We have seen how in October 1924 the Turkic and Iranian Muslims of Central Asia attained nationhood and statehood through a unique historical process that was directed from Moscow and in which they themselves had little active participation. The identification of the languages and nationalities, their classification, and subsequent national delimitation resembled more the work of scientists studying animal or vegetable species and then assigning their location in a zoo or a botanical garden than a nation's internal rise toward self-determination. Nevertheless, the scientists, in this instance Russian linguists, anthropologists, and politicians, had done fairly competent work: one proof is that when the failed coup of August 1991 against Gorbachev's reforms brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan have forcefully asserted their national identity as independent republics.

A frequent statement in the voluminous Sovietological and post-Sovietological literature produced in the West is that the borders created through national delimitation are “artificial,” and minority pockets in many parts of Central Asia are mentioned as proof of that; moreover, incidents like the bloody fighting between the large Uzbek minority and Kyrgyz nationalists that occurred during June 1990 in the Osh region of Kyrgyzstan are adduced as portents of catastrophic upheavals in the future. The answer is that perfectly monoethnic and monolingual populations in a territory they consider their homeland and dominate politically are a rare occurrence in any part of the world, and that virtually every national state must devise a compromise on how to deal with one or more minorities.