1 Introduction
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the region's peoples
have opted for a mode of national development common throughout Eurasia - they
all want to have sovereign states of their own. But the rate of collapse of the
former multinational Soviet state has been truly unprecedented, and this in
itself is one of the reasons for mounting ethnic tensions. Surely no other
country in living memory has been gripped at one and the same time by such deep
economic, political, and also ethnic crisis. Social and ethnic tensions have
been brought to a head by the plummeting living standards of the population. All
this has paved the way, in most former Soviet republics, for the establishment
of authoritarian-nationalist regimes which inflame nationalist passions even
more. Conflicts flaring up as a result further exacerbate the plight of the
people.
Prazauskas has termed the process precipitated by the collapse of
the Soviet Union "division of the colonial legacy": the former colonies (the
former Soviet republics) are dividing among themselves the country's territory
and armed forces, its factories and plants, and other resources. Similar
processes in Africa, Asia, or Latin America have often been accompanied by
territorial and ethno-nationalist conflicts1 the case of the former
Soviet Union, such conflicts have flared up at a galloping pace. The Centre for
Ethnopolitical Studies lists some 20 such conflicts from 1988 to 1991. According
to the USSR Interior Ministry, a total of 782 people were killed and 3,617
wounded in such conflicts in 1991 alone.2 The general toll of dead
and wounded over those four years is estimated at over 10,000. According to the
same statistics, the number of refugees had reached 710,000; a total of 1.0 to
1.2 million people had been forced to abandon their homes in areas of high
inter-ethnic
tension.3
