Violent Secession in the Former Soviet Union : A Comparative Analysis of Moldova and Estonia

Why did some Soviet states devolve into violent secessionist rebellion while others broke apart without violence, in the early 1990s? Following the collapse of the USSR, fifteen countries peacefully gained de jure independence. Within ten of these countries ethnic minorities threatened further rebellion, secession, or violence (Roeder 2007, 303). However, of these minority groups only five resorted to wide scale violence and civil war in an attempt to achieve separatist-like goals (Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, Nagornyi-Karabakh in Azerbaijan, Transnistria in Moldova, and Chechnya in Russia). The current literature attempts to explain the ethnic violence through psychological mechanisms (Horowitz 1985) or variations of the triadic configuration theory (Brubaker 1996; Van Houten 1996, 1998; Fearon 1998; Laitin 2001). As a preliminary study to explore these theories and ethnic violence in some post-communist countries and its absence in others, I conduct a structured comparison of Estonia, Moldova, Azerbaijan, and Ukraine, and in particular I focus on the cases of Estonia and Moldova. I argue that the power relationship between the ethnic group running the state and the ethnic minority opposition immediately after the collapse of central state Soviet power helped determine the likelihood of a violent secessionist movement