Il complesso ruolo della violenza nell'interminabile dissoluzione degli Stati territoriali plurinazionali. Un confronto fra Jugoslavia, Impero sovietico e Russia contemporanea

The collapse in different ways of some multinational states at the end of the twentieth century (empires or micro-empires and ap-parent federations) prompted questions about the role that violence played in their disintegration. While some states have experienced peace-ful separations (Czechoslovakia), others, such as the former Yugoslavia and only to a small extent the Soviet Union, have sought to violently hinder political-territorial disintegration, escalating violence and repres-sion to the extent of democides, genocides, ethnic cleansing, mass slaughter, and population displacement. This paper, developing personal reflections of the author and at the same time using a factual and theo-retical analysis, aims to compare three case studies of disintegration (Yu-goslavia, the Soviet Empire and contemporary Russia), seeking to identi-fy the main factors (ideal and material) that stimulated, or conversely re-strained, the use of violence in the course of disintegration. Indeed, these very factors may provide insight into whether those processes of disinte-gration have come to a halt or still underlie a long ongoing disintegrative phenomenon that former imperial centers are striving to stop with vio-lence. While the degree of the latter may be limited and “settling” in the former Yugoslavia, contemporary Russia's attempt to restrain the long post-imperial disintegration for years has been involving a shift to open violence - that could affect even the internal dimension - along the lines of what occurred in Yugoslavia in the 1990s.