Did I miss the context here or something?? Forget the above. Nolan, I just read your post, and it really blew me away. Fantastic argument for something that seems so logical.
Excellent post JV, I enjoyed reading it very much. I am slightly out of my element here, but wasn't the south that was the stronghold of the Tzarsist whites more in the Zaphorzyhe region (in the southern ukraine, west of the Caspian) rather than the Trans-caucausus region? At least that is the impression I have. I'm familiar (vaguely, from a long, long time ago) of Stalin trying to ethnic cleanse/deport etc for the sake of collectivization, but I would wager that ethnic resentment of him and Russians (even though he was really georgian!)in Chechnya and the transcaucusus region pre-dates that and probably even pre-dates the 19th C back to the days when the Caucusus was under the varying influence of the Tartars, Turks, Russians, etc. Regarding your professors thesis (I didn't know you were at UC for undergrad? I thought that was just Mrs. JV but that makes sense) I think, in fact, I know, that I have read it before, or at least portions thereof back when I was in college. The knowledge that I h ave of that area, rapidly forgotten since the end of the cold war, generally is more US-foreign policy centric and the name that jumps out of my memory the most (not one of my professors though I saw him speak once) was Walter LeFeber from Cornell. On the substantive issue I can say that he's probably got a point (ironic, actually, I'm still amazed that the "prisonhouse of nationalities" quote that I put up in the post that you were responding to was invented by Lenin) but that it is important to remeber how hard it is to kill ethnic/religious strife in the borderlands and that though Stalin may have inadvertently revived it, it was there (or at least the seeds were there) for a long time. (example, Tito keeping Yugoslavia relatively calm for decades -- but the Bosnian Serb/Bosnian Muslim conflict can be traced directly back to a 15th C. battle).
