 You are clear for launch and with that shut down your visors, O2 on and prepare for ignition to O2. You can copy that and um... Hey, it's Mr. Ruchoff again. Alright, so in our last lesson we saw how history has shaped the people of Russia and its former republics and this lesson we're actually going to look at those people today. So let's get on with looking at the people. And there are nearly 275 million people who actually live in the region. But as we've said before, the region is huge. So when we look at the population density, we see that it's only about 32 people per square mile. And that's just about a third of the population density of the United States. But we're going to find that the population is not distributed evenly across the region. In fact, three-quarters of the population of Russia lies in an area that is known as the agricultural triangle. The agricultural triangle runs out of the North European Plain and then through the southern step of Siberia, which is great for farming. Now to put this in perspective, Russia's overall population density of their 147 million people is 22 people per square mile. Yet when we go east of the Euro Mountains into Siberia, we see that this number plummets to just 8 people per square mile and even then it's usually just basically right around the rivers of Siberia. And then when we move even further east across the Lena River and into the Russian Far East, the population density goes down to a scant three people per square mile. The bottom line is pretty much no one lives there. Now when we move into Central Asia, we see the population density there is nearly triple that of Russia as a whole. But just like Russia, this is the saving as the largest country in Central Asia is Kazakhstan, which has a population density of just 18 people per square mile, which pretty much skews the entire average. This is especially true when you look at Uzbekistan, which has a land area of one-fifth the size of Kazakhstan, but it has a population density of 198 people per square mile. Now one of the changes that occurred in Central Asia during the Soviet Union was the rise of the cities. See, the Soviets wanted to industrialize the population for the state and they began creating cities in Central Asia and started moving people into these cities. Now originally the people of Central Asia had a nomadic pastorial lifestyle, largely living their lives moving from place to place on the step, minding their livestock. Now to accommodate this lifestyle, people lived in tents such as these, which are called yurts. In fact, in many areas people still live in these yurts and while over 50% of the world today lives in cities and Tajikistan just over a quarter of their people do so and only 47% of the Kyrgyz will live in cities. But it is in Transcaucasia that we see much higher levels of population density. For example, Azerbaijan is more than three times more crowded than the United States in terms of population density. We also see that the population in the region still continues to rise. Although the Transcaucasian countries of Armenia and Georgia have a rate of natural increase pretty much the same if not a little bit more than the United States, Central Asia's population is growing much quicker. We can see this in Tajikistan's population pyramid that has that shape of a fast growing population. Now as we've discussed before, birth and mortality rates are not the only thing that impacts population. Migration also has an effect. Within Russia, we see people moving out to the Russian Far East and Siberia and into the east near Moscow and this is going to further skew the distribution of the country's population. And after the Soviet Union fell, we have continued to see ethnic Russians who have lived in the Central Asia of republics moving back to Russia. In fact, one person out of every 1,000 people moves out of Central Asia every year. But it's important to understand that although 81% of the people that live in Russia are ethnically Russians, Russia and the republics are extremely ethically diverse. In fact, Russia has 190 ethnicities that actually live in the country. And remember, we discussed the effect that the Silk Road had on the ethnicities in Central Asia, which now has over 35 different ethnic groups living in the narrow stretch where the Silk Road ran through that portion of the land. But Transcaucasia is also very diverse with over 50 different ethnic groups that live in the mountains in the greater Caucasus and the lesser Caucasus mountains. See, just like Central Asia, Transcaucasia was a crossroads as merchants and traders would move over the Caucasus mountains between the Middle East and then into Europe. The rugged mountains of the Caucasus separated the different ethnic groups creating further cultural divergence among the groups. This created different pockets of ethnicities within the mountains. Speaking of pockets of people in Transcaucasia, we have several good examples of what is known as exclaves. Now we have two terms. We have enclaves and exclaves. Enclaves are any portion of a state that is entirely surrounded by the territory of a single other state. Vatican City is a good example of an enclave as it is totally within Italy. In fact, it's totally within Rome. Exclaves, however, are any portion of a state that is geographically separated from the main part by a surrounding territory. To understand the difference, take a look at this basket of apples. You could say that the red apple is a red apple enclave in a green apple basket. And if there was a red apple basket right next to this, you could also say that this red apple is a red apple exclave from the red apple basket. Now a real-life example of an exclave is Kalinograd, which is part of Russia that is separated from the main country of Russia by Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus. But because Kalinograd is not completely surrounded by one country, it is not an enclave. Now within Transcaucasia, the Nakhichevian Republic is an exclave of Azerbaijan separated by Armenia. However, just like Kalinograd, since it is not completely surrounded by one country, it is not considered an enclave. Now Transcaucasia does have its fair share of disputed regions that are largely caused by these pockets of different ethnicities. Now these include Abkhazia, South Assyria, and the Nagora Karabakh. See when the Soviet Union fell and Georgia gained its independence, there were other ethnicities within Georgia who wanted their own independence from Georgia and Georgia didn't want to do this. One group was the Abkhazians found in the western tip of Georgia who fought a war with Georgia between 1991 and 1992. South Assyria is also a home of another ethnic group that wanted its independence. The Assyrians fought a war with Georgia in 1992 and 1998, once again trying to break away South Assyria from Georgia. Of course, they also had help from the Russians who provided resources to the Assyrians during these fights. And then there is the Nagora Karabakh which is an area between Armenia and Azerbaijan which both countries want to claim. The two countries fought each other in 1992 and 1998 again trying to seize the land for themselves. Now each of these areas today are called frozen conflicts. A frozen conflict is when two sides have stopped fighting but they have not formally resolved the problems for their fighting which means that the