How Stalin Created Some of the Post-Soviet World's Worst Ethnic
Conflicts  By Robert Coalson  From bizarre border policies to
the forced deportation of ethnic groups, Stalin oversaw the
policies that gave rise to today's Central Asian strife.
dagestan banner.jpg Investigators and security personnel work at
a scene of suicide blast near a police camp in the Dagestani
town of Khasavyurt, October 24, 2010. A policeman was killed,
and seven people were injured in the attack. (Reuters)  Eighty-
one-year-old Nikolai Khasig was born in Sukhumi in 1932. It was
just one year after Soviet dictator Josef Stalin stripped
Abkhazia of its short-lived status as a full-fledged republic of
the USSR and made it a region of Soviet Georgia.  At the end of
1936, Lavrenty Beria -- at that time the head of the
Transcaucasia region and later the sadistic head of Stalin's
secret police -- invited the popular Abkhaz leader Nestor Lakoba
to dinner at his house in Tbilisi. Lakoba died suddenly --
officially, of a heart attack, but it wa