The areas of ethic conflict were: "Russia (Tatarstan and Chechnya), Ukraine(Crimea), Moldova(Transdnistria), Latvia and Estonia (Russian minorities), Georgia(Abkhazia, South Ossetia), Armenia and Azerbaijan (Nagorno-Karabakh), Central Asia (Kazakhstan's Russian minority; the Ferghana valley; Tajikistan's civil war)" (www.lse.ac.uk ). As it can be seen there were many areas in which ethnic conflicts can be observed. But the most important ones are the ones which were located in Eastern Europe (Poland,Estonia etc.). In these areas there were satellites (mostly they were border states). The weakening of ties of these satellites caused the whole body to collapse. The Soviet Empire can be told as the last great empire. With a huge amount of land (on sixth of earth's face) it had consisted of a population of 285 million and 120 different ethnic groups divided into fifteen republics and various autonomous regions. Lenin believed nationalism would disappear under communism and a Soviet people would emerge. This proved to be fundamentally false and Russian nationalism and beliefs of superiority set the stage for ethnic conflict within the USSR (www.historyorb.com). "The Pax Sovietica did not work" (Farnen, p.42).
Being consisted of 120 different ethnic groups which were divided into fifteen republics and having a huge amount of land was not a main reason for the collapse. The main reason was the wrong nationalist policies done by the USSR governments. China and India also have huge lands and they house lots of ethnic groups who speak many different languages. "The Republic of China is also a complex case because there are fifty five national minorities (seven percent of the population) in the country who do not speak Han Chinese of the majority population in a nation of over one billion people" (Farnen, p.43). India is even more diverse and has a much lower technology so the people can not communicate with each other and they are much more separated.
