Conflicting Loyalties and the State in Post-Soviet Russia and Eurasia

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Michael Waller, Bruno Coppieters, Alekseĭ Vsevolodovich Malashenko
F. Cass, 1998 - Political Science - 258 pages
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.

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