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The World and Yugoslavia's Wars, Edited by Richard H. Ullman
Paul A. Goble
Regular contacts between Moscow and Belgrade seem to be enabling Russia to play the role of a mediator between the West and the Serbs as well to show to the opposition at home its international influence. We must admit that "special relations," "historical links," and Moscow's "strong influence" on the Serbian leadership could have been more rewarding. Unfortunately, one can speak now not only about Moscow influencing Belgrade but also about Belgrade and Pale manipulating Moscow's politicians for their own ends. The attitude to Russia is also modified by the historical tradition of rivalry between Russia and Serbia in the Balkans (their being "allies from the start" is a historical–political myth), and the undeniable weakening of the positions of Russia, whose power and influence cannot be compared with those of the Russian Empire or the USSR.
—Kommersant–Daily (Moscow), July 29, 1995
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, three factors have defined Russian policy toward the conflicts in the former Yugoslav republics: Moscow's desire to exploit its historic cultural linkages without suffering from the consequences likely to flow if other states draw analogies between the two systems, Moscow's interest in becoming a good international citizen in the post–Cold War environment, and Moscow's need to reproject Russian power both to generate domestic political support and to regenerate Russian influence in Europe and more broadly. Most analyses of Russian involvement in the former Yugoslavia have focused on only one of these three factors and extrapolated sweeping conclusions from it, but Russian policy, in all its twists and turns, reflects the playing out of all three, and only by considering them together can one begin to understand why Moscow has done what it has done and why its actions there and the reasons behind them have such profound consequences for Moscow, the former Yugoslavia, and the post–Cold War international system.
This chapter is divided into three parts: the first examines each of these factors in some detail; the second considers how these various influences have affected the three periods of post–Soviet Russian policy in the former Yugoslavia; and the third points to three lessons of this policy for the West and its efforts to construct a new international system in Europe. Obviously, given the shifts in both Russian and Western policy toward Bosnia and Serbia over the last five years, this discussion must be more like algebra than arithmetic—that is, the specific values of the various elements may change at any time—but an understanding of the algebra here may nonetheless be useful as a guide to both further research and future action.
Three Competing Influences
The first influence on Russian policymaking regarding the former Yugoslavia involves the perceived or asserted cultural and historical linkages between Russia and Serbia, two fraternal Slav peoples—as Russian and Western commentaries almost never fail to point out. But if this influence is the one mentioned most often, it is probably the most overrated and the least understood as a factor in Russian concerns and calculations. That is because the Russian leadership fears the linkage perhaps as much as it welcomes it, first, because Western governments may decide that what happens in one country presages what will happen in the other; and second, because of Russia's need to engage in a new and more open politics in the formation of foreign policy.
Prior to the collapse of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, Western scholars routinely pointed to the similarities of these two systems. During the collapse of these two multinational states, Western political leaders routinely warned that developments in one indicated the likely course of development in the other. Soviet and then Russian politicians and commentators shared their concerns. For example, there were oft–repeated suggestions that a disintegrating Soviet Union could form a giant series of "Bosnias" or that what we were seeing was the "Yugoslavization" of the Soviet space. And more recently, Western policy analysts and the Russian press have noted the extent to which political developments in Serbia's neighborhood are reflected in the Russian nationalist movement in Moscow and with the new assertiveness in Russian foreign policy. 1
In discussing the linkages between Russia and Serbia, Western students point to the following similarities:
The problems with these analogies—which routinely are invoked by Russians, Serbians, and many in the United States—are threefold: First, the analogies are not precise. The role of Russia in the former Soviet Union, for example, was fundamentally different from the role of Serbia in the former Yugoslavia, however much the Serbs would like to think otherwise. 6 Moreover, by virtue of its size and power, the position of Russia in the world is so different from that of Serbia that no action against the latter would necessarily have an impact on the former. Second, all three players in this particular game have their own ideas about each of these assumed similarities. While many in Russia emphasize pan–Slavdom, others do not believe it at all, seeing it simply as cover for actions driven by crass political calculations. 7 Many in Serbia think of Russia as something other than a benign elder Slavic brother. And many in the West—even those who accept a view of conflicts that Pushkin once described as "a domestic quarrel among Slavs"—see the analogy as breaking down in the particulars and thus are willing to either support or oppose Russian involvement in the Bosnian crisis. And third, all three groups—the Russians, the Serbs, and Western governments—are increasingly internally divided, with some people in each adopting positions that are at variance with these generalizations both because they are making broader calculations and because they in fact disagree with the consensus just outlined.
