Soviet balance sheet

["Rosser Jr, John Barkley" <rosserjb@xxxxxxx>]

     I am not going to get into the very complicated
question of Stalin's encouragement of folk cultures
(sometimes yes, sometimes no), oppression of ethnic
minorities (sometimes yes, sometimes no), or the CIA's role
in various nationalist uprisings in the USSR/FSU (sometimes
yes, sometimes no).  But I shall further complicate the
counterfactual.
     Another issue hiding in the "what was the
alternative?" is that of whether the tsarist Russian Empire
would have survived or not, as it did, more or less in a
different form for another 80 years.  After all, among the
outcomes of WW I were the dismembering of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire and much of the Ottoman Empire
(which had been disintegrating for some time already).  In
the former, there were relatively peaceful relations among
the successor states except during WW II, although there
were (and still are) some serious tensions between some of
them.  Many of those tensions and conflicts were there
before and would have continued even if the empire had not
broken up.  There has been much more conflict in the
successor states of the Ottoman Empire (Israel, Palestine,
Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Bosnia, just to name a few), although
it is unclear what would have happened if it had survived.
After all, there is conflict within Turkey, the main
Ottoman successor state over the Kurds, just as there has
been in Russia, the USSR successor state over Chechnya.
There have been conflicts between successor states in the
FSU, but then some of those started before the breakup,
e.g. the Armenian-Azerbaijani war over Nagorno-Karabakh.
     It may be that the most significant implication of a
Russian Empire breakup, post-WW I, aside from the nature of
the successor states and their actions, would have been if
it had made it harder to defeat Hitler.  But then perhaps
Hitler would not have come to power, or there would have
been less motivation by Baltics and Ukrainians to be
pro-Hitler out of anti-Russian sentiment.  Again, very hard
to call all this.
Barkley Rosser

--
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
rosserjb@xxxxxxx