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.