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With this one appointment, the single foreign policy institution most respon-

sible for the maintenance of the Soviet Union’s vanguard identity, and for

advocating support for NLMs around the world, was cut off at the discursive

knees. Moreover, the MFA became the single most important foreign-policy

institution, no longer competing with the CCID.

171

In July 1985 Gorbachev replaced Gromyko with Eduard Shevardnadze, who

replaced personnel, created a new division on arms control and disarmament,

a department of humanitarian and cultural contacts and established a for-

malised conduit to alternative discourses with the creation of an academic

consultative council within the ministry. This council institutionalised the par-

ticipation of experts, such as Primakov and Arbatov, whose reformist views

had been largely ignored until then. Within a year, the MFA had experienced

more turnover in personnel than any other Soviet bureaucracy. They brought

new thinking and reinforced the MFA’s focus on West European and American

affairs, at the expense of the developing world and Eastern Europe. Shevard-

nadze demanded ‘unembellished pictures of events’, just as Gorbachev was

demanding from obkom secretaries and the media at home, and developed an

alternative intelligence network of foreign ministry ofﬁcials and researchers at

IMEMO, ISKAN, the new Institute of Europe and the Moscow State Institute

of International Affairs (MGIMO).

Shevardnadze’s ‘very non-professionalism helped him take bolder deci-

sions . . . He would often put his aides off-balance. He would give them a

paper, and then ask: “why have we taken this position?” All would shrug their

shoulders with surprise, and say: “Well, we have always taken it.” Shevard-

nadze would shake his head, and reply: “That’s not an answer. Explain to

me the sense of this position.”’

172

The new foreign minister compelled his

colleagues to think in ways that were literally unimaginable to them before.

The military was one of the MFA’s primary targets in the struggle over

information. Having created a department of arms control within the MFA, the

latter developed expertise and data, independent of the Defence Ministry and

General Staff, that undermined arguments about Soviet military inferiority.

The military was increasingly on the defensive, faced by a growing group

of experts with privileged access to both the General Secretary and sensitive

information that, until then, had been its monopoly.

173

171 Ekedahl and Goodman, Wars of Eduard Shevardnadze,p.72; and Bennett, Condemned to

Repetition?,pp.117, 254.

172 Mlechin, MID,pp.468–77.

173 Ekedahl and Goodman, Wars of Eduard Shevardnadze,pp.39–41, 70–99 and 137–9;and

Bennett, Condemned to Repetition?,p.257.

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Moscow’s foreign policy, 1945–2000: identities, institutions and interests

Aleksandr Yakovlev’s CC Ideology Department created a new section on

human rights.

174

Gorbachev used the traditional instruments of the General

Secretary to purge the apparatus of old cadres. By 1986, there were eight new

Politburo members and at the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in February

1987, 38 per cent of the CC was replaced. Editorial boards of key journals and

newspapers were stocked with new thinkers.

175

Gorbachev created ‘presiden-

tial commissions’, ad hoc bodies designed to provide him with advice, while

circumventing inherited institutions such as the CC departments.

176

The Soviet Union’s new identity was enacted in Gorbachev’s foreign policy

of new thinking. Having abandoned the identity of vanguard and centre of the

world revolutionary movement, interests in NLMs in the developing world,

and in Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and China were transformed.

East European allies lost institutional entr

ee into the Kremlin and discov-

ered that their own post-Stalinist identities had little in common with the new

Soviet understanding of itself as a European Social Democracy in the mak-

ing. Ponomarev was infuriated by the fact that Gorbachev preferred to meet

with Eurocommunists than with East European allies. As Ponomarev put it:

‘How can this be? Scores of good communist leaders, and he meets with the

bad Italians.’

177

Gorbachev met with the ‘bad Italians’ because he identiﬁed

the Soviet future with the revisionist deviant discourse of Eurocommunism.

What institutionalised resistance there was in Moscow to Gorbachev’s new

conceptualisation of relations with Eastern Europe was undercut by the arrival

of Dobrynin and Aleksandr Yakovlev to the CCID, and the restoration of the

MFA as the centre of Soviet foreign policy.

178

At an October 1985 meeting of

the Warsaw Pact Political Consultative Council, Gorbachev told the assem-

bled leaders that it was time for them to act independently of Moscow.

179

In a

renunciation of the vanguard discourse of the previous thirty years, Gorbachev

said that ‘it is time we stopped running fraternal parties like obkoms...Ifwe

disagree with them, then we have to make our point, not just excommunicate

them, scheming and meddling in their internal affairs.’

