Dr.Snufflebug Mon Sep 11, 2023 6:17 pm
kvs wrote:"Armenian occupied Nagorno-Karabakh" what a loaded propaganda phrase. I guess we had Tutsi occupied portions of Rwanda and Hutu occupied portions of Burundi.
Anyone who labels maps this way is either a retard or malicious. The problem with colonial borders (which most of them are) is that they deny the indigenous ethnic
distribution and create genocidal wars in their wake.
The bloodshed in Ukraine is an example of BS borders and their effect.
Indeed. Soviet border drawing came in a couple of flavors, often a combination:
Overall SSR (and SFSR re Russia) mostly based on geography and history
Ethnical regions receiving distinct borders to keep them a wee bit more content, given limited autonomy etc (this includes subregions, like ASSRs within SSRs).
Practical borders changes (eg made sense from a purely practical POV to hook Crimean ASSR up with UkSSR, due to train lines, power lines and other infrastructure, helped the administrative apparatus, some of the seemingly nonsensical broken jigsaw borders in Central Asia are results of that too.
Suppression of too much ethnic nationalism, Karabakh is a bit like this, this Armenian region being made part of the AzSSR helped "dilute" Azeri majority of the republic.
Abkhazia and South Ossetia were a bit of all too.
The huge problem arose when the "main" SSR borders were made sovereign and all these other considerations immediately ignored. I'd wager it's the main cause of all post-Soviet conflicts, including in UA now. The CIS project to my knowledge was supposed to mitigate this and over time bridge things, but the west stepped in immediately and started stirring stuff up (by for some reason insisting that SSR borders are infallible, the irony is palpable, mind you that was the "evil empire" a decade earlier). Only reason for that was that they knew the trouble it would cause and what a headache it would be for Russia.
Bit disjointed post, will clean it up later.
Last edited by Dr.Snufflebug on Mon Sep 11, 2023 9:35 pm; edited 1 time in total