My latest research article titled “From deportations to ‘frozen conflicts’: Russian nationalism, ethnic engineering and violence in the soviet and post-soviet space” has been published in the peer-reviewed open access journal Frontiers in Political Science (Section International Studies), included by ANVUR, the Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of the University and Research Systems, in the list of scientific journals for Area 11 (History, philosophy, pedagogy and psychology) and Area 14 (Political and Social Sciences).
The study adopts a historical-comparative approach to investigate the link between Soviet-era mass deportations, demographic reshuffling, and contemporary ethnic conflicts across the post-Soviet space – from the Caucasus to Crimea, the Donbas, and Central Asia.
Drawing on archival decrees, census data, administrative cartography, and legal sources, the article argues that Russian nationalism functioned not merely as an ideology, but as a repertoire of state practices centred on forced mobility and territorial manipulation. The deportations of Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars and Volga Germans, combined with the USSR’s ethnofederal structure, produced asymmetric republics, competing memories of victimhood, and unresolved territorial claims that continue to fuel conflict today.
The paper challenges prevailing explanations that attribute post-Soviet wars solely to failed democratization or great-power rivalry, proposing instead a longer genealogy rooted in Stalinist demographic engineering.
📘 Full citation:
Marsili, M. (2026). From deportations to “frozen conflicts”: Russian nationalism, ethnic engineering and violence in the soviet and post-soviet space. Frontiers in Political Science, 8, 1512946.
🔗 DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2026.1512946
🔓 Open Access – freely available for all.
