7 - Russia's foreign policy reconsidered

Summary

Having lived gloriously for a long time [nations] are unable to break with their past, whatever they do. They experience its influence at the very time they work to destroy it. In the midst of their outstanding transformations, they remain in the essential aspects of their character and destiny the product of their history. Even the most daring and powerful revolution cannot abolish national traditions that have existed for a long time.

François Guizot, Essai sur l'histoire de France (1824)

As a result of imperialist and civil wars, Russian temporarily disappeared from the horizon as a Great Power. Russia is coming back to the international stage. Let us hope that the day is at hand when her reappearance will be felt so strongly, that no one will dare to contradict her voice.

Izvestia, 7 December 1922

Do not think of Russia as a dead tiger. It is a great state that will demonstrate its might. It is necessary to be attentive in the conduct of relationships with Russia: It is never simple diplomacy – it is never a simple country.

Deng Xiaoping

If both its geopolitical position and the inherent set of values underlying its notion of the “national interest” shape a state's foreign policy, then currently no other foreign policy is subject to greater pressure and disorientation than that of post-communist Russia. Within the short space of three years the Russian people have seen the ideology that dominated their polity for seven decades de-legitimized. Worse still, they have lost the vast territories that for centuries they considered their own and have witnessed the disappearance of an imperial status that has been part and parcel to Russia's national being since at least the sixteenth century.