<div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_signature"><h1 class="event-det-title">The Post-Soviet Wars: Part II</h1>
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<a href="https://www.fpri.org/contributor/robert-hamilton/">Col. Robert E. Hamilton</a></div>
<p class="eventlist-date gmail-pf-date">December 19, 2017</p>
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<div class="gmail-desc">U.S. Army Colonel Robert E. Hamilton is a Black Sea Fellow at FPRI.<a href="https://www.fpri.org/contributor/robert-hamilton/">Read More</a></div>
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<h1>Related article(s)</h1>
<p><a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/12/post-soviet-wars-part-i/">The Post-Soviet Wars: Part I</a></p>
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<h1>Related Event</h1>
<p><a href="https://www.fpri.org/conference/what-is-eurasia-and-why-does-it-matter/">What is Eurasia? And Why Does it Matter?</a></p>
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<figure id="gmail-attachment_21865" style="max-width:575px" class="gmail-wp-caption gmail-aligncenter"><img class="gmail-wp-image-21865" src="https://www.fpri.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Russo-Georgian_war_-_Sunken_ship_in_Poti_Georgia_01-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="575" height="383"><figcaption class="gmail-wp-caption-text">(Source: gavinsblog/Flickr)</figcaption></figure>
<p><em>This essay is based on a presentation at the Butcher History Institute for Teachers on </em><a href="https://www.fpri.org/conference/what-is-eurasia-and-why-does-it-matter/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><em style="font-weight:inherit">What is Eurasia? And Why Does it Matter?</em></a><em>,
October 21-22, 2017, sponsored by the Foreign Policy Research
Institute, the Slavic Studies Department at the University of
Pennsylvania, and Carthage College.</em></p>
<p><a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/12/post-soviet-wars-part-i/">The previous article, The Post-Soviet Wars: Part I</a>,
advanced a causal explanation for the post-Soviet wars, the wars that
broke out in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, and
Ukraine during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. To summarize,
this explanation argued that the legacies of Soviet ethno-federal
policies left some post-Soviet states with <em>institutionalized identity divisions. </em>Where
these existed, the collapse of the Soviet Union caused mobilization
around these identities and escalation of conflict between identity
groups. Escalating conflict invited <em>international intervention</em>, with the type of intervention depending on the <em>geopolitical affiliation </em>of
the target state. States seen by Russia and the West as “Western” were
targeted for intervention focused on the de-escalation of conflict, led
most often by Western states and international institutions. States seen
as “non-Western,” on the other hand, were targeted for military
intervention by Russia, with Western states and international
institutions paying scarce attention to the conflicts.</p>
<p>The previous paper examined four cases to test this causal
explanation. Two of these—Georgia-Abkhazia and
Moldova-Transnistria—escalated to violent separatist conflict. The other
two—Georgia-Ajaria and Estonia and its Russian minority—were resolved
peacefully. To illustrate how the process unfolded in these four cases, I
will use two historical vignettes. The first will compare the processes
of identity construction in Abkhazia and Ajaria during the period of
Soviet rule in Georgia, and the second will compare the geopolitical
affiliation of post-Soviet Moldova and Estonia, showing how this
affiliation influenced intervention decisions by external actors. This
paper will then conclude by detailing my research findings and examining
the conclusions that can be drawn from them.</p>
<h3><strong>Identity Construction in Abkhazia and Ajaria</strong></h3>
<p>Both Abkhazia and Ajaria had identities distinct from Georgians and
restless—sometimes violent—histories with Georgians prior to the Soviet
period. Abkhazia’s distinct identity was based upon an ethno-linguistic
difference from Georgians and a history of sometimes being united with
Georgia and sometimes separate. Ajaria’s difference from Georgia was
grounded in a religious distinction—the majority of Ajarians were
Muslims while Georgians are Christian—that was itself part of a 300-year
legacy as part of the Ottoman Empire. While Soviet policies served to
strengthen the pre-existing identity division between Abkhazians and
Georgians, those same policies erased the identity division between
Ajarians and Georgians. The policies I will use to trace the process of
identity construction in Soviet Abkhazia and Ajaria are language
