RUSSIA'S TINDERBOX - Belfer Center for Science and International ...

trading posts. 71 A significant portion of the Russian population is also of Cossack ancestry, a fact
which has had an important impact on the region’s territorial disputes.
The repeated redivision of land, changes of administrative borders, and movement of peoples
in the Tsarist period, were continued by the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution (see Section I).
Today, the territorial legacy of both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union has produced a series
of disputes over political jurisdiction that is the primary destabilizing factor in the North Caucasus.
This legacy has been exacerbated by the failure of Russia’s regional policy and the economic decline
of the region since 1991. In the post-Soviet period, territorial disputes in the North Caucasus have
six components:
1. The repeated modification of administrative borders since the 1920s and the division of
individual groups among several administrative units.
2. The deportation of North Caucasian peoples to Central Asia between 1943-1944, and their
subsequent return to the region in 1956-57.
3. The official rehabilitation of these groups by the Russian government in the April 1991 Law
on the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples.
4. The increase in the value of land and its natural resources with the initiation of market
economic reforms: the proposed privatization of state-owned land now seems to threaten
members of one group with loss of livelihood, while promising economic advantage to
members of another.
5. A flood of refugees into the North Caucasus from Transcaucasia and other areas of the
former Soviet Union since 1989, which exerts additional pressure on scarce land and
resources and radicalizes local politics.
6. The failure of Moscow either to follow through with the implementation of laws affecting
the region, or to adopt a comprehensive approach to the political resolution of the disputes.
In the post-Soviet environment where Russian political parties are fluid and transitory and
lack a coherent platform, ethnic affiliation, the historic location of borders, traditional settlement
patterns, graves of ancestors, the Law on the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples, land privatization
and demands for territorial change have become the fabric of local politics. While most territorial
disputes in the region have been limited to the level of protest, demonstration, appeal and
71 Vladikavkaz, Grozny and Makhachkala were all initially established as Russian fortresses before being
transformed into towns after the ‘pacification’ of the Caucasus. The original Russian inhabitants were, therefore,
military officers, soldiers, and government officials and their families. The growth of the civilian population
came in the late 19th century and the early 20th century with the construction of the first railways and the
industrial development of the North Caucasus. Large numbers of ethnic Russians were resettled in the region
from the central provinces of the Russian Empire along with other Orthodox Christian Slavs from the Ukrainian
steppe, displacing the native population in the most fertile areas of the west and northwest.
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