180

Gorbachev’s expectation that East European states would remain Soviet

allies, that they would become Social Democracies, along with the Soviet

174 English, Russia and the Idea of the West,pp.208–14.

175 Mendelson, Changing Course,p.109.

176 Ekedahl and Goodman, Wars of Eduard Shevardnadze,p.68.

177 English, Russia and the Idea of the West,pp.204, 326 n. 64.

178 Chernyaev, My Six Years,p.36; and English, Russia and the Idea of the West,p.204.

179 English, Russia and the Idea of the West,p.43.

180 Ibid., p. 50; Iulii A. Kvitsinskii, Vremia i sluchai: Zametki professionala (Moscow, 1999),

p. 479; and Ekedahl and Goodman, Wars of Eduard Shevardnadze,pp.157–60.

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Union, reﬂected his conﬁdence in common human values.

181

Deviance was

impossible in Eastern Europe since the Soviet vanguard identity was no more.

In a meeting with East European Communist leaders in late 1986, Gorbachev

told them they could no longer rely on Moscow for support; they would

have to generate their own domestic legitimacy.

182

By 1989, Gorbachev had

proscribed the use of force in Eastern Europe, and not because the Soviet

military was incapable, but because this ‘would be the end of perestroika’,

at home; such actions were incompatible with Soviet identity and its implied

interests in a liberal, law-governed, international order.

183

At the December

1989 CC plenum, Yakovlev tied the new democratic Soviet identity to Soviet

interests in Eastern Europe: ‘If we have proclaimed freedom and democracy

for ourselves, then how can we deny it to others?’

184

The abandonment of the vanguard identity had similar effects on Soviet

interests in the ‘countries of socialist orientation’ inherited from the thirty

years of support for NLMs in the decolonising world. The most notable change

was the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, a decision made by Gorbachev

in principle in March 1985. But its formula of ‘national reconciliation’, that

is, negotiated settlements resulting in coalition governments and subsequent

elections, was pursued as well in Angola, Nicaragua and El Salvador.

185

From

being a constituent part of the world revolutionary alliance, Gorbachev rede-

ﬁned the developing world as part of a global alliance against nuclear war and

for the peaceful resolution of all conﬂicts. As in other realms of foreign policy,

the discourse shifted radically because of the marginalisation of the CCID,

and the empowerment of a minority point of view that had been in research

institutes all along.

186

Soviet interests in China were redeﬁned in accordance with the new identity.

China was no longer understood along socialist lines within the predominant

discourse, though, importantly, within the CCID, theycontinuedtotreatChina

as a revisionist deviation, given Deng Xiaoping’smarketreforms.Contrariwise,

181 Chernyaev, My Six Years,p.54.

182 English, Russia and the Idea of the West,p.224.

183 Quoted in Ekedahl and Goodman, Wars of Eduard Shevardnadze,p.159. See also Vorot-

nikov, Abyloetotak,pp.321, 352–3; Susanne Sternthal, Gorbachev’sReforms: De-Stalinization

through Demilitarization (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997), p. 177; and English, Russia and

the Idea of the West,p.203.

184 Vorotnikov, A bylo eto tak,p.353.

185 Ekedahl and Goodman, Wars of Eduard Shevardnadze,p.185; Chernyaev, My Six Years,p.

42; Bennett, Condemned to Repetition?,pp.278–87.

186 Hopf, Peripheral Visions,pp.132–9, 166–202, 213–19; Jerry Hough, The Struggle for the Third

Wo r l d (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 1986); and Elizabeth K. Valkenier, The

Soviet Union and the Third World (New York: Praeger, 1983).

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Moscow’s foreign policy, 1945–2000: identities, institutions and interests

Soviet reformers seized on Chinese reforms as demonstrating the possibilities

of the market at home. Control over policy on China shifted from the CCID to

the MFA and the General Secretary, and so relations were normalised during

the 1980s such that by 1998 trade between the two countries had already

reached the level of the 1950s.

