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All of the major post-Soviet ethnic conflicts--those in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, and
Tajikistan--are directly rooted in the political disputes and events of the late Soviet period. Under
Mikhail Gorbachev’s regime, ethnic conflict diffused within the Soviet Union in predictable
patterns. It sometimes erupted in Soviet Republics with strong reform nationalist movements,
where these movements appeared to threaten the future status of ethnic minorities. This was the
pattern in Georgia and Moldova. In Azerbaijan, the pattern was similar but reversed. The reform
nationalist movement initially developed among the Armenian minority, who were supported by
their ethnic brethren in neighboring Armenia. This prompted a nationalist counter-mobilization
among Azerbaijan’s ethnic Azeri majority. The Soviet Center intervened in all of these conflicts
in a failing effort to preserve its rule.
Where ethnic conflict already existed in the late Soviet period, the Soviet collapse
typically led to intensified fighting. The Soviet collapse also created many new states, and thus
opened up many more possibilities for foreign intervention (“escalation”). In particular, Armenia
and Russia intervened in the fighting in and around Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh region, and
Russia intervened in Georgia and Moldova. Beyond the immediate post-Soviet period, new
instances of escalation and novel outbreaks of ethnic conflict (“diffusions”) were rare. The one
case of new diffusion and escalation occurred in Tajikistan. Here the Soviet collapse made it
more difficult for a neo-communist regime to continue to repress a nascent opposition
movement, which was loosely organized around a reform nationalist agenda. The power struggle
between neo-communist insiders and reform nationalist outsiders soon metastasized into a civil
war along regional and ethnic lines. This war elicited intervention from Uzbekistan, Russia, and
various factions in Afghanistan.
Convention