Gorbachev spent the last two years of his rule desperately trying to convince the West that the Soviet Union hadbecome something else and that they should invest in his reforms so that world politics couldbeforevertransformed. Hewas disappointed. In May 1990, he told visiting German bankers that 'An historic turn is occurring in Europe and the world. If this turn is missed . . . then this will be narrow-minded pragmatism... If the Soviet Union does not fundamentally change itself, then nothing will change in the world. The Soviet people have turned to new forms of life. This is an epochal turn... But in the West, and especially in the US, they don't show a sufficiently broad approach.'[341] At the first Group of Eight (G8) meeting in London in July 1991, Gorbachev asked President George Bush explicitly: 'What kind of Soviet Union does the United States want to
see?'[342]
Between Europe and the United States, 1992-2000
There were three main discourses on Russian identity in the 1990s in Moscow: liberal, conservative and centrist. Each understood Russia with respect to internal, external and historical Others.[343] Liberals identified Russia's future, at first with the American, and then with the European, present. Theyidentified against the Soviet past and against the internal representation of that Other: the conservative discourse of Communists and far-right national patriots. They recognised the weakness of the Moscow federal Centre vis-a-vis its eighty- nine federal subjects, but felt economic prosperity within a democratic market economy would secure Russia from threats. Russia was understood as part of a universal civilisation of modern liberal market democracy.
Conservatives identified Russia's future with a Soviet past shorn of its Stalinist brutality and an ethno-national Russian past of Great Power status and strong centralised rule. Its domestic Other were the liberals who were understood as a fifth column of the United States and the West. The vulnerability of the Moscow federal Centre to the growing autonomy of the republics was a major source of insecurity, necessitating a more forceful response from Moscow. Russia was understood as a unique, sometimes Eurasian, project to be differentiated from Western conceptions of freedom and economics.
The centrist discourse identified Russia with European Social Democracy, but against American wild west capitalism. It also identified with an idealised Soviet past, but its internal Other was neither liberal nor conservative, but rather the disintegrative processes occurring within the country, most graphically, in Chechnya. Centrists explicitly rejected an ethno-national conceptualisation of Russia, instead adopting a civic national 'Rossian' identity designed to capture the multinational character of the Russian Federation.196 While Russia was unique, it was situated within a universal civilisation of modern Social Democracy.197
In 1992, Russia was polarised between liberal and conservative identities, with liberals implementing their economic and political plans to make Russia
Westview Press, 1996), pp. 69-94; Bennett, Condemned to Repetition?, pp. 306-9; Johan Matz, Constructing a Post-Soviet International Political Reality (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2001); English, Russia and the Idea of the West; Prizel, National Identity and foreign policy, pp. 220-68; Margot Light, 'Post-Soviet Russian Foreign Policy', in Archie Brown (ed.), Contemporary Russian Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Neil Malcolm, 'Russian Foreign-Policy Decision-Making', in Peter Shearman (ed.), Russian Foreign Policy since 1990 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995), pp. 3-27; and William Zimmerman, The Russian People and Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
196 Pal Kolsto, Political Construction Sites: Nation-Building in Russia and the Post-Soviet States (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000), pp. 203-27; and Tadashi Anno, 'Nihonjiron and russkaia ideia: Transformation ofJapanese and Russian Nationalism in the Postwar Era and Beyond', in Gilbert Rozman (ed.),Japan andRussia: The Tortuous Path to Normalization (New York: St Martin's Press, 2000), pp. 344-7.
197 Matz, Constructing Post-Soviet Reality, p. 169; and English, Russia and the Idea of the West,
p. 237.
into a liberal market democracy. The collapse of the Russian economy, the failure of the US to provide any significant aid, the rampant and rising crime, corruption and violence associated with privatisation and democratisation and the new issue of 25 million Russians living in the Former Soviet Union, discredited liberal discourse.[344] But conservative discourse did not take its place. Instead, a centrist discourse emerged, which, over the i990s, became at first the main competitor with conservatives, and finally, by the late i990s, the predominant representation of Russian identity.
Each of these three discourses had implications for Russian interests and foreign policy. Liberals desired a Russian alliance with the United States and the West. Conservatives desired a Russian alliance with anybody in the world who would balance against the United States and the West. Centrists preferred no alliances with anyone against any particular Other, but rather Russia as one among several Great Powers in a multilateral management of global affairs.
Russia's liberal identity was institutionally privileged in 1992.[345] The MFA under Andrei Kozyrev was initially the only coherent foreign policy institution in Russia, and Kozyrev purged it of Soviet holdovers. But the MFA's monopoly did not go unchallenged. The Russian Ministry of Defence (MOD) and presidential Security Council (SC) were created in the spring. The defence and international relations committees in parliament became sites of conservative and centrist attacks on the liberal MFA. The 'power ministries', the different intelligence and security branches of the federal government, also institutionalised centre-conservative discursive renderings of Russian identity. Moreover, elements ofthe armed forces, most notably and consequentially, the 14th army in the Trans-Dniestrian area of Moldova and local air force and army personnel in Abkhazia in Georgia, acted independently of the Yeltsin government, creating faits accomplis on the ground.[346] It took time for the Russian government to reassert control over armed groups acting in the name of Russia in the FSU.
The conservative Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) was the only mass national political party. By early 1993, the MFA had become a policy-making arm of the increasingly centrist Yeltsin government, and so liberal identity was to be found mostly in national daily newspapers such as
Kommersant and Izvestiia, as well as in the research institutions revived under Gorbachev.[347] In October 1993, Yeltsin crushed a primary institutional carrier of conservative identity, the parliament, replacing it in December 1993 with a no less conservative collection of legislators in the Duma, but in a constitutionally subordinate position to the centrist president. The national TV networks came increasingly under centrist control, although the weekend evening 'analytical news' programmes, such as Namedni (Recent events), Svo- bodaslova (Free speech), Vremena (Times), Zerkalo (Mirror) and others remained national free-for-alls, with all discourses represented. Newspapers also continued to reflect the widest range of Russian identities, and regional TV stations, the instruments of local governors, reflected the political coloration of that particular region. The dominance of the Russian economy by 'oligarchs' also institutionalised that part of the centrist-liberal discourse that identified the recovery of Russian Great Power status in the world, and the strengthening of the federal centre in Moscow, as best achieved through economic growth and
343
I derive these discourses from popular novels, history textbooks, film reviews and newspaper articles in Hopf,
345
My discussion of institutions relies on Bennett,
346
Bennett,