ABSTRACT
Post-Soviet Russia, which officially began its existence as the Russian Federation on January 1, 1992, was considerably downsized from both the pre1917 Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Gone was Ukraine, taking with it Kiev-the ancient “mother” of Russian cities-as well as about one-fifth of the former Soviet Union’s industrial plant, a variety of important mineral resources, a rich belt of black earth that produced about one-fourth of Soviet agricultural goods, and the sunny Black Sea shores of the Crimea. Gone also were the grasslands of Moldova, long contested with Romania; the forests
and marshes of Belarus, contested even longer with Poland; most of the Baltic coast, where Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia-once again free of Russia’s imperial grasp-eagerly looked westward; the soaring mountains and picturesque valleys of the Transcaucasus, where the tiny and troubled republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan uneasily calculated their unsettled, complex ethnic scores; and the vast steppe, deserts, and mountains of Central Asia, a politically unstable region divided among sprawling Kazakhstan, arid Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, and diminutive Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. In short, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia lost most of its conquests of the past 250 years. Its borders, with some variations, now approximated those of the Russian Empire at the death of Peter the Great.