fighting can resume at any given time. Now unfortunately Russia has been a country that has exploited for their own gain these frozen conflicts. One such example was the 2008 Russo-Georgian conflict. See Russia has been a long supporter of the Assyrian separatists in South Assyria and now they have the opportunity to set a trap for the Georgians. Now with the Russian support in 2008 the South Assyrians began conducting small scale attacks against the Georgians. This was planned because the Russians understood that after a while all these different small attacks Georgia's patience was going to wear out. And the Russians were right. After a while the Georgians had had enough and they launched a military operation invading South Assyria. But what the Georgians did not realize was that the Russians had already staged over a division of their army at the Loki tunnel that ran from Russia to Georgia through the Caucasus Mountains. So when the Georgians committed their attack into South Assyria the Russians counterattacked by moving their tanks and armored personnel carriers through the tunnel and went into South Assyria and Georgia. The Georgians were totally unprepared for the Russians counterattack and were quickly defeated by the Russians. Now if you're wondering why the Russians would go to war over a small territory in Georgia you need to realize that Russia was looking at a much bigger picture. See in 2008 both Georgia and Ukraine were working hard to become not only members of the EU but members of NATO. And this is the last thing that Russia wanted for two other former republics. So the reason for the conflict quite frankly was to prevent Georgia from joining NATO and sending a clear signal to Ukraine that it better not try to join the EU or join NATO. But the Russians have had troubles of their own in Chechnya. When the Soviet Union fell in 1991 Chechnya also declared independence but in 1994 Russians invaded Chechnya to be able to bring them back into the Russian Federation. But two years later Islamic terrorists came to power in Chechnya and even invaded the neighboring republic of Dagestan. So in 1999 Russia once again invaded Chechnya in order to regain power of the province. Now at this point the Islamists changed their tactics to truly to terrorism. See in 2002 Chechen terrorists seized the theater in Moscow and held over 850 people hostage in an effort to force the Russians out of Chechnya. In the end 180 people lay dead almost all were due to the gas the Russians used to try to put everyone to sleep. And two years later the Chechens struck out again this time at an elementary school in Beslan, North Ossetia in Russia. For three days the terrorists held 1,100 children, teachers and parents hostage. The siege ended with the Russian forces storming the school which by this time had been booby trapped with explosives by the terrorists. In the end 22 terrorists had another 330 hostages over 180 of these being children lay dead. So what do we know about the governments that are calling the shots in the region? Well every one of the countries actually considered themselves democratic governments but what most have really doesn't fit the description of democracy. Take Russia. Since 2000 Vladimir Putin has been his leader. In 2008 when he has completed the second term as president he decided to run for prime minister because you could only have two terms as president. However before being elected prime minister he transferred all his presidential powers to the office of prime minister so in essence he continued to stay in power. In addition in his 20 years in office he has allegedly been able to amass a personal fortune of over 200 billion dollars largely from corruption as the leader of Russia. And unfortunately most of the essential Asian countries also have governments that are nothing close to being true democracies. Take Kazakhstan and their first president Norsultan Nazarbayev who ruled from 1991 to 2019. In 2015 he is reported to have actually won re-election with an astounding 98% of the vote and that shouldn't be surprising as election watchers around the world have stated there has never been a fair election in Kazakhstan since the fall of the Soviet Union. And when he decided to resign in 2019 at the age of 80 he actually renamed the country's capital after himself. But he still has influence. His daughter has already positioned herself to become the next leader of Kazakhstan. Now fortunately the governments in Transcaucasia actually do seem to be operating pretty much as democracies although they do also have their own problems. And how are the economies of the republics? Well for most of the republics when the Soviet Union collapsed it left the republics without the financial aid that they were used to receive from Moscow and they pretty much been struggling. Now Russia has been able to pull itself out of the financial woes that it had right after the breakup and is pretty much doing fine however countries such as Tajikistan still continue to struggle. The GDP per capita there is actually less than $900 per year. But Kazakhstan seems to be doing better than most and that is largely due to its location near the Caspian Sea oil fields. In 2018 it was the 15th largest producer of oil more than some producers of OPEC. It also sits on the 12th largest oil reserves in the world. So as you might imagine oil is a large part of Kazakhstan's economy accounting for 35% of GDP as well as 75% of all its exports. Now what is interesting is that despite the Caspian being one of the oldest oil producing regions in the world outside of Azerbaijan oil was actually not drilled there until after the Soviet Union collapsed. Another interesting fact about the Caspian Sea is the five surrounding countries actually had to come together and have an agreement on whether to call it a sea or whether to call it a lake. Now it probably sounds silly but according to international law the rights that surrounding countries have to the resources in a lake is different than the rights that they have if it's actually a sea. So after years of discussion in 2018 the five countries came to an agreement which declared that the Caspian is neither a sea nor is a lake rather it was granted special legal status which essentially allowed the five countries to kind of get what it wanted. Now the last aspect we'll talk about is religion. Now despite the Russian Empire originally being Orthodox Christian in the 7th century Arab merchants would introduce Islam to the region. This meant that many in Central Asia adopted Islam but under the Soviet Union the official policy of the land was atheism or that there was no religion. However since the fall of the Soviet Union we've seen a resurgence of Central Asians turning back to Islam. Now unfortunately some of these countries such as Tajikistan have had Islamist terrorist organizations beginning to find refuge in their country. Now in Transcaucasia both Armenian and Georgian are majority Orthodox Christians. Armenian actually boast having the oldest church in the world. And the influence of Iran's Shia Islam has been felt in Azerbaijan which is majority Shia. Now Sunni Islam which is what 90% of the world's Muslims practice is also important in the region especially on the Russian side of the Caucasus Mountains. Alright so we've taken a look at the people of Russia and the former republics. Until next time keep on learning.