Dmitri Trenin
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the war in Chechnya, between 1991 and 2001, cost 28,000 lives,6 with many more wounded; the civil war in Tajikistan, which lasted from 1992 to 1997, left another 100,000 dead. The Georgian-Abkhazian and Georgian-Ossetian conflicts, the fighting on the Dniester in Moldova, and the Ingush-Ossetian violence added a few thousand more victims to those grim statistics. Moscow itself did not escape fully unscathed. While the 1991 putsch led to the deaths of three young people in the country’s capital, the “mini-civil war” there two years later resulted in the official toll of 140 dead, while unofficial claims put the figure several times higher. Still, these figures pale in comparison to the victims of the partition of India in 1947; or the wars in Algeria in 1954–1962 and Indochina in 1946–1954, to name but a few. By comparison, the dissolution of the Soviet empire was surprisingly peaceful. Except for the Karabakh conflict and the Russo-Georgian war of 2008, there were no major wars among the Soviet successor states. Strikingly, the first-ever collapse of a nuclear superpower did not lead to nuclear proliferation. Soviet strategic nuclear weapons remained under centralized control throughout and, by 1994, those deployed in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus had been withdrawn to Russia, and the three new countries joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty as non-nuclear weapon states. Tactical nuclear weapons had been redeployed to the Russian Federation even before the breakup of the USSR. Over the past two decades, there have been no major breaches of the nonproliferation regime attributable to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The astounding smoothness of the process was largely due to the fact that Russia, the imperial metropolis, led the process of imperial dismantlement. Even when the Soviet Union still existed, the Russian republic’s authorities proceeded to conclude treaties with other republics, respecting their sovereignty. Once the USSR was no more, the Russian leadership immediately recognized the country’s new, much-shrunken borders, and, while it fought separatism in Chechnya, it was wise enough to resist an impulse of irredentism in Crimea, northern Kazakhstan, and elsewhere. Compared with other empires in their final, usually not finest, hour—including the British, the French, and the Portuguese—Russia’s did unbelievably well. It is striking how virtually everyone took the incredible news for granted. That the ten-year presence in Afghanistan, the forty-year hold on Eastern Europe, and the three-hundred-year state unity with Ukraine would all evaporate within less than three years had been, of course, beyond any-