Next an effort was made to achieve a compromise and rally support of the Duma and the people behind a new government. Foreign minister Evgeny Primakov, who had connections and an important past in the communist party and the police establishment, switched his state functions to become prime minister, while newcomers to the governing group included a number of outsiders as well as some former officials brought back to high office. Yeltsin's prestige sank lower than ever, and it was expected that he would be promptly forced to resign or at least become unmistakably a mere figurehead. Yet, although again ailing, the President apparently thought differently, and he merely assured the Russians that he would not run for office in the year 2000. (Whether he could run was a matter of dispute, depending on whether his first election would count towards the constitutional limit enacted later - eventually the supreme court decided that it would count.). But neither Primakov nor anyone else seemed to dominate the scene. In fact, the government appeared to have no clear economic policy as it promised on the one hand to continue the free-market reforms and the modernization of Russia and on the other to pay quickly its huge debts to employees and retirees and to bring the population of the country out of its penury. Nor was it going to accomplish the latter by printing all the money needed and producing another great inflation, which, in any case, was rising rapidly.
Foreign Policy
It was Gorbachev and his associates, not Yeltsin and his government, who made the historic decision to let Eastern Europe go and who ended the cold war. They also made a major contribution to the breakup of the Soviet Union itself, although in that development Yeltsin too played a prominent part. The net result was a transformation of international relations and, indeed, of the political map. Most important, the dread of an impending mutual atomic annihilation disappeared. Much as one can rightly worry about the possibility of an atomic war, for example, between Pakistan and India, or about the use of atomic weapons by some rogue government or even a private group, these dangers do not begin to compare to the Armageddon threatened by the intense, decades-long confrontation of the two superpowers. International relations lost their apocalyptic character and became more a matter of common sense and adjustment. Yeltsin and Russian foreign ministers, in particular Aleksandr Kozyrev, continued the orientation and the work of Gorbachev and Shevardnadze.
Taking into account the immensity of the change, the breakup of the Soviet Union, which resulted in the sudden appearance of fifteen independent states in Europe and Asia, where there had previously been one, occurred amazingly peacefully, in particular as far as Russia was concerned. To be sure, the bloody and tragic Chechen war must be kept in mind, although, strictly speaking, it represented a struggle within the Russian Federation itself rather than between that
Federation and other newly created republics. Otherwise, the Russian army played a secondary role in the bitter fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which came to center on Nagorny Karabakh, in purportedly supporting or even promoting the rebellion of the Abkhazians against Georgia, in guarding the southern border of Tajikistan, and in still other instances of crisis and war. Characteristically, Russian interventions were marginal both geographically and in their importance for the evolution of Russia proper.
More central were Russian relations with Ukraine and Belarus, connected with Russia by centuries of history and by very numerous cultural and personal ties, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Russian relations with the Baltic states to the west and northern Kazakhstan to the east, which, while not "Russian" in the same sense as Ukraine and Belarus, or even Slavic, contained a very large percentage of Russians in their populations. In fact, some thirty million ethnic Russians found themselves outside the Russian Federation, perhaps twenty million in Ukraine and ten million in other new republics, where sometimes, as in such small countries as Estonia and Latvia, they formed a third or more of the population. Russian-Ukranian relations have been most significant and problematic. Whereas much of eastern Ukraine is ethnically Russian and Russians constitute the largest ethnicity also in the Crimea, transferred to Ukraine by Soviet authorities as recently as 1954, western Ukraine is not only solidly Ukrainian, but also, in part, ardently nationalist, and, again in part, even different in religion, professing Uniate Catholicism rather than Orthodoxy. Under the circumstances, and pressed hard by their respective nationalists, the two governments did well to settle their mutual affairs peacefully, as reflected in the treaty of friendship of May 30-31, 1997, signed by Yeltsin and Leonid Kuchma, confirming the boundary between the two countries and agreeing that Russia lease from Ukraine for twenty years the great Crimean naval base of Sevastopel (so prominent in the Crimean War of 1853-56). The Russian need for peace followed readily from everything discussed previously; as to Ukraine, it was probably worse off economically than Russia, on which it depended for fuel and other imports and to which it was heavily in debt.
White Russia, or Belarus, has been very different from Ukraine. Behind Ukraine in developing a sense of identity or nationalism of any kind (the Lithuanian-Russian state is one of its main historical assets), Belarus has also exhibited little or no hostility towards Russia, a feeling that has been one of the inspirations of Ukranian nationalism. Poor, its economy unreformed, and dependent on Russia for fuel and other needs, Belarus seemed to be in many ways an ideal junior partner for its giant neighbor. And indeed Belarus and Russia signed on April 2, 1997, a Treaty of Union. Although Yeltsin presented that treaty as a major success, it was not clear what it meant or where it would lead. In fact, economists in particular asked, what could Russia gain from Belarus? In addition, the crude, dictatorial head of Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenko, kept arousing opposition at home and even in the world (as when he was
forcing foreign diplomatie representatives to vacate their domiciles in Minsk), and, albeit in his own way pro-Russian, was regarded with much suspicion by the Russians.
In the cases of the Baltic countries, Kazakhstan and most other successor states, the Russian government was not concerned with their historical past or their ethnic and cultural closeness to the Russians, but only with how these obviously foreign entities treated their ethnically Russian subjects. Yet tensions were raised by the possibility that a change in the Russians' approach might lead to their claiming on ethnic grounds territories all the way from a strip along the Estonian border to the entire northern Kazakhstan. Nor is the issue of "the treatment" of Russians in the succession republics an easy one. It pivots on requirements for citizenship and especially on how quickly and how well Russian inhabitants must learn the official language of their republic to qualify for citizenship, although sometimes when the candidates for citizenship or their families moved into the area also matter. And the languages in question range from difficult to very difficult. Still, some adjustments and compromises have been made, and the attitude of the Russian government on this entire issue deserves to be considered on the whole reasonable, unless one is to assume that it has no right at all to be concerned with the fate of Russians outside Russia.
The Soviet government and the Red Army also gave up Eastern Europe, including East Germany, and in fact evacuated it, in general, in a remarkably precipitous and total way. During the years that followed, the countries in that area underwent different experiences, some of them like and others unlike those of Russia, ranging from the absorption of East Germany into a larger Germany, and Vaclav Havel's liberal regime in Czechoslovakia to strong residual communism and neo-communism in such states as Rumania, Bulgaria, and even to some extent Poland. Yet throughout Eastern Europe the period preceding the collapse of 1989 was regarded as that of Russian, as well as communist, oppression, and, once the oppression ended, the inhabitants of the area were at best indifferent to the Russians and their fate. In fact, as debates about the expansion of N.A.T.O. and other evidence indicated, East European countries could be considered as much enemies as friends of Russia. A greater sympathy awaited new Russia in central and western Europe and in the United States. Following Gorbachev's example, Yeltsin maintained excellent personal relation with Western leaders, such as Chancellor Kohl and President Clinton. In January 1996 Russia was admitted to membership in the Council of Europe. In general Clinton and West European leaders and states, including Germany, strongly supported Yeltsin and his limping program of democracy and modernization, although, to be sure, no Marshall Plan was established for Russia, and although Russians felt deceived in their expectations of a much larger sponsorship. The Russian Federation also tried to maintain good relations with other neighbors as well as more distant countries, in spite of such serious hindrances as its inability to settle the issue of the sovereignty of certain of the Kurile islands with Japan.