Title: Boris Yeltsin's Legacy
Headings: BORIS YELTSIN'S FOREIGN POLICY LEGACY
BORIS YELTSIN'S FOREIGN POLICY LEGACY
Robert H. Donaldson
Basic Concepts of Foreign Policy under Yeltsin
Foreign Policy-Making under Yeltsin: The Institutional Legacy
Russia and the "Near Abroad": The Yeltsin Legacy
Russia's Relations with the West: The Yeltsin Legacy
Russia and the "Non-West": The Yeltsin Legacy
Yeltsin's Foreign Policy Legacy & the Impact of Personality
Footnotes

Content: but in Sidney Hook's terms, his personal skills would determine whether he would go down in history as a Great Man or a Great Failure.5
Although Gorbachev had set a new direction and forged new relationships, the foreign policy challenges facing Yeltsin demanded considerable leadership skill. To him fell the unique opportunity of defining a new national identity for Russia and establishing the basic concept for its national security. Moreover, with the collapse of the long-dominant Communist Party, he would need to build the new institutions that would shape foreign policy. Like Gorbachev's, his foreign policy could help set the direction for economic and social changes in the country and could gain the foreign assistance that might spark its recovery from a long downward slide. A totally new challenge lay in establishing relationships of trust and mutual assistance with the fourteen other "newly independent states" that emerged from the Soviet collapse. Russia's new constructive relationships with the West were not yet solidified, and immediate attention to the "non-West" would be required to reduce threats to the security of the borders of Russia and her new neighbors. Finally, Yeltsin would have to pursue policies that ensured that Russia found a prominent "place at the table," to ensure safeguarding not only of its traditional interests, but of its concerns relating to the new dangers of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, ethno-religious conflict, and terrorism. To determine the shape of Boris Yeltsin's foreign policy legacy and to assess the impact of his personality on Russian foreign policy of the past decade, we now proceed to summarize Yeltsin's record in responding to each of these challenges.6
Basic Concepts of Foreign Policy under Yeltsin
Boris Yeltsin's primary aim in foreign policy, like Mikhail Gorbachev's before him, was to create a non-threatening external environment that would be most conducive to his country's internal economic and political development. As in the early decades of Soviet rule, this concentration on domestic development, together with relative shortcomings in military strength, produced a foreign policy of accommodation, retrenchment, and risk-avoidance--at least, in Russia's relations with states beyond the borders of the former USSR. The fall of the CPSU and its Marxist-Leninist ideology, together with the disintegration of the USSR itself, left a conceptual void in the foreign policy of the newly-independent Russian Federation that raised to the forefront the question of Russia's national identity.