187

Finally, the end of the Cold War with the West was associated with the

new identity’s acknowledgement of fallibility at home and abroad. Violations

of the ideals of Social Democracy by Stalin and his successors had made the

Soviet Union into an untrustworthy and threatening state; and its foreign

policy actions in Afghanistan, Poland and Czechoslovakia, and its nuclear

and conventional military build-up had exacerbated the problem. As a Great

Power vanguard, the Soviet Union had encircled itself. By becoming a normal

Social Democratic Great Power, the Soviet Union would ally with humanity

against common threats, most importantly the danger of nuclear war. The

Soviet Union would be more secure because the new discourse recognised the

independent sovereignty of each state, thereby dissipating the illusory threat

from a monolithic imperialist bloc headed by Washington. Gorbachev told a

May 1986 MFA assembly that the most important direction of Soviet foreign

policy should be European, and that the ministry was too Americanised.

188

Gorbachev linked this new Soviet identity with the security dilemma previ-

ous Soviet behaviour had created. Reporting to the Politburo after a meeting

with the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, Gorbachev told his col-

leagues that what she most wanted to know was ‘What is the USSR today? She

emphasized trust, and said the USSR had undermined that trust’, but that the

USSR’s domestic reforms were making a deep impression on her, changing

her image of the USSR.

189

Gorbachev told his Politburo colleagues that the

West European leaders with whom he had met after the summit in Reykjavik

with Reagan in November 1986 had said: ‘you have no democracy . . . Let’s

say we trust you personally, but if you are gone tomorrow, then what? . . .

Without democracy we will never achieve real trust in Soviet foreign policy

abroad.’

190

The new Soviet identity treated public opinion in the West as real,

and as partly the product of the Soviet Union’s own foreign policy errors.

191

187 Wishnick, Mending Fences,pp.93–116.

188 Kvitsinskii, Vremia i sluchai,pp.483–6. See also Chernyaev, My Six Years,pp.56, 308, 330,

350–1; Ekedahl and Goodman, Wars of Eduard Shevardnadze,p.156; and Vorotnikov, A

bylo eto tak,p.137.

189 Quoted in Chernyaev, My Six Years,p.104.

190 English, Russia and the Idea of the West,p.219. See also Mlechin, MID,p.468.

191 Hopf, Peripheral Visions,pp.90–101; Kvitsinskii, Vremia i sluchai,p.483; and Primakov,

Gody v bol’shoi politike,p.47.

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Among the concessions Gorbachev made to change Soviet identity in the

eyes of the Westwere: a unilateral moratoriumon nuclear testing announced in

August1985, repeatedlyrenewed until February 1987, by which time the US had

conducted over twenty tests; acceptance of zero SS-20s, codiﬁed in the Decem-

ber 1987 INF Treaty; April 1988 agreement to withdraw from Afghanistan; a

unilateral 500,000 cut in conventional forces in Eastern Europe announced in

December 1988; delinkage of strategic weapons talks from SDI in September

1989; non-interference in the peaceful liberation of Eastern Europe, culmi-

nating in the velvet revolutions of November–December 1989; reuniﬁcation

of Germany accepted in July 1990; and support for the US war against Iraq,

autumn 1990. Soviet insecurity was a self-inﬂicted wound that could be healed

through not just changes in Soviet foreign policy, but a transformation of what

the USSR was.

192

Gorbachev spent the last two years of his rule desperately trying to convince

the West that the Soviet Union had become something else and that theyshould

invest in his reforms so that world politics could be forever transformed. He was

disappointed. In May 1990, he told visiting German bankers that ‘An historic

turn is occurring in Europe and the world. If this turn is missed . . . then this

will be narrow-minded pragmatism...If the Soviet Union does not fundamentally

change itself, then nothing will change in the world. The Soviet people have turned

to new forms of life. This is an epochal turn . . . But in the West, and especially in

the US, they don’t show a sufﬁciently broad approach.’

193

At the ﬁrst Group of

Eight (G8) meeting in London in July 1991, Gorbachev asked President George

Bush explicitly: ‘What kind of Soviet Union does the United States want to

see?’

194

Between Europe and the United States, 1992–2000

There were three main discourses on Russian identity in the 1990s in Moscow:

liberal, conservative and centrist. Each understood Russia with respect to

internal, external and historical Others.

195

Liberals identiﬁed Russia’s future,

192 Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), and

Chernyaev, My Six Years,pp.194–5.

193 Quoted in Kvitsinskii, Vremia i sluchai,p.27. Emphasis added.

194 Chernyaev, My Six Years,p.356.

195 I derive these discourses from popular novels, history textbooks, ﬁlm reviews and

newspaper articles in Hopf, Social Construction,pp.153–210. For taxonomies of Russian

foreign policy thought itself in the 1990s, see Richter, Khrushchev’s Double Bind,pp.207–

10; James Richter, ‘Russian Foreign Policy and the Politics of Russian Identity’, in C. A.

