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: Boris Yeltsin's Legacy
BORIS YELTSIN'S FOREIGN POLICY LEGACY
Robert H. Donaldson
Trustees Professor of Political Science, University of Tulsa
Presented to the 41st Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, Los Angeles, California, March 18, 2000
A discussion of the policy legacy that an individual political leader leaves to his country should begin by considering the extent to which a leader and his personal characteristics can have an impact on political events. The study of leadership, personality, and politics has been a preoccupation of social scientists for many decades, and there is a rich literature drawn from observations of a variety of political environments, from democratic to totalitarian.1 The analysis that best frames the present study is that of Fred Greenstein in his classic, Personality and Politics. Of particular relevance is Greenstein's summary discussion of the circumstances in which individual actions affect events: " The likelihood of personal impact varies with 1) the degree to which the actions take place in an evironment which admits of restructuring; 2) the location of the actor in the environment; 3) the actor's peculiar strengths or weaknesses." The latter two conditions are self-explanatory, but the first requires some further elaboration. Political environments that "admit of restructuring," Greenstein explains, are "unstable" or in a state of "precarious equilibrium," whereas a situation that does not admit of restructuring would be one in which the outcome "can be expected to occur even if some of the contributing factors are eliminated. "2
In the context of the foreign policy of the Russian Federation  (or of the USSR before it), it is not difficult to determine which leaders are strategically placed so that their peculiar strengths or weaknesses can be brought to bear on the content of policy. In the Soviet period, since the time of Stalin the General Secretary of the Communist Party occupied the strategic leadership position, whereas in the post-Soviet period--and especially after the passage of the 1993 Constitution--the President of the Russian Federation is positioned to dominate the policy process.