Md. Merajul Islam

Fully Masterized, Department of Social Work, Rajshahi College, Bangladesh

Prof. Dr. Jacques Coulardeau

Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France

 

ANSWER PART 2

3. Suny: The Empire's Corpse Is Still Drawing the Front Lines

The historian Ronald Grigor Suny offers the least abstract and, in a strict sense, the most falsifiable of the three answers, because it can be checked against a map and a body count rather than a philosophical claim about cosmic energy or convergent social grammars. In his 1990 assessment of the nationalities crisis then tearing through the Caucasus, given as Soviet troops were entering Azerbaijan, Suny observed that Soviet nationality policy had assigned ethnic groups to fixed territories and ranked statuses  union republic, autonomous republic, autonomous oblast in a process the affected populations were never consulted on, 'implemented quite arbitrarily', producing new nations where none had existed and submerging others inside larger ones; and that so long as the Soviet state itself endured, these arbitrary designations caused no open war, because Moscow remained the sole arbitrator of last resort for any dispute between them.^[1] His later, fuller study, The Revenge of the Past, generalised the point: the Soviet system's national delimitation of the 1920s and 1930s did not merely misgovern pre-existing nations, it manufactured a great many of the nations themselves, then froze their mutual grievances in administrative amber for sixty years.^[2] Subsequent legal and political-science scholarship has confirmed the mechanism in exact and grim detail: ethnic groups were placed in a strict constitutional hierarchy, some deliberately split across republican borders to weaken their capacity for self-advocacy, and the guarantee of whatever autonomy each group held existed only for as long as the Soviet constitution itself existed.^[3] Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian-majority autonomous oblast administratively lodged inside Soviet Azerbaijan; Abkhazia and South Ossetia, autonomous units inside Soviet Georgia each was a Soviet cartographic decision, not a pre-Soviet fact, and each has produced war, ethnic cleansing, or unresolved military occupation in almost exact proportion to how firmly the Soviet state, and only the Soviet state, had once guaranteed its particular status.^[4] Here the earlier legal-continuity argument about UN Security Council seats looks almost decorative by comparison. Whatever else disappeared in 1991, the actual administrative geography of Soviet ethnic engineering did not disappear; it simply stopped being administered, and immediately began, on its own, to kill people along precisely the lines Soviet cartographers had drawn six decades earlier. If any single fact demonstrates that the USSR persists rather than vanished, it is not a treaty or a scholarly paradox. It is a trench.

 

4. Civilizational Transformation, Beneath the Argument About Ideology

What Gumilev, Zinoviev, and Suny share, despite starting from biology, sociology, and cartography respectively and despite two of them having been hounded by the Soviet state they are sometimes mistaken for defending, is a refusal to treat 1991 as an event occurring inside political history at all. Gumilev's timescale is too long for 1991 to be anything but a single incident in a centuries-long organism's life. Zinoviev's claim is that the categories 'Soviet' and 'Western' were already dissolving into each other beneath the ideological surface, so that no clean victory was available to either side to claim. And Suny's map shows that the most durable thing the Soviet Union produced was not an ideology or an economy at all, but a set of physical, cartographic facts that continue to generate violence with no ideological content whatsoever. Armenians and Azerbaijanis do not fight over Nagorno-Karabakh because one side is Marxist and the other liberal. Each of the three, in other words, locates the real Soviet Union somewhere underneath the place where the 1991 argument is usually held, in a layer that the collapse of an ideology does not reach: a biological rhythm, a shared administrative grammar, or a line on a map. Civilizations, on all three accounts, are not dismantled by the fall of the flag that happened to be flying over them. They are inherited, mile by mile and generation by generation, by whatever structure biological, managerial, or cartographic was actually doing the work the flag took credit for.

5. Conclusion

So: has the Soviet Union disappeared, or has it become something different? At the depth Gumilev, Zinoviev, and Suny were each independently working, none of them in dialogue with the other two, none of them trying to answer a Western question on Western terms, the answer is not merely that it transformed, but that '1991' was never the right unit to ask the question about in the first place. A civilization measured in the centuries Gumilev used does not register a seventy-year ideological experiment as anything more than a single turbulent phase in its own much longer aging. A social order measured, as Zinoviev insisted on measuring it, by its actual administrative and informational grammar rather than its declared ideology, had already begun merging with its supposed opposite well before the Soviet flag came down, which means there was no clean 'other side' left to defect to. And a territory measured, as Suny measured it, by the literal borders a vanished bureaucracy once drew, is still in Nagorno-Karabakh, in Abkhazia, in South Ossetia, enforcing those borders with artillery, decades after the ministry that drew them closed its doors. None of this is a story about who won the Cold War. It is a story about how much of any civilization was never actually carried by its ideology to begin with, and how little, therefore, that ideology's disappearance actually explains.

… TILL NEXT TOPIC …

The Incas, they say …

Bibliography

Geukjian, Ohannes. Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in the South Caucasus: Nagorno-Karabakh and the Legacy of Soviet Nationalities Policy. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012.

Gumilev, Lev. Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere of the Earth. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1990 (Russian original completed in stages, 1939–1979).

Harzl, Benedikt C. 'The Soviet Nationalities Policies and Their Contribution to Conflicts: Law, Legacies and Ideology.' International Journal of Foresight and Innovation Policy 14, no. 1 (2019).

Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.

Titov, Alexander Sergeevich. Lev Gumilev, Ethnogenesis and Eurasianism. PhD thesis, University College London, 2005.

Zinoviev, Alexander. Homo Sovieticus. London: Victor Gollancz, 1985 (Russian original 1982).

Zinoviev, Alexander. Katastroika: Legend and Reality of Gorbachevism. London: Claridge Press, 1990.

Online sources consulted: New World Encyclopedia, 'Lev Gumilev' and 'Alexander Zinoviev'; ResearchGate, 'Lev Gumilev: His Pretensions as Founder of Ethnology and his Eurasian Theories'; Institute of Modern Russia, 'The ‘Enlightened Nationalism’ of Lev Gumilev'; dokumen.pub (Titov thesis); Philosophy Now, Issue 26; marxists.org, 'The Crisis in the Caucasus' (Against the Current, 1990); Texas Digital Library, 'Blurred Lines' (all accessed 2026).

Jacques Coulardeau uploaded a paper

https://jacquescoulardeau.medium.com/launching-pad-rampe-de-lancement-for-research-beginners-0024e7857ed7

https://www.academia.edu/144641680/LAUNCHING_PAD_RAMPE_DE_LANCEMENT_FOR_RESEARCH_BEGINNERS

Mohammad Merajul Islam, now he is fully Masterized, will imprint a mark on historical science, both as a researcher and as a Muslim. We have to support the "Renaissance" of Islam in a universe of cosmic hostility. It can open us to the phylogenetic continuity in history. FROM getting passé TO déjà vu AND FINALLY TO TRANS-SUBSTANTIATION.

By Jacques Coulardeau & Md. Merajul ISLAM

35 Pages

2025, Éditions La Dondaine, Medium.com

Check Mohammad’s latest eBook

The Architecture of Silence: Language, Migration, and the Survival of Suppressed Civilizations

by Mohammad Merajul ISLAM (Author), Jacques COULARDEAU (Author)  

Format: Kindle Edition

Kindle Book Amazon ASIN: ‎ B0GY92ZTK1

Publisher: ‎ Éditions La Dondaine

Publication date: ‎ April 27, 2026

Language: ‎ English

Print length: 385 pages