Wallander (ed.), The Sources of Russian Foreign Policy after the Cold War (Boulder, Colo.:

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Moscow’s foreign policy, 1945–2000: identities, institutions and interests

atﬁrst with the American, and then with the European, present.They identiﬁed

against the Soviet past and against the internal representation of that Other: the

conservative discourse of Communists and far-right national patriots. They

recognised the weakness of the Moscow federal Centre vis-

a-vis its eighty-

nine federal subjects, but felt economic prosperity within a democratic market

economy would secure Russia from threats. Russia was understood as part of

a universal civilisation of modern liberal market democracy.

Conservatives identiﬁed Russia’s future with a Soviet past shorn of its Stal-

inist brutality and an ethno-national Russian past of Great Power status and

strong centralised rule. Its domestic Other were the liberals who were under-

stood as a ﬁfth column of the United States and the West. The vulnerability

of the Moscow federal Centre to the growing autonomy of the republics

was a major source of insecurity, necessitating a more forceful response

from Moscow. Russia was understood as a unique, sometimes Eurasian,

project to be differentiated from Western conceptions of freedom and

economics.

The centrist discourse identiﬁed Russia with European Social Democracy,

but against American wild west capitalism. It also identiﬁed with an idealised

Soviet past, but its internal Other was neither liberal nor conservative, but

rather the disintegrative processes occurring within the country, most graph-

ically, in Chechnya. Centrists explicitly rejected an ethno-national conceptual-

isation of Russia, instead adopting a civic national ‘Rossian’ identity designed

to capture the multinational character of the Russian Federation.

196

While

Russia was unique, it was situated within a universal civilisation of modern

Social Democracy.

197

In 1992, Russia was polarised between liberal and conservative identities,

with liberals implementing their economic and political plans to make Russia

Westview Press, 1996), pp. 69–94; Bennett, Condemned to Repetition?,pp.306–9; Johan

Matz, Constructing a Post-Soviet International Political Reality (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis

Upsaliensis, 2001); English, Russia and the Idea of the West; Prizel, National Identity and

foreign policy,pp.220–68; Margot Light, ‘Post-Soviet Russian Foreign Policy’, in Archie

Brown (ed.), Contemporary Russian Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Neil

Malcolm, ‘Russian Foreign-Policy Decision-Making’, in Peter Shearman (ed.), Russian

Foreign Policy since 1 990 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995), pp. 3–27; and William

Zimmerman, The Russian People and Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 2002).

196 Pal Kolsto, Political Construction Sites: Nation-Building in Russia and the Post-Soviet States

(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000), pp. 203–27; and Tadashi Anno, ‘Nihonjiron and

russkaia ideia: Transformation of Japanese and Russian Nationalism in the Postwar Era

and Beyond’, in Gilbert Rozman (ed.), Japan and Russia: The Tortuous Path to Normaliza-

tion (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), pp. 344–7.

197 Matz, Constructing Post-Soviet Reality,p.169; and English, Russia and the Idea of the West,

p. 237.

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into a liberal market democracy. The collapse of the Russian economy, the

failure of the US to provide any signiﬁcant aid, the rampant and rising crime,

corruption and violence associated with privatisation and democratisation

and the new issue of 25 million Russians living in the Former Soviet Union,

discredited liberal discourse.

198

But conservative discourse did not take its

place. Instead, a centrist discourse emerged, which, over the 1990s, became at

ﬁrst the main competitor with conservatives, and ﬁnally, by the late 1990s, the

predominant representation of Russian identity.

Each of these three discourses had implications for Russian interests and

foreign policy. Liberals desired a Russian alliance with the United States and the

West. Conservatives desired a Russian alliance with anybody in the world who

would balance against the United States and the West. Centrists preferred no

alliances with anyone against any particular Other, but rather Russia as one

among several Great Powers in a multilateral management of global affairs.

Russia’s liberal identity was institutionally privileged in 1992.

