expert meetings ahead of the 20th anniversary of the tragic events in Khojaly. It was devoted to "The tragic events of our common post-Soviet history". The moderator of the discussion was the editor-in-chief of VK, Alexei Vlasov.
According to him, the twenty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union unfortunately have not brought a deep historical understanding of the events which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Not only the South Caucasus, which is at the center of attention of our agency, but also Central Asia, Transnistria and many other hot zones have led to the deaths of many peaceful citizens and to mass forced migrations. The unsettled conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh, Ossetia, South Abkhazia and Transnistria are still a great problem.
Since the Soviet times events in Southern Kyrgyzstan, the Osh riots, by chance in the same location, between the same communities, Uzbeks and Kyrgyz and with the same victim rate, burned houses and material damage. Why did people who lived peacefully together not only in Soviet times and if we talk about the Russian empire for centuries under the same sky, shared their homes and food, were friends and created families, come to be on different sides of the barricades? Who is to blame? Perhaps the question of individual responsibility is not as important here as how the mechanism of self-destruction was launched at state level. If we do not recall the tragic events of Osh, Khojaly and Transnistria, which are still sources of tension on post-Soviet territory, sooner or later new conflicts will emerge, as well as new victims. People forgetting their own history or trying to bury it in oblivion find themselves helpless in the face of new threats and challenges, which are largely rooted in our common historical past.
The tragic events of Khojaly happened in February 1992. These events to the present day have not been properly studied by political scientists, historians and experts professionally dealing with the problems of post-Soviet history without anger and bias. The problem lies in the fact that we often substitute a scholarly approach with clichés and political agitprop. Why is this history outside of our scope of interest, not in the awareness of eyewitnesses to these events and more so of the generation which was already born after the collapse of the Soviet Union? Perhaps it is because we have not entirely fulfilled our duty to present a straightforward and honest picture of the past pages of our common history.
Leonid Gusev, expert, MSUFA reminded that in the late 1980s and the early 1990s the Soviet Union was in many regions overwhelmed by these awful bloody events in Baku, Khojaly, Sumgait, Nagorno-Karabakh. There is also a terrible bloody war in Tajikistan, which caused deaths according to different calculations of 200 or even 300 thousand people. This was largely caused by the aspirations of local elites coming to power in the new, already independent states to accumulate everything at once, despite the interests of others. In Moldova the leaders of the Moldovan Popular Front, which was most interestingly formed from ex-party officials, declared the dominance of the Moldovan language and culture, while Russians, Ukrainians and other nationalities were to be suppressed. If we look at Tajikistan, there are only Tajiks, but they all represent different regions and clans and some of them tried to dominate the others, and it caused a civil war. The representatives of Islamist forces intervened, of the Wahhabite ideology.
People born at the beginning of the 1990s do not know anything about these events. The history of our post-Soviet space is formulated badly. There are only a few books and course materials, but they are not enough.
These glowing conflicts still remain. Many of them were frozen, but they have not been entirely resolved. Thus, experts and professors are responsible for trying to contribute to their resolution. Certainly, this is very difficult, especially when these conflicts are ethnic-based. If you are not careful, say a wrong word, people can explode and go crush other people, since this is human nature.
