Conflicting Loyalties and the State in Post-Soviet Eurasia - Hardcover

This work analyses the conflicting ethnic, religious and regional loyalties with which the state-building process must contend in the Soviet Union's successor states and Russia itself.

This book analyses the political impact that ethnic, confessional and regional factors have had in the reconfiguration of the former Soviet space. It contains a number of thematic chapters - on Soviet nationality policy, on Islam in Russia today and on Bolshevik policies towards Islam in the early Soviet period. These synoptic chapters contain the following case studies: They include the enclave of Kaliningrad; the Ukraine, the Crimea within Ukraine each with its own turmoil within. The final chapter relates the evolution of these regions' conflicting loyalties to the global weakening of the nation-state, and distinguishes what is particular to the Soviet state and its demise from that more general phenomenon. The volume therefore covers a number of the more significant questions of analytical importance posed by the collapse of a major contemporary multi-national state.