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: Russia had never existed as a nation-state; rather, during both the Tsarist and Soviet periods it had been a multinational empire with messianic ambitions. Unlike other European imperial states, the modern Russian nation was not formed prior to the period of colonial expansion. Moreover, the tsars, unlike the rulers of Britain or France, colonized lands that bordered their home territories, thus producing an unusual intermixing of Russian and non-Russian peoples.7 Further complicating the definition of Russia's national identity is the fact that twenty-five million ethnic Russians live outside the Russian Federation, in the other newly independent states of the former Soviet Union. Not only are the people of the Russian Federation experiencing new geopolitical confines, but they are also acutely aware of the relative weakness of their state, in comparison to the superpower status enjoyed by the USSR at the height of its power. The dizzying economic decline of the early 1990s produced a profound sense of national humiliation, as Russia's leaders--first Gorbachev, then Yeltsin--were perceived as meeting with Western leaders in the role of supplicants for foreign aid. The combination of a loss of national mission, a wounded national pride, and a confused national identity rendered more acute the need for Yeltsin to articulate a sense of national purpose in the foreign policy of the new Russia. As presidential advisor Sergei Stankevich wrote in March 1992, "foreign policy with us does not proceed from the directions and priorities of a developed statehood. On the contrary, the practice of our foreign policy. . . will h