Abstract
During a joint press conference with the Armenian President in Yerevan, March 2005, Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly acknowledged what had long been assumed about the original logic and role of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in the transformation of the post-Soviet states, commenting:
The stated aims were one thing, but in reality the CIS was formed in order to make the Soviet Union’s collapse as civilized and smooth as possible and to minimize the economic and humanitarian losses it entailed, above all for people.
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Notes
A. Åslund, Building Capitalism: The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
I.S. Ivanov, The New Russian Diplomacy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2002).
Z. Brzezinski and P. Sullivan (eds), Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States: Documents, Data, and Analysis (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1997);
M.B. Olcott, A. Åslund and S.W. Garnett, Getting It Wrong: Regional Cooperation and the Commonwealth of Independent States (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999).
D. Lynch, Russian Peacekeeping Strategies in the CIS (New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 2000);
J.P. Willerton, ‘Regional Leadership Amidst Power Contraction: Russia and the FSU’, Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, 25, 1, 1998 (published spring 2000), 83–100.
For example, L.K. Metcalf, ‘Regional Economic Integration in the Former Soviet Union’, Political Research Quarterly, 50, 3 (1997) 529–49;
D. Trenin, The End of Eurasia: Russia on the Border Between Geopolitics and Globalization (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2002);
J.P. Willerton and G. Cockerham, ‘Russia, the CIS, and Eurasian Interconnections’, in J. Sperling, S. Kay and S.V. Papacosma (eds), Limiting Institutions? The Challenge of Eurasian Security Governance (Manchester: Manchester Press, 2003) 185–207.
A.C. Lynch, ‘The Realism of Russia’s Foreign Policy’, Europe-Asia Studies, 53, 1 (2001) 7–31.
H.A. Welsh and J.P. Willerton, ‘Regional cooperation and the CIS: West European lessons and post-Soviet experience’, International Politics, 34, 1 (March 1997), 33–61.
Former Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov has written that of the 164 documents adopted by the Council of Heads of State and Council of Heads of Government for the period 1991–98, only seven had gone into full effect (as of 1 February 2000); see I.S. Ivanov, The New Russian Diplomacy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2002), p. 83.
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© 2007 John P. Willerton and Mikhail A. Beznosov
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Willerton, J.P., Beznosov, M.A. (2007). Russia’s Pursuit of its Eurasian Security Interests: Weighing the CIS and Alternative Bilateral—Multilateral Arrangements. In: Malfliet, K., Verpoest, L., Vinokurov, E. (eds) The CIS, the EU and Russia. Studies in Central and Eastern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230210998_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230210998_4
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