development.[348]
We can see the three discourses of Russian identity in relations with Belarus, the FSU or near abroad, NATO, and NATO's war against Yugoslavia in April 1999.[349] Conservative construction of Russian interests in Belarus and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) more generally was the restoration of the Soviet Union in these former Soviet republics. This included the advocacy of the forceful defence of ethnic Russians in these places, and the use of coercion to return these republics, excepting the Baltic, to Moscow's rule. Both the expansion of NATO to the east, and NATO's war against Yugoslavia on the behalf of Kosovo's Albanian majority, were construed as a direct US threat to Russian security, necessitating a Russian military response. Conservatives identified with their Slavic brethren in Belarus and Serbia, generating an ethno-national Russian interest in these countries absent in the other two discourses.
Liberal constructions of Russian interests could not be more different. Understanding the Soviet past as something to be avoided, they were against its restoration in the form of reunification with Belarus or a centralised CIS under Moscow's management. Interests in the FSU should be the product of market economic calculations, not ethno-national fraternity or an atavistic Cold War competition with the US. Liberals did not oppose the expansion of NATO, but for its domestic political empowerment of conservatives.204 While liberals did not support NATO's war against Yugoslavia, they also saw no security implications for Russia, except for its energising of conservative discourse at home.
Russian foreign policy was neither liberal nor conservative, but centrist, at least after 1992. Integration with Belarus was neither spurned nor accelerated, but rather treated as an issue of economic efficiency.205 The creation of the CIS was neither treated as trivial nor understood as a way to restore the Soviet Union, but was instead cobbled together to co-ordinate defence and economic policy among its twelve very different members.206 NATO expansion was neither welcomed nor opposed by arming or allying with other states against it. Instead, it was opposed, with the expectation that Russia's interests would be taken into account as much as was politically feasible as the expansion unfolded. NATO's war in Kosovo was opposed vigorously, but once begun, Russian efforts were aimed at getting Slobodan Milosevic to sue for peace as quickly as possible, not at arming him, or encouraging him to resist.207
The common centrist thread through the 1990s was to maintain or restore Russia's Great Power status through economic development at home and the empowerment of multilateral international institutions abroad. These main themes were evident in Russian foreign policy towards the diaspora. Despite incessant conservative calls to use military force to rescue Russians from discriminatory citizenship laws in the Baltic states, Moscow consistently worked through multilateral institutions, such as the Council of Europe and the Council for Security and Co-operation in Europe.208 Meanwhile, Russian multinational companies, such as Yukos, Lukoil and Gazprom, cemented a Russian presence in the FSU through direct investments and debt-for-equity swaps to amortise local energy arrears.209
204 Ekedahl and Goodman, WarsofEduardShevardnadze,pp. 169-76; James M. Goldgeier, Not Whether but When (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), pp. 15-16; Kvitsinskii, Vremiaisluchai,pp. 39-43,67-9;Chernyaev My Six Years,pp. 272-3; Kornienko, Kholodnaia voina, pp. 264-7; and Primakov, Gody vbol'shoi politike, pp. 232-3.
205 Vyachaslau Paznyak, 'Customs Union of Five and the Russia-Belarus Union', in Dwan and Pavliuk, Building Security, pp. 66-79.
206 MarthaBrill Olcott, Anders Aslund, and Sherman W. Garnett, GettingitWrong(Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999); Matz, ConstructingPost-Soviet Reality; and Lena Jonson, 'Russia and Central Asia', in Roy Allison and Lena Jonson (eds.), Central Asian Security: The New International Context (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2001).
207 Primakov, Gody vbol'shoi politike, pp. 174-6, 305. See also Allen Lynch, 'The Realism of Russia's Foreign Policy', Europe-Asia Studies 53, 1 (Jan. 2001): 7-31.
208 Kolsto, Political Construction Sites, pp. 208-13.
209 Olcott, Aslund and Garnett, Getting it Wrong, pp. 54-66.
Conclusion
The Stalinist understanding of the Soviet Self squandered pro-Soviet sympathies in Eastern Europe and anti-German feelings throughout Europe so as to reproduce the NSM in the socialist community. The post-Stalinist discourse of difference multiplied allies in the Third World, but entailed the loss of China as an ally and spurred the quest for difference in Eastern Europe. Subsequent suppression of the latter, combined with support for NLMs, led to a Soviet Union encircled by states allied against it. The Gorbachev revolution eliminated that Soviet Great Power vanguard identity that had fixed the Soviet Union and the US in a global competition for international dominance. Soviet interests in the NLMs and control of Eastern Europe disappeared with the old Soviet identity. The Russian Federation understands itself today as a Great Power who can either join European Social Democratic civilisation as a counterweight to US liberal market hegemony, or bandwagon with that hegemony in order to pursue more narrow tactical considerations in defence of its own fissiparous periphery.
What is the Soviet Union? What is Russia? These are questions about a state's identity. The answers are found in how a state understands itself, in relationship to its significant Others, at home and abroad. We have seen that how that question was answered in Moscow from the end of the Second World War to the dawn of the twenty-first century has profoundly affected foreign policy and international order more generally. States interact not only with other states, but also with themselves, with their societies and institutions. Interstate interaction affords an opportunity for other states to help empower or disempower the discourses of identity that are being reproduced at home. But they cannot in and of themselves account for a state's identity. States interact with their own pasts, their own social groups, their own political institutional landscapes. These form the domestic sources of a state's identity, and are fundamental to understanding any state's foreign policy.
The Soviet Union and the road to communism
LARS T. LIH
The heart of the governing ideology of the Soviet Union was an image of itself as a traveller on the road to communism. This image was embedded in the narrative of class struggle and class mission created by Karl Marx and first embodied in a mass political movement by European Social Democracy. When Russian Social Democrats took power in October 1917, they founded a regime that was unique in its day because of their profound sense that the country had embarked on a journey of radical self-transformation.
Throughout its history, the Soviet Union's self-definition as a traveller on the road to socialism coloured its political institutions, its economy, its foreign policy and its culture. The inner history of Soviet ideology is thus the story of a metaphor - a history of the changing perceptions of the road to communism. In 1925, Nikolai Bukharin's book Road to Socialism exuded the confidence of the first generation of Soviet leaders. Sixty years later, the catch-phrase 'which path leads to the temple?' reflected the doubts and searching of the perestroika era. Right to the end, Soviet society assumed that there was a path with a temple at the end of it and that society had the duty to travel down that path.
348
Pavel Baev, 'Russian Policies and Non-Policies toward Subregional Projects around its Borders', in R. Dwan and O. Pavliuk (eds.),