lauriandres
Well-Known Member
I would add, that without indirect support from Russia to Serbia, the Balkan conflict would have been little bit milder?One of the things that I have been preaching for years and is becoming ever more obvious by the day is that Boris Yeltsin was one of the greatest men of the 20th century.
For all his personal and political flaws, we as humanity owe him for the disaster he prevented 30 years ago. That Soviet Union broke up the way it did and that we didn't see brutal(and even nuclear) warfare seems incredible in hindsight. So much of this is because of Yeltsin.
His decision, as the president of the biggest and most powerful of the 15 Soviet republics to say that the Union was a union of republics who were free to leave in whatever borders had been drawn since the Revolution prevented so much bloodshed. I say this as someone who lived through the breakup of Yugoslavia at the same time where things took the opposite turn.
Several republics had huge Russian minorities. Latvia was 34% Russian, Estonia 30%, and Kazakhstan almost 40%. Kazakhstan was actually ethnically majority Russian until around 1980. That doesn't include places like Ukraine where the percentage was smaller but the absolute numbers were big. All in all, 25 million Russians lived in republics other than Russia in 1989. Only one ethnicity in Soviet Union(other than the Russians) even numbered 25 million at the time.
The most dangerous thing was that in cases of some of the republics like Latvia or Kazakhstan, ethnic Russians weren't just concentrated in large cities, but also as compact blocks along the border with Russia. It would've been easy for Yeltsin to claim that borders were unfair and that ethnic Russians were persecuted and use force to fix it. It was made even easier by the fact that some of these republics weren't exactly kind to their Russian minorities either. Latvia declared that the citizenship of their newly independent state would only be conferred automatically on those whose parents or grandparents held Latvian citizenship in 1940. That affected anyone whose family moved there during Soviet times. Remember that USSR was not a country where you moved freely. You moved to Latvia because you were ordered to do so. You didn't look for work, it was assigned to you and you went wherever you were told.
10% of Latvia's population doesn't have Latvian citizenship right now. Most of them were born in Latvia. Due to the way citizenship laws work in other former Soviet states, they also don't have citizenship of whatever other republic their grandparents or parents moved from. These people are stateless. Latvia wasn't the only country to do this. Estonia did it, too. It is very much discrimination. In all former Soviet republics, the share of ethnic Russians fell as they moved out.
Yeltsin's greatness was in realizing this was not worth fighting over. Not when the whole country and even the world could be embroiled in this war. Now, this wasn't perfect. Under Yeltsin, Russia did get involved in conflicts in Transnistria, Nagorno Karabakh, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Adjara. 4 of the 5 are still ongoing, but it's nothing compared to what could've happened.
What Putin has been doing the past decade or so has been undoing so much of that.
Otherwise - 12 points!