policies, ethnic/national classification policies, and educational
policies.</p>
<p>Soviet language policies in Abkhazia privileged the status and use of
the Abkhazian and Russian languages over Georgian. As part of the
process of <em>korenizatsiia </em>(“indigenization”), Soviet officials
classified Abkhazia as a “backward” nation, entitling it to special
promotion of the Abkhazian language, among other things. So over the
course of the Soviet period—aside from a period of “Georgianization”
under Stalin in the 1930-40s—the language of instruction in Abkhazian
was Abkhazian or Russian, despite the fact that Abkhazia was part of the
Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR). The effect of these policies
was that by the final Soviet census in Abkhazia in 1989, 97.3% of ethnic
Abkhazians living there listed Abkhazian as their native language.<a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/12/post-soviet-wars-part-ii/#_edn1" name="_ednref1">[1]</a>
In Ajaria, by contrast, Soviet language policies represented a
comprehensive and sustained effort to increase literacy in Georgian and
eliminate the regional peculiarities of the Ajarian dialect, which
contained a large number of Turkish loan words. Prior to the Soviet
period, literacy in Ajaria had been primarily in Turkish or Arabic; by
the time of the Soviet collapse, literacy in standard Georgian was
essentially universal in Ajaria. This change explains Christoph
Zuercher’s assertion that the assimilation of Ajarians was perhaps the
greatest success of the Soviet Georgian national project.<a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/12/post-soviet-wars-part-ii/#_edn2" name="_ednref2">[2]</a></p>
<p>Ethnic classification policies also contributed to strengthening the
identity division between Georgians and Abkhazians. Over the more than
seven decades of Soviet rule in Georgia, Abkhazians remained on the
official list of Soviet nationalities, despite the fact that the Soviet
government eliminated almost one hundred other national categories, at
least in part in an attempt to demonstrate the “drawing together and
merging of peoples” predicted by Marxist ideology. For example, while
there were 188 national categories listed on the first all-union Soviet
census in 1926, by 1939 that number had been reduced to 92. Among the
national categories eliminated in this period was that of the Ajarians.
In the 1926 census, a slight majority of residents of Ajaria had
classified themselves as Ajarians,<a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/12/post-soviet-wars-part-ii/#_edn3" name="_ednref3">[3]</a>
but this category had disappeared by the 1939 census. The effects of
the disappearance of the Ajarian national category and the relentless
Georgianization campaign in Ajaria can be seen in the final Soviet
census in 1989, when 86% of Ajaria’s population self-identified as
Georgians. As Christoph Zuercher says, the disappearance of the Ajarians
has a simple explanation: “unlike other Caucasian ethnic groups, they
had not been deported but instead had fallen victim to the Soviet
criteria for classifying ethnic groups. Language was regarded as an
indicator of ethnicity, whereas religions were not. Hence, the Muslim
Ajarians, speaking a version of Georgian, were not qualified as a
distinct ethnic group.”<a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/12/post-soviet-wars-part-ii/#_edn4" name="_ednref4">[4]</a></p>
<p>Soviet education policies also contributed to strengthening the
identity division between Georgians and Abkhazians while virtually
eliminating it between Ajarians and Georgians. As discussed previously,
for a large majority of the period of Soviet rule, the language of
instruction in Abkhazia’s schools was Abkhazian through the fourth grade
and Russian thereafter. Furthermore, in 1978—in response to protests in
Abkhazia—Soviet authorities decreed the establishment of an Abkhazian
State University. As in many other Soviet universities, the humanities
departments in the Abkhazian State University housed what Anatol Lieven
has called “crypto-nationalists,”<a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/12/post-soviet-wars-part-ii/#_edn5" name="_ednref5">[5]</a>
scholars who used their academic positions to advance strong—though
often encoded in Marxist language—nationalist research agendas. So in
Abkhazia the education system—from the primary schools through the
university—promoted an identity and history that emphasized the
distinctiveness of the region and its people from the rest of the
Georgian SSR. In Ajaria, the process was exactly the opposite. Soviet
authorities closed all religious schools, which had been a source of the
distinct identity of Ajarians. They also ensured the language of
instruction in primary and secondary schools was Georgian, and they
declined to allow the establishment of a separate university in Ajaria.
