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: The foreign policy record of his administration fairly clearly demonstrated the impact of his personal leadership, as he guided the choice of key personnel, reduced the role of the party bureaucracy, discarded outdated Marxist-Leninist tenets, and conducted an innovative personal diplomacy.4
Gorbachev's experiment in perestroika was an immense failure, resulting in the collapse of the political institutions of the USSR and the breakup of the country itself. Stepping into this precarious environment, which decidedly "admitted of restructuring," Boris Yeltsin clearly occupied the strategic location from which he could exert far-reaching impact on the foreign policy of his newly established realm. In Greenstein's framework, it was the third variable that would prove decisive. On Yeltsin's political skills--the strengths and weaknesses of his personality--would ultimately depend the determination of his personal impact as a leader. He was destined by his situation for greatness; 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.