The papers in this special issue of Eurasian Geography and Economics are designed to
illustrate key aspects of the Caucasus region 15 years after the dissolution of the Soviet
Union. For a region that is so complex in both physiographic and human aspects, we had to
be quite selective in our choice of subjects. As a result, we present an overview as well as
five specialized papers on aspects of the economic, political, and population geography of
the Caucasus. Originally, we intended to focus solely on the North Caucasus, the federal
Russian part of the region, but because the links across the Caucasus are still intense in political
and human terms, we decided to include one paper (Radvanyi and Muduyev, 2007) that
considers the nature of these linkages between Transcaucasia (as the Russians call it) and the
North Caucasus. Two papers offer more detail about the post-Soviet population developments
in the two largest regions, Stavropol’ Kray (O’Loughlin et al., 2007) and the Republic
of Dagestan (Eldarov et al., 2007); another reflects on the impacts of the Chechen wars on
the neighboring regions (Vendina et al., 2007); and a fifth contrasts the perspectives from the
federal center, Moscow, and those from the various stripes of political ideology in Russia
with the opinions of the local populations about the causes of conflicts in the region
(Kolossov and Toal, 2007)