The history taught in Ajaria’s schools emphasized the common roots of
Ajarians and Georgians and depicted the 300-year period of Ottoman rule
in Ajaria as an historical aberration, against which Ajarians had
valiantly and consistently resisted.</p>
<p>So the period of Soviet rule in Georgia strengthened a pre-existing
identity division between Georgians and Abkhazians, while essentially
eliminating a pre-existing identity division between Georgians and
Ajarians. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the outcome in these two
regions, both of which had been Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics
inside the Georgian SSR, was profoundly different. In Abkhazia, there
was mobilization around the distinct Abkhazian identity and escalation
of conflict between Abkhazians and Georgians. This conflict erupted into
war in August 1992, and the war ended 13 months later with the defeat
of the Georgian Army to a coalition of Abkhazian forces and militia
groups from the Russian North Caucasus, supported by the Russian armed
forces. As this was happening, Ajaria remained stable. Although there
were political disputes between the central government in Tbilisi and
the regional government in Batumi, these disputes remained confined to
the relevant political institutions, and did not escalate into
large-scale violence.</p>
<h3><strong>Geopolitical Affiliation and External Intervention in Moldova and Estonia</strong></h3>
<p>As noted previously, the causal framework I advance to explain
post-Soviet conflict argues that where there are institutionalized
identity divisions, the onset of sudden political transition can cause
mobilization around identity groups and the escalation of conflict
between them. This escalating conflict draws the attention of external
actors and causes them to decide whether and how to intervene. In the
former Soviet Union, the factor that shaped that decision was the
geopolitical affiliation of the target state. States considered
“Western” by Russia and the West—such as Estonia—were targeted for
conflict mitigation efforts by Western states and international
institutions. States considered “non-Western”—such as Moldova—were often
targeted for military intervention by Russia. This section of the paper
examines the geopolitical affiliation of these two states and shows how
this factor shaped intervention decisions.</p>
<p>Post-Soviet Moldova was seen in the West as “too small, too quiet and
too obscure” to be worth significant attention, despite the fact that
it sits squarely in Europe geographically. In Moscow, on the other hand,
Moldova is seen as a country where “Russian influence ought to be
unchallenged.”<a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/12/post-soviet-wars-part-ii/#_edn6" name="_ednref6">[6]</a>
Although not important in a geostrategic sense, the Transnistrian
region of Moldova served as “a custodian of Soviet values and of Russian
great-power interests.”<a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/12/post-soviet-wars-part-ii/#_edn7" name="_ednref7">[7]</a>
In a reflection of these observations, the West was in no hurry to
recognize Moldova or admit it to international institutions after the
collapse of the Soviet Union. Moldova declared independence—as did
several other Soviet republics—after the collapse of the coup attempt
against Gorbachev in August 1991. Although the Moldovan declaration of
independence came on September 27, 1991, Western states did not
recognize independent Moldova until the formal end of the Soviet Union
on December 25, 1991. While it seems natural for the West not to
recognize the independence of individual Soviet republics while the
Soviet Union still formally existed, Western states did not follow this
pattern with the Baltic Soviet republics, including Estonia. Western
states recognized Estonia’s independence immediately after the collapse
of the coup attempt in August, and the U.S. Embassy in Tallinn opened in
September of that year, three months before the formal end of the
Soviet Union. Estonia was also admitted as a member of the Conference on
Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE, now OSCE) in September, while
Moldova was not admitted until the end of January 1992.</p>
<p>This difference in how external states viewed Moldova and Estonia
provides the best explanation for how they responded to the escalating
tensions in each state. In Moldova, escalating tension between the
primarily Moldovan-speaking Bessarabian part of the country and
Transnistria, where Russian and Ukrainian were the most common
languages, escalated into armed conflict in March 1992. The intervention
of the Russian 14<sup>th</sup> Army in support of Transnistrian
separatists settled the conflict in their favor by July of that year. As
Russia intervened, the West stood by. As the <em>Washington Post</em>
observed at the time, “State Department officials conceded there is
little the United States can do at this stage other than counsel
patience and caution. Western European nations have not been extensively
involved, and the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe,
which has set down rules for avoiding ethnic fighting, has yet to take a
strong stand on the Moldovan situation.”<a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/12/post-soviet-wars-part-ii/#_edn8" name="_ednref8">[8]</a>
This is despite the fact that Moldova had called for CSCE intervention
in the conflict from early on, hoping that international presence would
prevent the conflict from escalating and thereby remove any pretext for
Russian military intervention. As William Hill puts it, “the Moldovan
authorities in Chisinau appealed for support and assistance to the
United Nations, the OSCE, and a variety of European and North American
states. The only response came from Russia.”<a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/12/post-soviet-wars-part-ii/#_edn9" name="_ednref9">[9]</a></p>
<p>Estonia’s experience was fundamentally different. Despite the fact
that Estonia was strategically important to Russia, since it has
extensive Baltic coastline and hosted Soviet naval bases, radar stations
and air defense sites, Russia exercised considerable restraint there.
