a quick and dirty cliffs notes history/current events lesson, or what the hell is going on in russia?

some of you may have heard of a little skirmish going on currently between russia and georgia in a place called north ossetia. for the news-junkies out there, this is probably going to be nothing new. for those of you who are just learning that there is a place called georgia that is not in the american southeast, this may be educational.

a little background...
there is a little spit of land between the black sea and the caspian sea which is somewhere around 300 miles wide and contains a mountain range called the caucasus. (yes, this is where we get the term caucasian.) as far as researchers can tell, this region has been continuously inhabited since the stone age. this region is also quite rugged and at times impassable, so of course a number of distinct people-groups emerged over the centuries. as far as i can tell, this relatively small piece of real estate contains somewhere between 30 and a zillion distinct ethnolinguistic groups, as pictured in the map below. (ethnolinguistic = people who share a distinct culture and language.)

i traveled to this area (Kabardino-Balkaria to be specific) in the summer of 2002 and saw firsthand how each of these groups sees themselves as distinctly different from the others. and there is not a lot of love lost between them. each group has their own history, culture, traditions and language. and then you throw in a few different religions....and i think you all know what happens.

now for some history...
we all learned about the russian empire in school, and how czar after czar slowly conquered most of the eurasian continent, absorbing numerous countries and people groups. and like the roman empire before them, they kept order between these groups mostly by force. then the russian empire fell and was taken over by the USSR, which continued the expansion of borders and kept order with even more of an iron fist.
fast-forward to the early 1990's and the dissolution of the soviet union.
in the aftermath of the end of the USSR, there were a number of countries who were able to regain their sovereignty. (think latvia, estonia, lithuania, etc.) but what about the innumerable ethnolinguistic groups which were absorbed by the russian empire before the invention of the nation-state, so had never had the opportunity for sovereign rule the way we know it today? well, some of them were allowed to create their own countries. (think uzbekistan, khazakstan, azerbaijan, georgia, etc.) but wait, according to that map up there, there are still a lot of ethnolinguistic groups who never got their own country and are living in the country created for another ethnolinguistic group.

there's your problem.

the russian government had to put their foot down somewhere, because the area inhabited by ethnic russians is not very large, and if they let every people group form their own country, there really wouldn't be much of a russia left.
but that doesn't keep them from trying...
the ossetian people group claim an area which is partly in russia (north ossetia) and partly in georgia (south ossetia). and the ossetians don't much like georgians. the people of south ossetia - backed by the russian gonvernment - consider themselves to be an independent republic. yet the international community consider it to be a part of georgia.
so last week when the georgian army went into south ossetia to show them who was in charge, the russian government stepped in and backed the ossetians. now why the russian army is storming toward the georgian capital of tbilisi is another story...

i could say a lot more about this, but most of you probably stopped reading a long time ago.

but for those of you who got this far, i hope that it was at least somewhat educational.

now back to the michael phelps juggernaut and lip-syncing 9-year-olds...