The impact of history – persistent fault lines in the post-Soviet region

Abstract

In order to demonstrate that the spatial patterns of current conflicts and socioeconomic problems in post-soviet regions are related to the historical past we try to reconstruct historical regions and extend our conclusions to the entire post-Soviet space. With the help of detailed statistical material from 1897 and the 1930s, the results of former countrylevel case studies (Belarus, Poland Ukraine) are synthesized and parallels are shown to some former political boundaries, present-day fault lines and regional boundaries.

The post-soviet region is characterised not only by political-ideological opposites and social conflicts, but the differences are manifest in territorial patterns too, which have historically evolved. From a methodological aspect, the study attempts to complement the dominant sociological and politological approach by a geographical and historical one.

Our investigation used 25,000 data and 9 variables to analyse the situation in 1897. The regional structure – considering both the developmental level and the dissimilarities – of the Russian Empire shows 1. that the state was inable to eliminate the differences created by old borders even after they had been gone for 100 years; 2. and that the location of present-day conflict zones coincides with the boundaries of the historical regions and old state boundaries. And if 100 years in an empire characterised by efforts of homogenisation and centralisation were not enough to eliminate the previous differences, why should some 70 years of communism be able to do so?

To analyse the timeline further, we examined the links between Central Europe and the Belarus–Ukraine–Moldova region through a data analysis for the 1930s. The results based on 15 selected variables also confirm the persistence of phantom boundaries and go to prove that the post-soviet region was dissimilar to Eastern Central Europe regarding both its development stage and its characteristics. The sharp difference in the features of the two regions disproves the Tobler-hypothesis and suggests that the differences were not stemming from the delimitation of the new borders; sometimes fault lines did not even coincide with them. They can be considered to be significantly older, and the elapsed 100 years were simply not long enough to let these differences fade. East Central Europe was a separate region at the time in question and did not (and does not) comprise the Ukraine and Belarus.