Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency conference report, numbered RTT 95-10039 and dated October 1995, presents the proceedings of a conference held 30 September to 1 October 1993. The CIA's Geographic Resources Division sponsored the conference. In it, academic geographers, anthropologists and US Government officials examined ethnic conflict by region, covering Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and South Asia. The report also discusses what these conflicts mean for US policy. It does not deal with UFOs or unidentified aerial phenomena.
“Nevers”25 pages
Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268 General Discussion QUESTION: Dr. Wixman, if we accept your analogy that the disintegration of the Soviet Union can be compared with the disintegrations of previous empires, can we also look at the Russian federation now as an empire? Is there a possibility of the Russian federation also disintegrating like the Soviet Union? DR. WIXMAN: For the most part, no. There are very few regions of the Russian federation within which the Russians are not the vast majority. Siberia and the Far East is now—-whatever it was before—extremely Russian in makeup. The Russian Federation is basically Russia. The big- gest threat to Russia today in terms of its intemal terri- torial integrity is not going to come from minorities. If I had to guess where a problem might arise, and I was just there for the sixth time in _l0 years, it is in the Russian Far East. I think that the Russians are going to have more problems dealing with Russian territories that perceive themselves as different and that resent Muscovite rule than from the minorities themselves. There is a strong movement in the Far East for that. DR. KAISER: I agree with parts of what Dr. Wixman has said. As I indicated in my presentation, a sense of national consciousness is something that typically pre- cedes the drive for independence, and it is really absent for the most part in a lot of these smaller non- Russian groups to the east. One region that Dr. Wix- man didn’t mention, which I think is critically impor- tant, is the North Caucasus. It is an area without a large Russian population. Russians are leaving that area too, setting up the conditions through which a ris- ing call for independence may occur. The Chechen republic, first of ‘all, declared its inde- pendence from the Chechen Ingush ASSR and declared its independence from Russia. It is the only one that has actually declared its outright indepen- dence. At the same time, a lot of the North Caucasian peoples have joined together in a confederation. They are still a part of Russia but almost once removed in that sense. ' The other thing we are seeing in Russia is not only the non-Russians asking for or demanding as much inde- pendence or autonomy as they can get but also Rus- sians declaring their independence as republics. So a federation of maybe 88 republics may exist when everything is finished. Russian localism is, in part, a response and a reaction against minority nationalism, particularly among the nationally conscious groups like the Tatars, but it also may reflect a limited level of Russian nationalism itself that would be more centrip- etal in its orientation. QUESTION: Of the 22 republics within the current Russian federation, one has seceded, several others have threatened to secede, and some are developing their own economic policies——in other words, eco- nomically seceding. Is the center giving power to the regions or are the regions taking power from the cen- ter‘? In the latter case, is it really a camouflage confed- eration‘? DR. KAISER: This looks more to me like localism and regionalism than it does territorial nationalism. It is similar to the previous disintegrative process, but it does not appear as though an impetus for outright independence exists to the same degree that it did at the level of the Union republics. I should add a caveat here: not all Union republics were equally secession- ist, and the Central Asian republics were not necessar- ily all that proindependence when this process first began. It was the Baltic states that were pushing this forward, and a kind of diffusion occurred from there. Some of the republics even accepted independence as a fait accompli after August 1991. In short, all the groups do not have to be nationalistic, but the wave of territorial nationalism that is needed to get the ball rolling toward the ultimate point of disin- tegration currently does not appear to exist within the Russian Federation. DR. WIXMAN: The real issue within the Russian state—with the few exceptions of some of the nation- als on the periphery who are really inconsequential to 71 Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 205 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.