re: #294 Alyosha

The issue being the arbitrary borders imposed on Near Eastern nations by European colonial powers, if I wasn’t clear.

The problem with that analogy is that no Western nation imposed borders on any part of the Soviet Union. It carved itself up, then implanted Russian majorities and near-majorities in the areas that had been carved off.

Sure, it was positive that those different jurisdictional boundaries would never mean anything, but it set them up. And before they started exporting Russians to outer Soviet republics, those were the natural boundaries of where-a-nation-would-be-reasonable-because-the-vast-majority-of-people-there-were-of-that-nation.