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: 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. Under what circumstances, then--i.e., at which times or in which issue areas--might we expect the occupants of these positions to have impact on policy? Guided by Greenstein's first proposition, we might hypothesize that a leader's impact would be greater in times of political transition or internal instability. It would also be greater in times when an unrestrained individual dictatorship (a "cult of personality," in Soviet parlance) overrode the norms of collective leadership in the top councils of the party or state. Conversely, it would be unlikely that a leader would have much impact at relatively settled times, when the distribution of influence among interest groups and institutions is fairly static and shared governance (or "collective leadership") prevails.