Point well taken, though the largest ethnic groups did get independence with the breakup of USSR. So really we are no just trying to find ways for some peripheral areas of Russia proper to break away along ethnic lines. I really think the Caucasus are the only significant area of ethnic identity coupled with a strong independence streak (I could be totally wrong here) so the POD/alt history approach should probabkly focus there.
Altay and Tyva could break away along turkic ethnic lines as well I think ...
Nah, the USSR actually broke up almost
exactly along the lines of all its constituent republics, the only time things really changed were when an area was contested between two or more former republics (the Nagorno-Karabakh, Ferghana Valley, etc.).
The problem with balkanizing other places is that while Russia is by no means a homogenous land, is that most places for all or most of their history have never known anything other than Russian rule. It's
hard for a Siberian people who were conquered and Russified in say the 1600s to try and come up with an identity and national ideals that would be a change from the centuries of Russian rule (and subsequent cultural influence) that they have undergone.
And honestly, desires for separatism and autonomy are not always equivalent to desires for independence. A place like Altai, which you list as somewhere that has potential for independence, has a little over 200,000 people today, let alone back in the Russian Empire. It doesn't have the economic prospects or population to support independence. Sure it has minerals, but it needs Russian money and workers to staff the mines, and independence would forfeit all of that. Not to mention the relative remoteness of the territory makes it fairly easy for Russia to simply lock down everything of value and leave whoever is still rebelling out in the taiga to freeze.
As you mention however, the Caucasus is pretty much the trouble spot for Russia. When it comes to conquests made by the Russian Empire, the Caucasus and Central Asia were some of the last major places to enter the Russian sphere of influence, and in many ways, the process of properly integrating the Caucasus territories into the Russian nation is still an ongoing issue today. Dagestan, Chechnya, Circassia, etc. None of these are without their local separatists and opponents of Russian rule. Hell, Sochi on the Black Sea coast in the North Caucasus is going to host the Winter Olympics in 2014, something that local Circassian groups have objected to greatly, so in all likelihood, the Sochi Olympics are going to be a major acid test for not only Russia's ability to put together an international event.
My money's on them though, historically, Russia or states controlling Russia (in the case of the Soviet Union, which was NOT synonymous with Russia) have done a very good job with this sort of thing.
How about we take a page from China's warlord era and apply it to Russia? Russia balkanizes along military lines while the peripheries crumble off. The Russian warlords waste what IOTL were the Lenin and Stalin decades fighting each other, then Germany comes to introduce the "Russia Incident". You could have the Germans splitting up their conquests into myriad groups.
The problem was China was already in dire straits even before the warlord era, and had spent several decades under varying degrees of influence from foreign powers. Russia was effectively a developing great power and even despite its fairly poor showing in WWI was by no means the anemic state that China was.
Plus there is just a massive amount of territory in Eurasia for any potential invader to occupy, and it's unlikely that the Slavic Ukrainians or various other constituent peoples of the Russian Empire would be treated all that well by the Germans or anyone else (two world wars and a few interwar conflicts proved that pretty decisively).
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