On the rostrum of the RAS presidium

The Caucasian region was always a problem for the Russian and then the Soviet state. In the post-Soviet years, it has faced several wars and periods of instability and is almost continually exposed to terrorist threat. Political destabilization leads to economic and social ill-being. The authorities have to search for forms of government that could correspond to the specifics of the situation. Obviously, the search for such forms is doomed to failure without knowing the sources of many modern processes and turning to events that happened several tens and hundreds of years ago. This knowledge should be purely scientific, i.e., based on reliably established facts, well approved, and, at the same time, subject to constant updating. Scientists of the Academy of Sciences constantly work at widening and deepening our ideas about the history of the Caucasus and its cultural, socioeconomic, and ethnoconfessional peculiarities, which is been illustrated vividly by this paper heard at a meeting of the RAS Presidium.