Not much has changed. I see that many people even in the American media are wont to refer to Ossetians and Abkhazians as "Russians." Of course, the Abkhaz and the Ossetians are not ethnic Russians. Stalin tended to deport people in order to do away with nationalist sentiments. Today Russia just reclassifies people; it gives them passports and calls them "Russians." (And if that doesn't work, the Russians like to obliterate the towns and the countryside that the offending populations inhabit. See, e.g., Grozny, Chechnya. Afterwards a democratic referendum is held [the dead do not have a vote] and peace is proclaimed.)
The Europeans have the right approach: let Czechoslavakia break into two countries and then invite both to join a truly transnational union. Of course, even the EU is not fully consistent. Witness its member states' treatment of, say, Basque nationalist sentiments.
Peter Tillers' dynamic evidence page
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