Post-Soviet Borders and National Identity

When the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991, its fifteen constituent republics became independent states essentially overnight, inheriting internal administrative boundaries that Soviet nationalities policy had drawn decades earlier, often for reasons of political control rather than to reflect coherent ethnic, linguistic, or economic units. In Central Asia, the "national delimitation" process carried out by Soviet authorities between 1924 and 1936 divided the region into the Uzbek, Turkmen, Tajik, Kyrgyz, and Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republics, a process historians including the American scholar Arne Haugen (The Establishment of National Republics in Soviet Central Asia, 2003) describe as having been shaped as much by Bolshevik strategies for weakening pan-Turkic and pan-Islamic solidarity as by any prior sense of distinct national identity among the region's populations, who had previously organized their loyalties around clan, tribe, city-state (as in the Khanate of Kokand or the Emirate of Bukhara), and religious rather than modern national lines.