Answer Trivia For Each According To His Ability

Yesterday I posted the answer to the West Wing Trivia question.  I promised more trivia to keep the minds from focusing on professional responsibility.  C'mon - learning that is more of a liability than an asset.  If I'm ever a hiring partner at a firm that has a certain reputation, I will hire no student that gets above a 90 on the MPRE.  Who wants someone telling you what you can't do.  

When I was in middle school, it was common knowledge that the biggest country in the world was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics - the USSR - the motherland.  If we looked at a map, it was all one big color and had those four simple letters sprawled across it.  Well, it's been a long time since I bought a new globe, but the world has changed since I was in middle school.  And I'm not just talking about the eventual awareness and proper recognition of Lady Gaga and Hillary Duff. 

So, your trivia question for the next few days is this.  It's two fold:

1. According to various websites of ill repute, there are currently fifteen countries that used to comprise the USSR.  Name them.  
2. There are seven countries whose names end in -"stan."  Name those.  Clearly there will be some overlap.

As always, answer in the comments.

I know you all care about the scoring.  So for this week's puzzle, you get 2.3 billion points for each correct answer.  And you get 3.3 billion for each correct answer if you get them all in both categories.  I hope you're keeping score at home, because I sure ain't keeping track here.  It's rather difficult when every guesser is "Anonymous." 

As the bar review professors remind me often, "I know you came to law school because you didn't know how to do math."  That's a fairly incomprehensible statement.  For what it's worth, I came to law school because I did know something about numbers and could see that the one on my bank statement wasn't high enough.