Alan Kasayev: all the Soviet borders are unfair

The situation in Crimea has revived the discussion on how party decisions about the borders of the Soviet republics influenced the geopolitical situation in post-Soviet space. Alan Kasayev, the Head of the Journalism Department of Moscow State Linguistic University, discussed it with VK.

The expert stressed that from the geostrategic point of view all the Soviet territorial changes, including giving Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, were completely arbitrary, and nobody thought about the possible consequences.

Another example of this was giving the Zangezur and Dereleiz regions to the Armenian republic in 1920. "The decisions of the 1920s led to such consequences that will for years be present among not only the internal, but also international, geopolitical factors."

This was common during Soviet times. "The borders of the Moscow region were changed with the territories of the neighboring regions - Tula, Tver, Ryazan. If we talk about the border changes in the North Caucasus, in 1944 after the deportation parts of the abolished Checheno-Ingush republic became the territory of Dagestan, Stavropol Territory, North Ossetia and Georgia. Without any deportations, in the 1930s and 1940s the territory of the North Ossetian republic was changed, and part of it was given to Georgia. Due to the exchange of territories in the South Caucasus, Nakhichevan became an enclave of Azerbaijan."

"If we try to find a system behind it, we will see that there is no system. Nobody thought that those questions would become problems of international relations. We need to say that the process of the dissolution of the USSR is not yet over," Kasayev said.

That is why there can be no question about whether the Soviet borders were fair or not. "All those borders are unfair. But to reconsider them today is extremely dangerous," the expert warned.