That Serbia should look to Russia for assistance and expect to find it in both Russian nationalist pretensions and Moscow's desires to resume a major role on the world stage is no surprise. Russia has a veto at the United Nations, enormous potential power in the region, and the wish to demonstrate that it is still a great power. But that Russia should look to help the Serbs is perhaps less obvious to those who thought the initial Atlanticism of Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev and President Boris N. Yeltsin was sustainable. Although Serbia is obviously the weaker party, it may in some respects be more useful to Russia than Russia is to it. This is because the international discussions about the future of the former Yugoslavia provide Moscow with a valuable opportunity to advance its own position in the world more generally—but only at the possible cost of entrapping the Russians in a "lose–lose" situation vis–à–vis both the West and its own population.
Given these limitations in the analogies so often drawn between the two countries and the concerns of the Russian elite about the implications of their being drawn at all, one needs to ask why the Russian authorities both in the parliament and in the executive branch nonetheless continue to talk about Slavic ties. A more rational Russian policy would seem to require that such discussions be carefully limited. But the reason for the current and perhaps even increasing dominance of Slavdom as a factor in Russian policy lies in the opening up of the foreign policy process in Moscow. Under the Soviets, foreign policy was made by a small group of men—usually smaller in number than the entire Politburo—and implemented with little regard as to what the population or even the broader political elite thought. Now that has changed.
Foreign policy choices, like choices in every other sphere, must now be justified to ever broader groups. There is a serious foreign relations committee in the Duma, foreign policy commentators in every major paper, and politicians prepared to use foreign policy as a means to advance their own careers—in short, there is a messy foreign policymaking environment in which the senior elite must justify what it is doing in terms that the population can understand and support. Nor is it surprising that the most extravagant statements in support of Serbia and the Serbs have come from the legislature rather than the executive. In Russia today, references to a pan–Slav mission elicit a positive response from a broad section of the political spectrum.
The reasons for this lie in the special difficulties Russia found itself in after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Alone among the 15 former Soviet republics, the Russian Federation felt the trauma of loss rather than the ebullience of victory; and alone among the governments of these states, the Russian authorities could not resort to nationalism to generate support for themselves at a time when their ability to deliver the goods was at an all–time low. That is because Russian nationalism, unlike that of most of the other successor states, is almost invariably inherently revisionist with regard to the existing international system—that is, it seeks to recover something that has been lost rather than to glory in what has been achieved. When things go bad in one of the other successor states, the national elites can use nationalism virtually with impunity, but for the Russian government to do so risks negative reaction from both Russia's immediate neighbors, who remain deeply suspicious of Moscow's intentions, and Russia's potential partners and competitiors farther away. Thus, discussions about the Serbs who live farther away are really a means for talking about the 25.4 million ethnic Russians who live in the 14 other former Soviet republics. Such discussions are thus simultaneously a sop to Russian sensitivities and a test of Western reaction.
An apparently countervailing factor in Russian calculations is somewhat less complicated: the desire of Russian elites to become "good international citizens," either out of a genuine belief that such behavior is good in itself or because of a conviction that such behavior is the price of extracting resources from the West while Russia recovers. Despite their behavior, Russians have tended to be obsessed by what others, and especially Westerners, think of them. To the extent that the West makes clear its views when it is in a position of strength, Russians may be more inclined to go along than might be expected. When the West, and especially the United States, has made clear the linkages between specific behavior and specific rewards, Russian elites in recent years have seldom had any option but to go along. But whenever the West has been divided on a particular question or has been uncertain of what to do, many in Moscow have concluded that Russia can get away with more while retaining its standing as a good international citizen.
