What does Russia need the Caucasus for?

“…less than an hour and a half after, the iron division - the one, which the best military units of our allies were afraid to face - ceased to exist. On my behalf, on behalf of the tsar court, on behalf of the whole Russian army, give love and fraternal greeting to the fathers, mothers, sisters, wives and brides of these brave “eagles” of the Caucasus, who, by their fearless heroic deed, marked the beginning of the end to the German hordes. Never will Russia forget this heroic deed. All honor to them!
With fraternal regards, Nikolai II. 25 August 1915”.
  The question “Does Russia need the Caucasus?”, under which they more often mean “What do the Russians need the Caucasus and its population for?” is far from being idle inquiry today. The amount of mutual pretensions and offences is reaching the critical point and there seems to be no end to it. There’s no way to understand Russian politics in the Caucasus. That’s because there’s nothing to understand. It does not exist, this policy. There’s no strategy of development of the Caucasus as part of the Russian state. And a middlebrow with superficial knowledge of history may even find it difficult to understand, why our ancestors, with a lot of effort and casualties, having killed more than half of the locals, conquered these hilly and even lands.
For most Russians the Caucasus is a TV series, an irritating soap opera with endless explosions and fire-fights. And nothing else.
  But let me tell you about different Caucasus. About this most complicated region of Russia: multinational, multicultural, controversial. What can one write about the Caucasus? About the people inhabiting it? Do you know that over 100 nationalities, different in origin, language and even confession, live there?
  The Caucasus is not only healthy climate, grand nature, healing springs and pure air. Thanks to communication with representatives of different nationalities and confessions, I’ve opened up the world of the Caucasus culture, unique and original.
It’s not for nothing that Russian classics admired hillmen. I don’t want to and won’t have to break the practice of Russian literature. A part of the Russian soul has always been given to the Caucasus, be this soul female or male. Even before starting to live there I already loved the Caucasus with the same love that Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy loved it...
I admire the beauty…This beauty, which one finds in the Caucasus, - it’s most real. It’s not only outer beauty – there is power and depth, the real beauty of spirit standing behind it… And this beauty is expressed through everything: as if copying the severe and sublime beauty of the Caucasus mountains, there is the beauty of customs and traditions, music, dances, words (the languages of the nations of the Caucasus are a completely separate phenomenon in the world of linguistics)… and, of course, the beauty of the people. It is a completely special kind of beauty. It is so different from the Slavic beauty, in which the most precious traits are simplicity, purity and kindness. One can’t call the beauty of the Caucasus faces simple. There is a lot of something severe and cold in it, but, at the same time, noble and aristocratic.
  I don’t want to speculate about the difference in mentalities, political peripeteias and historical relationships of the nations. It’s a topic for far more than a dozen pages. All I want to say is that we - all the nations of the former USSR - despite our differences, share one sociocultural space.
The Caucasus is one of the rooms in the house called “Russia”. And why do I have to feel a guest in one of the rooms of my own house?
What for does Russia need the Caucasus? And what for does it need Siberia, the Far East, the Kuril Islands, the loss of which such a great amount of Russians are nostalgic about. Wise statesmen of old times had conquered living space for us for hundreds of years. They had built an Empire for the Russian nation, which now does everything to help the authorities to fritter it away, yielding to primitive nationalistic provocations. The Caucasus and other territories and regions are a part of strong and united Russia. Our mission is to continue bearing the honorary burden of a unifying nation, related to national development. And as for difficulties, we’re used to them, and we’ll get by.