Conflicting Loyalties and the State in Post-Soviet Russia and EurasiaMichael Waller, Bruno Coppieters, Alekseĭ Vsevolodovich Malashenko This book analyses the political impact that ethnic, confessional and regional factors have had in the reconfiguration of the former Soviet space. It contains a number of thematic chapters - on Soviet nationality policy, on Islam in Russia today and on Bolshevik policies towards Islam in the early Soviet period. These synoptic chapters provide a framework in which are set selected case studies. They include the exclave of Kaliningrad, separated now from the rest of Russia by independent states: Ukraine, where regional tensions are losing some of their ethnic edge; the Crimea within Ukraine, a small territory rich in tensions and home to what was the Soviet Black Sea fleet, and home also to a returning population of Tatars expelled in the Stalin years; Tatarstan, engineer of a 'model' of autonomy within the Russian federation; and Tajikistan, where regional tensions with religious overtones and important international implications, led to the eruption of a violent and destructive civil war. The final chapter relates the evolution of these conflicting loyalties to the global weakening of the nation-state, and distinguishes what is particular to the Soviet state and its demise from more significant questions of analytical importance posed by the collapse of a major contemporary multi-national state. |