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THE SOUTH OF THE CIS: FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS OF DEVELOPMENT
Aziz NIIAZI
Aziz Niazi, Senior researcher, Department of Comparative and Theoretical Research, Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Oriental Studies, director of the Institute for Development Problems of Central Asia (Moscow, Russian Federation)
The Soviet Union has been history for twelve years now, but the heated debates around the reasons for its collapse and the country itself are still going on. We indeed experienced a unique communality of nations that knows no analogies in history. A multi-tribal civilization congregated around Russia for centuries, at first in the form of separate state formations, and then under the wing of czarist autocracy. During the Soviet era, this process continued at a qualitatively different level, without the metropolises and colonies inherent in empires, but the country prided itself on its previously unheard of consolidation of nations, which radically cast aside linguistic, racial, and confessional confines in the name of a single state. This Eurasian community has acquired its borders within the course of civilizational development and made an intense lunge toward modernization within a very short time, which is still awaiting an objective scientific assessment.
The Soviet Union collapsed overnight and broke down into smaller countries. Nevertheless, they all stand on the same foundation—the Eurasian civilization. We can argue until the cows come home about the reasons the Union collapsed, and the pluses and minuses of the Soviet system, but the crux of the matter is that we still depend on each other, just as before. The CIS is a single organism run through with common technological, educational, and intellectual vessels. The cultural-psychological, spiritual, and blood strings that have their origin in the depths of time and became entwined into a single ball during the Soviet era prevent us from moving away from each other. Together we rise, or together we fall. The question is which path we choose. And in order to define it we need to understand our past and present in the context of the global development processes, where the priority lies on man’s relationship with nature, and the influence of the scientific and technological revolution on society and the environment.
In contrast to the western world, we mainly relied in our development on our own resources, both human and natural. We took, squandered, and destroyed them beyond all measure and in………………
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