Ethnic Composition and Major Territorial Disputes

Abstract

The post-Soviet era’s interethnic problems and major territorial disputes were very much a product of the USSR’s so-called nationality policies. From 1924 to 1926 the Soviet authorities conducted their nation-state delimitation in the region (see map 37), and over the next six decades they supported the development of all the attributes of the modern nation—national vernacular language and mass literacy, national identity associated with territory and various national symbols. Communist government officials believed that national identity and nationalism would inevitably give way to “socialist internationalism.” In this political philosophy, the borders between the Central Asian Soviet republics played merely symbolic administrative roles, though the external borders were sealed by the “iron curtain” and reinforced by the military might of the Soviet state.KeywordsNational IdentityMass LiteracyTerritorial DisputeExternal BorderSoviet StateThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.