In the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a majority or significant part of the population in five territories refused to accept the status determined for them by the governments of the new states and recognised by the international community – Chechnya in the Russian Federation, Nagorno Karabakh in Azerbaijan, South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia and Transdniester in Moldova. The demand for outright independence (or union with Russia) has been the bottom line in all five cases, while the newly independent states have appealed to the principle of territorial integrity in insisting that the territories remain within their borders. No amount of negotiation over the precise status of each region has been successful in finding a compromise between two positions which are essentially incompatible. The apparent impossibility of breaking out of a situation where each territory (apart, eventually, from Chechnya) is ungovernable by the state in which international recognition locates it has earned the disputes the label of ‘frozen conflicts’, while the regions themselves are often described as ‘breakaway’.

Supporters of both sides have frequently appealed to ancient history to support their case. The esoteric nature of these disputes contrasts with the actual origin of the conditions of conflicts which in most cases first broke out in 1905. Rather more apt is the sarcastic characterisation by two American historians of the origins of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict as ‘shrouded in the mists of the twentieth century’. Soviet nationality policies combined with alternating tolerance of and suppression of chauvinistic nationalism preserved, for the most part, ethnic peace in the Caucasus and elsewhere until the late 1980s. But the same policies that prevented conflict also preserved underlying tensions and, crucially, once the structures of the USSR crumbled, the status of a number of territories was thrown into limbo.