On March 18, 2013, the Radio Free Europe website published an article on
ethnic tensions in the post-Soviet Caucasus titled "Stalin's Legacy:
Ethnic Time Bombs That Continue To Tick".
"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," the author of the article
Robert Coalson writes.
"If they [the Soviet government] did anything that created ethnic
conflict, they created ethnic conflict by trying to draw the borders
too precisely,” the article quotes Terry Martin, director of the Davis
Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. “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."
"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," Coalson writes."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."
