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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (26755)	12/8/1998 11:44:00 PM
From: jbe	Respond to of 108807

X, there have been quite a few waves of government-sponsored Russian settlement of non-Russian areas, beginning back in the pre-revolutionary period. The most notable such project in Soviet times was the settlement of the "Virgin Lands" -- former Kazakh grazing lands that Khrushchev wanted to see planted in corn. Hundreds of thousands of Russians went there, with the result that today ethnic Russians predominate in the population of Northern Kazakhstan..Elsewhere in Central Asia, Russians came to fill factory & administrative jobs, in which the "natives" often were not interested, or for which they were not trained. In time, the cities in Central Asia tended to become "Russian" (or at least Russian-speaking), while the countryside remained "native". (Remember also that until very late in the Soviet period, people were generally assigned to their place of work; it was not easy to just pick up and leave, unless you already had a job someplace else.) In Central Asia and Kazakhstan, I do not think the Soviet authorities were consciously pursuing the same policy the Chinese pursued in Tibet -- i.e., a policy designed to dilute the minority population . At the time, I think economic development was their top priority, and dilution was just an unfortunate "side effect." However, I DO think that ethnic dilution was definitely intended when Russian workers were transported to and resettled in the Baltic Republics, after they were annexed. Another point: the Soviet authorities often used simpler methods of "diluting" minorities when that seemed appropriate: 1) transporting & resettling the minorities themselves, in their entirety (Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachais, Kalmyks, etc. in the 40s); or 2)transferring the territories themselves, by constantly tinkering with the map and redrawing borders at all levels. jbe