199

The MFA

under Andrei Kozyrev was initially the only coherent foreign policy institution

in Russia, and Kozyrev purged it of Soviet holdovers. But the MFA’s monopoly

did not go unchallenged. The Russian Ministry of Defence (MOD) and pres-

idential Security Council (SC) were created in the spring. The defence and

international relations committees in parliament became sites of conservative

and centrist attacks on the liberal MFA. The ‘power ministries’, the different

intelligence and security branches of the federal government, also institution-

alised centre-conservative discursive renderings of Russian identity. Moreover,

elements of the armed forces, most notably and consequentially, the 14th army

in the Trans-Dniestrian area of Moldova and local air force and army personnel

in Abkhazia in Georgia, acted independently of the Yeltsin government, creat-

ing faits accomplis on the ground.

200

It took time for the Russian government

to reassert control over armed groups acting in the name of Russia in the FSU.

The conservative Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) was

the only mass national political party. By early 1993, the MFA had become

a policy-making arm of the increasingly centrist Yeltsin government, and so

liberal identity was to be found mostly in national daily newspapers such as

198 Prizel, National Identity and Foreign Policy,pp.222–47.

199 My discussion of institutions relies on Bennett, Condemned to Repetition?,pp.306–10;

Matz, Constructing Post-Soviet Reality,pp.40–143; and Hopf, Social Construction,pp.153–

210.

200 Bennett, Condemned to Repetition?,pp.313–23; and Emil A. Pain, ‘Contiguous Ethnic

Conﬂicts and Border Disputes along Russia’s Southern Flank’, in R. Menon, Y. E.

Fedorov, and G. Nodia (eds.), Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia (Armonk, N.Y.: M.

E. Sharpe, 1999), p. 185.

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Moscow’s foreign policy, 1945–2000: identities, institutions and interests

Kommersant and Izvestiia, as well as in the research institutions revived under

Gorbachev.

201

In October 1993, Yeltsin crushed a primary institutional carrier

of conservative identity, the parliament, replacing it in December 1993 with

a no less conservative collection of legislators in the Duma, but in a con-

stitutionally subordinate position to the centrist president. The national TV

networks came increasingly under centrist control, although the weekend

evening ‘analytical news’ programmes, such as Namedni (Recent events), Svo-

bodaslova (Free speech), Vremena (Times), Zerkalo (Mirror) and others remained

national free-for-alls, with all discourses represented. Newspapers also contin-

ued to reﬂect the widest range of Russian identities, and regional TV stations,

the instruments of local governors, reﬂected the political coloration of that

particular region. The dominance of the Russian economy by ‘oligarchs’ also

institutionalised that part of the centrist-liberal discourse that identiﬁed the

recovery of Russian Great Power status in the world, and the strengthening of

the federal centre in Moscow, as best achieved through economic growth and

development.

202

We can see the three discourses of Russian identity in relations with Belarus,

the FSU or near abroad, NATO, and NATO’s war against Yugoslavia in April

1999.

203

Conservative construction of Russianinterests in Belarus and the Com-

monwealth of Independent States (CIS) more generally was the restoration

of the Soviet Union in these former Soviet republics. This included the advo-

cacy of the forceful defence of ethnic Russians in these places, and the use

of coercion to return these republics, excepting the Baltic, to Moscow’s rule.

Both the expansion of NATO to the east, and NATO’s war against Yugoslavia

on the behalf of Kosovo’s Albanian majority, were construed as a direct US

threat to Russian security, necessitating a Russian military response. Conser-

vatives identiﬁed with their Slavic brethren in Belarus and Serbia, generating

an ethno-national Russian interest in these countries absent in the other two

discourses.

Liberal constructions of Russian interests could not be more different.

Understanding the Soviet past as something to be avoided, they were against its

restoration in the form of reuniﬁcation with Belarus or a centralised CIS under

Moscow’s management. Interests in the FSU should be the product of market

economic calculations, not ethno-national fraternity or an atavistic Cold War

201 Prizel, National Identity and Foreign Policy,p.241.

202 Pavel Baev, ‘Russian Policies and Non-Policies toward Subregional Projects around its

Borders’, in R. Dwan and O. Pavliuk (eds.), Building Security in the New States of Eurasia

(Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2000), p. 129.

203 Hopf, Social Construction,pp.211–57.

703

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competition with the US. Liberals did not oppose the expansion of NATO,

but for its domestic political empowerment of conservatives.

204

While liberals

did not support NATO’s war against Yugoslavia, they also saw no security

implications for Russia, except for its energising of conservative discourse at

home.

Russian foreign policy was neither liberal nor conservative, but centrist, at

least after 1992. Integration with Belarus was neither spurned nor accelerated,

but rather treated as an issue of economic efﬁciency.

