#5
Rossiiskiye Vesti
No. 15
April 2002
[translation from RIA Novosti for personal use only]
HAS THE KREMLIN ABANDONED ITS MULTIPOLARITY DOCTRINE?
By Dr. Artem ULUNYAN (History)

My interest was drawn to that part of the presidential address in which he spoke about the international stance of Russia. Judging by everything, the Kremlin has abandoned its multipolairty doctrine in favour of a completely new formula of the multivectoral nature of Russia's interests.

The stress was put not on confrontation with adversaries and potential opponents but on the principle of survival in this complicated world. This ideology is based not on any unions, "triangles" of allies or anything of the kind, but on policy with regard to Europe. It appears that Russia has finished its "Asian march." Vladimir Putin as a man who knows Europe better than the East is logically attracted to the European miracle more than to the Chinese "leap."

A year ago the Kremlin tried to win the East as its ally against the West and Europe as its ally against the USA. Today only the latter part of the formula is still operational. There are grounds to assume that the new foreign policy of the Kremlin was chosen consciously and with one goal in mind: to ensure at least a relatively objective, from the viewpoint of Vladimir Putin, attitude to Russia's efforts and interests above all in the economic sphere.

The Russian president, who has come face to face with reality, seems to be no longer interested in deliberations about a "great nation" and other myths. His expectations of "the stabilisation of the situation," "normalisation" and the like proved to be excessive. Oil prices, which provoked the euphoria of many economists and politicians, have not become the potent cure against socio-economic flops. The Kremlin is coming to see that much depends not on primitive price hikes in periods of international cataclysms and conflicts but on a substantiated foreign policy and stand on the international scene.

This forced the president to admit that nobody intends to fight or attack Russia. But the world is not altruistic either. Of course, the president wanted his words to be heard not only in Russia. But anyway, he renounced the dogmas of a certain collusion against Russia, the creation of a "terrorist ark" from the Balkans to the Philippines, and so on, which polluted the power corridors.

Yet the Kremlin is worried by the situation that developed in the world by the spring of 2002. It was not by chance that the president has stated, just as before, that Moscow would pay priority attention to relations within the CIS. There are grounds to believe that, seeing the impossibility of competing on a par with industrialised countries in a vast geographical area, Russia will try to maintain its leading role within the framework of the CIS.

But this is where Moscow will have quite a few surprises (which Vladimir Putin did not mention). To begin with, the current CIS policy of the Russian Foreign Ministry will hardly yield good fruit. The political regimes in the CIS countries are changing and Russia will have to seek for allies in their societies in relations with many CIS countries. This entails more underwater reefs than the conventional relations with the USA, France, Germany or Britain. Regrettably, the presidential address did not say anything about the new principles of Russia's foreign policy in the post-Soviet space.

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