The West, on the other hand, involved itself very early in an attempt to
prevent escalation of tensions between the Estonian government and the
country’s Russian minority, most of whom were concentrated in the
northeast, along the border with Russia. The peak of the crisis in
Estonia was the sovereignty referendum held in the east in July 1993. As
the date of the referendum approached, foreign press converged on the
regional capital of Narva, “positioning themselves to catch the early
battles in what was perhaps to be the next Transdniester.”<a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/12/post-soviet-wars-part-ii/#_edn10" name="_ednref10">[10]</a>
When voters in the east voted overwhelmingly for sovereignty and the
Estonian government declared the results invalid, expectation for
violence rose further. But in the end, the crisis abated with no large
scale violence, despite the fact that Russian troops were still
stationed in Estonia and could easily have fomented such violence had
they chosen to do so. A year after the referendum, despite serious
misgivings about how the Estonian government was treating its ethnic
Russian population, Russia withdrew its troops on schedule.</p>
<p>Whereas Russia restrained itself in Estonia, the West was active from
early on, attempting to prevent escalation to large-scale violence. The
CSCE deployed a conflict prevention mission to Estonia in February
1993. Although the Estonian government initially resisted the deployment
of this mission out of concern with being put “on the level of Bosnia”
and other troubled European states, it eventually accepted the mission,
which proved to be helpful in preventing conflict because it gave the
Russian population “a trusted agent to go to for arbitrage.”<a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/12/post-soviet-wars-part-ii/#_edn11" name="_ednref11">[11]</a>
International institutions also used their leverage to force Estonia to
change how it dealt with its Russian minority, and these changes almost
certainly served to prevent escalation of conflict by reassuring
Moscow. The Council of Europe, for example, recommended changes to
Estonia’s Law on Aliens—the most threatening of the new laws to the
rights of the Russian minority—and Estonian President Lennart Meri
insisted that parliament makes those changes before he signed the bill.
Another important Estonian law, the one that allows non-citizens to vote
in local elections, was also the result of strong pressure from
international institutions. Indrek Tarand, the Estonian government’s
representative in northeastern Estonia at the time, recalls that the
Estonian government was against the idea because of a fear that it would
cause Tallinn to lose control in the cities of the northeast and result
in ethnic enclaves inside Estonia. In the end, Tarand says the
government decided to accept the idea because it concluded that
“otherwise we will be outcasts in the international arena and we can
stop dreaming about the EU and things like that.”<a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/12/post-soviet-wars-part-ii/#_edn12" name="_ednref12">[12]</a></p>
<p>So the experiences of Moldova and Estonia are fundamentally
different. Although both experienced mobilization around identity
divisions and escalation of conflict, in Moldova that conflict was
enabled and its outcome was eventually dictated by Russian military
intervention. In Estonia, the escalation of conflict was dampened by
early and active involvement of Western states and international
institutions, and the exercise of considerable restraint by Russia
ensured a peaceful resolution to the situation. In almost all other
respects, Moldova and Estonia were similar cases points to the
geopolitical affiliation of each as the variable predicting the outcome.</p>
<h3><strong>Findings and Conclusions</strong></h3>
<p>The vignettes above serve to illustrate the causal process at work in
the four cases discussed here. The following table provides another way
of illustrating this process and the observed outcomes in each case:</p>
<p><img class="gmail-aligncenter gmail-wp-image-21863 gmail-size-full" src="https://www.fpri.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/hamlton-table-2.png" alt="" width="1240" height="510"></p>
<p>A review of the findings in the table reveals that the variables of
institutionalized identity divisions, political transition, and
non-Western geopolitical affiliation are individually necessary but
jointly sufficient for the onset and escalation of violent separatism.
