1 Ethnic Erasure: The Role of Border Changes in Soviet Ethnic Cleansing and Return Migration J. Otto Pohl Modern national identification is intimately connected to cartography. The borders and place names on maps represent the historical ties of nationalities to specific territories. Maps are in this sense the title deeds to the collective property of national groups. The ink between nations delineates proprietary ownership of the land inside the borders by a specific group of people linked by a common history, culture and self-conception. The psychological connection of nationalities to the lands of their historical development receives strong reinforcement through the demarcation of this territory on maps. The members of a nationality come to feel that the lands, designated on their maps as their national homeland, exclusively belong to them collectively and cannot be alienated. They thus resist foreign claims that contest the national ownership of these lands. This feeling of exclusive rights by certain groups of people to particular territories is the core of modern nationalism. 1 This connection to the symbolic representation of political borders becomes even more important for people deprived of control of their national territory. People under foreign occupation, or in exile, often display a particularly strong attachment to maps of their homeland as evidence of their unique national connection to the territory. Maps play an important role in inculcating, preserving and justifying this feeling. They are both a symbol and evidence that a defined territory does in fact historically belong to a certain people. 2 Maps help to create and preserve national identification. They can also be used as a weapon in dispossessing a people from their lands. The Soviet government made The acknowledgement of this connection demonstrated by maps provides proof of the illegitimacy of foreign claims to their land. This evidence both fortifies the national resistance of the victimised people and serves as a weapon to undercut international recognition of the occupier’s legal and moral rights to the territory. 1 Robert Kaiser, The Geography of Nationalism in Russia and the USSR (Princeton, NJ, 1994), pp. 4-8. 2 As an example I noticed while living in London that Palestinians often wore clothing or jewelry with the representation of the borders of historic Palestine. They continued to express an emotional attachment to all the land of their ancestors despite the PLO’s formal cessation of 78 % of this territory to Israel in 1988.