Russian Diasporas in the "Near Abroad": Implications for International Peace

Abstract

The collapse of the Soviet Union removed the most important threat to international peace—the confrontation of two nucleararmed superpowers—but, in the process, created some new ones. One of the new sources of interstate instability identified by political analysts was the presence of a Russian population, numbering in the millions, who, without having moved, now found themselves living in non-Russian Soviet successor states. Some feared that mistreatment of these groups by the national and nationalist governments of these new states might trigger military Russian responses. Others surmised that, irrespective of how they were being treated, Russia might use these diaspora communities as stalking horses in a bid for regional hegemony and as an excuse for interference in the domestic affairs of neighbor states. In the 1990s, hundreds of articles and dozens of books devoted to the Russian diaspora problem were published. The first full-length book in English was The New Russian Diaspora: Russian Minorities in the Former Soviet Republics, edited by Vladimir Shlapentokh, Munir Sendich, and Emil Payin and published in 1994. It was followed by books by Jeff Chinn and Robert Kaiser, Pal Kolsto, Neil Melvin, and David Laitin. The security implications of the Russian diaspora issue were pointed out in the introduction or the conclusion of all of these books but were not the main focus of any of them. Instead, the authors concentrated on such issues as the historical background—how these Russians had ended up outside the borders of the contemporary Russian state; their plight in the new states; the minority policy of the new governments; human rights violations; language change; and other issues of adaptation and integration. Two of the contributors to this literature, Melvin and Laitin, employed identity formation as their main analytical framework. They discussed the chances that the Russian diasporans would develop an identity of their own, retain or strengthen a traditional xxxxxxxxxxxx 297