The cases of Abkhazia and Transnistria follow this pattern. The Ajarian
case shows that where institutionalized identity divisions are lacking,
rapid political transition and non-Western geopolitical affiliation are
not sufficient to cause the escalation of conflict. The Estonian case
provides interesting insights, as it does not exactly follow the
trajectory predicted by the model, in that the Soviet collapse did not
cause the expected level of mobilization around identity divisions and
escalation of conflict between the Estonian government and Estonia’s
Russian minority.</p>
<p>The reason for this is that the Soviet Union allowed an Estonian
nationalist movement to develop inside the Estonian Communist Party,
something it strictly forbade in Georgia or Moldova. The development of a
moderate nationalist wing within the Estonian Communist Party gave the
Party legitimacy and allowed the moderately nationalist Estonian Popular
Front to emerge from within the Party, thereby confining more radical
nationalists to non-governmental organizations. So in Estonia, the
legitimacy conferred upon the moderate nationalists within the Party
allowed them to fare well in Estonia’s first post-Soviet elections. In
Georgia and Moldova, by contrast, radical nationalists captured the
governments, putting the minorities in those countries in conflict with
their governments. In Estonia, the government was better positioned to
mediate between minorities and radical nationalist groups. Another
reason for the lower-than-expected mobilization and escalation in
Estonia is its geopolitical affiliation, which had a chilling effect on
mobilization of Russian minority, since it expected no intervention from
Russia.</p>
<p>We can draw a number of conclusions from researching these four
cases. First, states sometimes construct and institutionalize identities
among the people they govern. While the construction and
institutionalization of identities may serve the state’s interests in
the short term, these identities can become bases for mobilization and
escalation of conflict if the state loses its capacity to regulate
interaction among identity groups. Next, although identities are
constructed and not primordial or perennial, they do matter to the
people who hold them, and this includes leaders who mobilize people
along lines of identity. So, instead of viewing “ethnic entrepreneurs”
as cynical opportunists motivated purely by the pursuit of power or
wealth, we need to take a more nuanced view of their motivations. This
view should consider the possibility that leaders of groups in conflict
may in fact be deeply committed to the identity or ideology they
espouse, and may therefore not be amenable to being “bought off” by the
promise of wealth or power.</p>
<p>Turning to Soviet policies, the cases examined here undermine the
claim—often put forward by the leaders of the non-Russian post-Soviet
states—that Soviet ethno-federal policy amounted to a policy of “divide
and rule.” The accusation here is that the Soviet leaders intentionally
embedded “time bombs” inside the non-Russian republics of the Soviet
Union, in the form of ethnically defined autonomous regions, so that if
these republics tried to secede, they would in turn be confronted with
their own secessionist movements. While there was certainly an element
of divide and rule inherent in Soviet ethno-federal policies, they in
fact represented a sincere, if misguided, attempt to conform to Marxist
ideological prescriptions for ruling over a multi-ethnic state. The idea
that ethnic and national identities were but a stage in the development
of human consciousness and that the progression through this stage
could be sped up by state intervention was more important than power
political considerations in the design of the Soviet ethno-federal
system. There are two examples that bear out this assertion. First, as
the case of Ajaria shows, Soviet polices did not only divide people, but
also served to reunite peoples that had been divided for centuries.
Second, the assertion that Soviet leaders were motivated by Russian
chauvinism and therefore inserted ethnically defined autonomous regions
into the non-Russian republics is belied by the fact that 16 of the 20
autonomous republics in the USSR were inside the Russian republic, and
only four were in other republics.</p>
<p>The next lesson we can draw is that we often overuse the label
“ethnic conflict’ to describe internal wars, when in fact ethnicity is
not at the heart of many of them. The Transnistria conflict is an
example here. Although it has been labelled an “ethnic conflict” between
Moldovans on one side and Russians and Ukrainians on the other, in fact
members of all three ethnic groups fought on both sides, the conflict
was not characterized by ethnic cleansing, and the ethnic groups
involved remained relatively dispersed after the war, rather than
concentrating themselves into defensible ethnic enclaves. The conflict
in Transnistria was more about different interpretations of Moldova’s
history and different visions of its future geopolitical affiliation
than it was about ethnic groups fighting each other. While clearly not
all internal wars are ethnic conflicts, those that have a significant
ethnic component, like the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict, are often far
more violent and more intractable than conflict devoid of a significant
ethnic component.</p>
<p>The final lesson we can draw from an examination of the cases in this
paper is this: the geopolitical affiliation of a state is a better
