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'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. 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.