Divisions and uncertainties in the West make it more rather than less likely that Moscow will respond to domestic political pressures. Indeed, with Western governments reluctant to take any action in this first post–Cold War crisis in Europe, Moscow generally has been able to win points for being a good citizen simply by arguing that more talks are always preferable to the use of force. Moreover, the very nature of the West as an entity is in doubt in the absence of a clearly defined East; as a result, by siding with the European states against the Atlantic alliance and the Americans in the name of "good citizenship," Moscow has been able, despite its weakness, to open the door to a redefinition of the geopolitical map of Europe.
This brings us to the third factor that has been operative in defining Moscow's approach to the crisis in the former Yugoslavia: the desire to build authority at home and to promote geopolitical interests abroad. For the reasons cited, many in the Russian government see support for Serbia as useful in generating domestic political authority. Obviously, many—such as Kozyrev—who have been charged with being too deferential to the West are anxious to prove that they can be just as tough as anyone in promoting Russian interests abroad. As one right–winger put it in Pravda at a time when Russia seemed unprepared to act in defense of ethnic Russians abroad, "Thank God that in contrast to Yeltsin's Russia, Serbia has not left these Serbs [beyond the borders of Serbia] in the lurch." 8 It is noteworthy that Russian right–wing commentators continued to state views like these even after Croatia occupied the Krajina in the summer of 1995 and expelled most of its Serbian population. The same was true for the Dayton accords the following November. Milosevic, they argued, had done the best he could. Indeed, a broad range of politicians, from right–wing extremists such as Zhirinovsky to "liberal reformers" such as Kozyrev and Yeltsin, seem to believe that, given Western divisions and uncertainty, the crisis in the former Yugoslavia represents an important chance to reassert Russian power in its traditional domain, to signal that Moscow is not prepared to adopt a permanently subordinate position to the West, and not unimportantly, to gain Western approval for Moscow's own self–defined "peacekeeping" activities in the Commonwealth of Independent States.
But the government and the parliamentary opposition are very much divided on three other questions: the relative importance of maintaining ties with the West as opposed to reasserting Russian power; the impact of supporting Serbian nationalism on Russian nationalism; and the importance of the Serbian–Bosnian model for Russia's relationships with the so–called near abroad.
While Russia looms very large for Serbia, the reverse is certainly not true. Serbia represents both an opportunity and a problem for Moscow, but the Russian authorities—and especially the Yeltsin government—always will view Serbia in the context of a much larger game. Russia's relations with Europe as a whole, with the United States, and even with its immediate neighbors are part of Moscow's calculus. Consequently, Russian policy toward Serbia has been and will remain inconsistent.
Although no one knows for certain what the consequences of the interaction between Russian nationalism and Serbian nationalism will be, some on the right of the Russian political spectrum hope that Serbian successes will embolden Russian nationalists; some on the left are afraid that this will be the case. Both groups have been affected by developments in Bosnia, with the right becoming more assertive with Serbian successes and the left less able to resist playing the Russian nationalist card.
Both liberals and conservatives in Moscow see in the Yugoslav case implications for Russia's relationships with what many Russians call the "near abroad," the former Soviet republics that are now independent countries. Some on the right believe that Serbia by its support and use of Serbians in Bosnia has shown the path Moscow should follow; some on the left fear that if Moscow were to follow Belgrade's lead, this would isolate Russia internationally and ultimately destroy its prospects for a successful transition to democracy and a market economy.
As a result of such differences as well as of the broader geopolitical situation, Russia's approach to Serbia is likely to end up being very different from what the Serbs expect. It is entirely possible that Russian support for Serbia will turn out to have been a feint, a move intended to allow the Russian government to insist on Western recognition of its claimed special rights in the so–called near abroad. That is certainly where Kozyrev, until Yeltsin dismissed him as foreign minister, and now Yevgeny M. Primakov, his successor, appear to have been heading—unless, of course, they can get even more. In the end, the Serbs may be left up the proverbial creek, precisely because they have tended to ignore the fact that Russia has a broader agenda than they do.