205

The creation of the

CIS was neither treated as trivial nor understood as a way to restore the Soviet

Union, but was instead cobbled together to co-ordinate defence and economic

policy among its twelve very different members.

206

NATO expansion was

neither welcomed nor opposed by arming or allying with other states against

it. Instead, it was opposed, with the expectation that Russia’s interests would

be taken into account as much as was politically feasible as the expansion

unfolded. NATO’s war in Kosovo was opposed vigorously, but once begun,

Russian efforts were aimed at getting Slobodan Milo

sevi

c to sue for peace as

quickly as possible, not at arming him, or encouraging him to resist.

207

The common centrist thread through the 1990s was to maintain or restore

Russia’s Great Power status through economic development at home and

the empowerment of multilateral international institutions abroad. These

main themes were evident in Russian foreign policy towards the diaspora.

Despite incessant conservative calls to use military force to rescue Russians

from discriminatory citizenship laws in the Baltic states, Moscow consistently

worked through multilateral institutions, such as the Council of Europe and

the Council for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

208

Meanwhile, Russian

multinational companies, such as Yukos, Lukoil and Gazprom, cemented a

Russian presence in the FSU through direct investments and debt-for-equity

swaps to amortise local energy arrears.

209

204 Ekedahl and Goodman,Warsof Eduard Shevardnadze,pp.169–76;JamesM. Goldgeier, Not

Whether but When (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), pp. 15–16; Kvitsinskii,

Vremia i sluchai,pp.39–43, 67–9;Chernyaev,My SixYears,pp.272–3; Kornienko,Kholodnaia

voina,pp.264–7; and Primakov, Gody v bol’shoi politike,pp.232–3.

205 Vyachaslau Paznyak, ‘Customs Union of Five and the Russia–Belarus Union’, in Dwan

and Pavliuk, Building Security,pp.66–79.

206 Martha BrillOlcott, Anders Aslund, and Sherman W. Garnett, Gettingit Wrong (Washing-

ton: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999); Matz, Constructing Post-Soviet

Reality; and Lena Jonson, ‘Russia and Central Asia’, in Roy Allison and Lena Jonson

(eds.), Central Asian Security: The New International Context (Washington: Brookings

Institution Press, 2001).

207 Primakov, Gody v bol’shoi politike,pp.174–6, 305. See also Allen Lynch, ‘The Realism of

Russia’s Foreign Policy’, Europe–Asia Studies 53, 1 (Jan.2001): 7–31.

208 Kolsto, Political Construction Sites,pp.208–13.

209 Olcott, Aslund and Garnett, Getting it Wrong,pp.54–66.

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Moscow’s foreign policy, 1945–2000: identities, institutions and interests

Conclusion

The Stalinist understanding of the Soviet Self squandered pro-Soviet sympa-

thies in Eastern Europe and anti-German feelings throughout Europe so as to

reproduce the NSM in the socialist community. The post-Stalinist discourse of

difference multiplied allies in the Third World, but entailed the loss of China as

an ally and spurred the quest for difference in Eastern Europe. Subsequent sup-

pression of the latter, combined with support for NLMs, led to a Soviet Union

encircled by states allied against it. The Gorbachev revolution eliminated that

Soviet Great Power vanguard identity that had ﬁxed the Soviet Union and the

US in a global competition for international dominance. Soviet interests in the

NLMs and control of Eastern Europe disappeared with the old Soviet iden-

tity. The Russian Federation understands itself today as a Great Power who

can either join European Social Democratic civilisation as a counterweight to

US liberal market hegemony, or bandwagon with that hegemony in order to

pursue more narrow tactical considerations in defence of its own ﬁssiparous

periphery.

What is the Soviet Union? What is Russia? These are questions about a

state’s identity. The answers are found in how a state understands itself, in

relationship to its signiﬁcant Others, at home and abroad. We have seen that

how that question was answered in Moscow from the end of the Second World

War to the dawn of the twenty-ﬁrst century has profoundly affected foreign

policy and international order more generally. States interact not only with

other states, but also with themselves, with their societies and institutions.

Interstate interaction affords an opportunity for other states to help empower

or disempower the discourses of identity that are being reproduced at home.

But they cannot in and of themselves account for a state’s identity. States

interact with their own pasts, their own social groups, their own political

institutional landscapes. These form the domestic sources of a state’s identity,

and are fundamental to understanding any state’s foreign policy.

705