Carter V. Findley

“With the division of Central Asia between Russia and China, the historic Turkic territories of the Tarım basin and vicinity passed under Chinese rule in 1759 as Xinjiang, the “new province”—a province larger than Alaska and three times the size of France.43”
― Carter V. Findley, The Turks in World History

“By the 1980s, Gorbachev’s efforts to reinvigorate the idea of a “single culture of the Soviet people, socialist in content, diverse in its national forms, internationalist in spirit” faltered against the fact that nationalism had acquired meaningful content to Soviet citizens in a way that socialist internationalism had not.49 For seventy years, the carrot of Soviet-style “internationalism” and the stick of Soviet repression had squelched demands for independence while promoting nationalism in other ways. This combination had prevented the breakup of the multinational empire, which otherwise would probably have collapsed after World War I, along with Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. With repression now eased, “openness” and “restructuring” were about to launch the Soviet Union, too, into a new world of identity politics. Moscow found itself faced with the choice between “nativized” elites, who were corrupt but loyal to Soviet “internationalism,” and alternative leaders in the republics, who were nationalists and not loyal to the Soviet Union.”
― Carter V. Findley, The Turks in World History