predictor of the intervention decisions of external actors than is the
strategic significance of that state. The Moldovan and Estonian cases
provide a good contrast here. Estonia’s Baltic coastline, hosting of
Soviet air, naval, and radar installations and uranium-processing
facilities made it significantly more strategically important to Russia
than was Moldova. However, Russia intervened militarily in Moldova in
response to the escalation of conflict there, while it played a
comparatively benign role in Estonia. Russian reluctance about
escalating the situation in Estonia included withdrawing its troops on
schedule despite the fact that Moscow remained unhappy with Estonia’s
citizenship laws, which it saw as disenfranchising Russian-speakers in
the country.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/12/post-soviet-wars-part-i/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">This two-part series</a>
has argued that the post-Soviet wars deserve further study and have
advanced a causal explanation for them based on the factors of
institutions, identities, and international intervention. They have
argued that the legacies of Soviet ethno-federal policies led to <em>institutionalized identity divisions</em> within some Soviet republics. Where institutionalized identity divisions existed, the sudden <em>political transition</em> of the Soviet collapse caused <em>mobilization</em> around these identity divisions and <em>escalation of conflict</em> between identity groups. This escalation of conflict drew the attention of external actors and invited <em>international intervention</em>. In turn, the <em>geopolitical affiliation</em>
of the target state determined both who intervened (Russia or Western
states) and the type of intervention (military or non-military). Further
research of the phenomenon of post-Soviet conflict will be critical to
understanding the ongoing war in Ukraine, in determining what the
post-Soviet conflicts might tell us about internal conflict in other
areas of the world, in allowing policymakers in Western states to make
more effective decisions about intervention in foreign conflicts and in
allowing them to better understand the intervention decisions of other
states.</p>
<hr>
<p><a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/12/post-soviet-wars-part-ii/#_ednref1" name="_edn1">[1]</a>
This is significantly above the average of 91.3% for all Autonomous
Soviet Socialist Republics, of which Abkhazia was one of 23 in the USSR.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/12/post-soviet-wars-part-ii/#_ednref2" name="_edn2">[2]</a> Christoph Zuercher, <em>The Post-Soviet Wars: Rebellion, Ethnic Conflict and Nationhood in the Caucasus </em>(New York: NYU Press, 2001), p. 201.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/12/post-soviet-wars-part-ii/#_ednref3" name="_edn3">[3]</a> Mathijs Pelkmans, <em>Defending the Border: Identity, Religion and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia </em>(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 10.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/12/post-soviet-wars-part-ii/#_ednref4" name="_edn4">[4]</a> Zuercher, <em>The Post-Soviet Wars, </em>p. 201.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/12/post-soviet-wars-part-ii/#_ednref5" name="_edn5">[5]</a> Anatol Lieven, <em>The Baltic Revolution: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Road to Independence </em>(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 93.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/12/post-soviet-wars-part-ii/#_ednref6" name="_edn6">[6]</a> William H. Hill, <em>Russia, the Near Abroad and the West: Lessons from the Moldova-Transnistria Conflict, </em>(Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson center Press, 2012), p. 7.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/12/post-soviet-wars-part-ii/#_ednref7" name="_edn7">[7]</a> Andrew Williams, “Conflict Resolution after the Cold War: the Case of Moldova,” <em>Review of International Studies </em>25 (1999), p. 76.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/12/post-soviet-wars-part-ii/#_ednref8" name="_edn8">[8]</a> Don Oberdorfer, “End Fighting in Moldova, U.S. Urges; Bush, Baker Unable to Halt Escalation,” <em>The Washington Post</em>, June 23, 1992, p. A18.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/12/post-soviet-wars-part-ii/#_ednref9" name="_edn9">[9]</a> Hill, <em>Russia, the Near Abroad and the West: Lessons from the Moldova-Transnistria Conflict, </em>p. xi.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/12/post-soviet-wars-part-ii/#_ednref10" name="_edn10">[10]</a> David Laitin, <em>Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad </em>(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 182.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/12/post-soviet-wars-part-ii/#_ednref11" name="_edn11">[11]</a> Indrek Tarand, former Estonian government special representative to the northeast. Interview with the author, July 17, 2012.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.fpri.org/article/2017/12/post-soviet-wars-part-ii/#_ednref12" name="_edn12">[12]</a> Indrek Tarand, former Estonian government special representative to the northeast. Interview with the author, July 17, 2012.</p>
</div>arold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com" target="_blank">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/" target="_blank">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------</div>
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