In fact, the coming demise of the Soviet Union would vindicate not only ‘primordialist’ theories of nationalism, like Gumilev’s, which saw nationalism as immanent, natural and essential, a fundamental, unchanging and practically genetic identity; the constructivists – those who believed that nationalism was a ‘construct’ created for social reasons or out of political expediency – also proclaimed victory, and with some justification: the Soviet Union fell apart not along true national lines, but along those of largely artificial nations identified by Soviet ethnographers and cartographers in the 1920s. In other words, according to political scientists such as Rogers Brubaker, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and other republics sought independence from the USSR not due to some strong primordial ethnic unity, but rather due to the simple fact that they had been given artificial statehood. In the right circumstances (wide-ranging economic crisis, combined with a real fear of the rise of Russian nationalism) this was simple to translate into real statehood. Not a single ethnic group that was not given national status by Soviet ethnographers bothered to revolt against authority in 1991 (though later, Chechnya would).

—Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 144.