Turkic and Islamic Dimensions of Russian-American Relations

Abstract

The dramatic dissolution of the Soviet Union on 25 December 1991 transformed the geopolitics of the Eurasian land mass. In Transcaucasia and Central Asia, it ended Russian imperial rule over most of the Islamic peoples whom Moscow had conquered over a period of more than 400 years. The six Muslim entities that emerged to independence – Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan – had been created by Stalin in the 1920s and 1930s as tactical nation-states in order to strengthen the administration of a polyglot imperial system; to give form (but not substance) to the Bolshevik espousal of the principle of national self-determination; and to enable Moscow to pursue a policy of divide and rule by separating ethnolinguistic groups across two or more union-republics.