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

• a strategic international border zone separating the region from a number of new and
unstable states and major powers with their own ethno-political conflicts, historic
interests in the area, and North Caucasian diasporas;
• a refugee crisis of catastrophic proportions that foments additional strife in areas
where the refugees are temporarily housed.
The North Caucasus is a tinderbox where a conflict in one republic has the potential to spark
a regional conflagration that will spread beyond its borders into the rest of the Russian Federation,
and will invite the involvement of Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Iran and their North Caucasian
diasporas. As the war in Chechnya demonstrates, conflict in the region is not easily contained.
Chechen fighters cut their teeth in the war between Georgia and Abkhazia, the Chechen and North
Caucasian diaspora in Turkey is heavily involved in fund-raising and procuring weapons, and the
fighting has spilled into republics and territories adjacent to Chechnya.
The thesis of this report is that the conflicts in the North Caucasus, including Chechnya, are,
in the first place, directly attributable to the structural legacy of the USSR. In spite of the dissolution
of the USSR, its successor states, including the Russian Federation, have retained the old ethnicallybased
Soviet administrative structures. These structures have created the basic conditions for ethnopolitical
conflict across the whole of the former Soviet Union, and especially in the North Caucasus
where individual ethnic groups have been divided by administrative borders and new international
frontiers.
One of the most important consequences of the structural legacy of the USSR is a lack of
experienced national and regional leaders capable of guiding the successor states and their
administrative units through the minefield of post-Soviet reform. Where the old Soviet leadership
was rapidly overthrown in the late 1980s and early 1990s in new states such as Azerbaijan, Georgia,
Moldova, the Baltic states, and in republics such as Chechnya, the transition has been a rocky one
and conflicts have erupted both internally and externally. Where the old leadership has been
retained in a “national” guise in new states such as Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and in
republics such as Tatarstan and Dagestan, a modicum of stability has been maintained, although
reform has been both slow and difficult.
The general crisis of leadership has been compounded by the failure of the post-Soviet
governments to develop and implement coherent policies to tackle the problems created by the
USSR’s structural legacy. As the largest, most ethnically diverse of the Soviet successor states, the
Russian Federation has been particularly challenged by this legacy. Its government, however, has
consistently failed to rise to the challenge. And, in the North Caucasus, its failure has had drastic
consequences.
In the North Caucasus, the three related problems of the administrative structures inherited
from the USSR, poor leadership, and inadequate central policies have been exacerbated by a number
of other factors specific to the region:
• The extreme ethnic diversity, high population density, and severe economic decline
mentioned earlier in the introduction.
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