Three Stages in the Evolution of a Policy
The history of the Russian–Serbian relationship over the last five years reflects the interplay of these three factors. 9 At first, Russia's desire to be a good citizen led Moscow to be deferential toward Western opinion on what to do or what not to do in the former Yugoslavia, even as some Russian politicians worried about linkages between Serbia and Russia while others saw the conflict as an opportunity for building domestic authority. Later Russia saw the conflict as an opportunity to ratify its desire to be accepted as a good citizen on the world stage while pursuing its geopolitical interest in dividing Europe from the United States and projecting power once again in those regions that many Russians assume are properly their own. Later still Russia faced the prospect that it would be marginalized by a newly united West unless it was willing to lend its good offices to the West's plan for solving the Yugoslav crisis. In the face of sharpening criticism from the Russian right, the Yeltsin government occasionally adopted even tougher anti–Western rhetoric, even as it sought to find a continuing, albeit reduced role in international regulation of the situation in the former Yugoslavia.
Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union in August 1991, Moscow dealt with Yugoslavia as an East–West issue rather than as a question that was likely to have an impact on Russian domestic developments. Mikhail S. Gorbachev occasionally talked about the disintegration of Yugoslavia in terms of the possible breakup of the Soviet Union, but in general he discussed developments there as if there were no such connection. That is not to say that all Russians, or even all Soviets, felt that way: the Soviet military and several rightist groups took advantage of glasnost to argue that Moscow had a special responsibility in Yugoslavia, out of both Slavic solidarity and self–interest. But this was not the dominant motif of the discussions.
In the period from August 1991 to February 1992, Moscow did not have a well–developed policy with respect to the former Yugoslavia. The scope and rapidity of change in Russia itself meant that even Russian diplomats had little time to discuss the equally dramatic changes taking place in Yugoslavia. In general, the Russian government, and especially Foreign Minister Kozyrev, simply echoed Western statements, primarily because of their self–absorption with domestic affairs, but also because of a desire to register Russia as a good partner with the West. Indeed, throughout this period Kozyrev repeatedly suggested that the development of the Moscow–Washington relationship in the post–Soviet era meant that Moscow could not hold on to its shibboleths about policy.
Not surprisingly, as conditions stabilized in Russia, many in the Russian political elite concluded that a more assertive Russian policy in the former Yugoslavia would pay handsome dividends at home, and that past concessions to the West had been unnecessary and even counterproductive. The turning point came in June and July 1992 during a full–dress parliamentary debate on Russian policy toward the former Yugoslavia. Various parliamentarians attacked the government for going along with U.N. sanctions on Serbia and condemned Kozyrev's "kowtowing" to the West on this and other issues. In response, Kozyrev and the Foreign Ministry began to revise Moscow's hitherto accommodationist stance, seeking modifications in the September 1992 U.N. resolutions and agreeing to support the West's position only after the West modified its original proposal on sanctions. But this was not enough for the Russian right—including many in the Foreign Ministry apparatus itself. Smelling blood, they pressed their case throughout the fall and winter.
This pattern repeated itself in early 1993, with Kozyrev and the Russian government seeking to solidify the East–West relationship even at the price of "selling out" the Slavic Serbs while the Russian right in the parliament, among the public, and within the regime pressed for and achieved modifications in Kozyrev's rhetoric and, ultimately, in Moscow's policies. A major shift came in April and May 1993, one marking a new approach to the crisis by Moscow. This approach reflected a calculation by Yeltsin and his allies that the crisis in the former Yugoslavia represented an opportunity for Russia at home and abroad and that Moscow need not fear that what was happening in the former Yugoslavia would occur in Russia itself. At that time the Russian Supreme Soviet insisted, and Yeltsin agreed, that Moscow had a special role to play in the Balkans, one that could not be ceded to the United Nations or the West generally, and that Moscow should adopt a position more supportive of Serbia to counter the West's perceived pro–Muslim position. Indeed, the Yeltsin government showed signs that it believed that it could have it both ways, introducing Russian troops under U.N. cover as blue helmets to show that it was cooperating with the West, but allowing these troops to act in symbolic ways that pleased both Russian nationalists at home and their friends in Serbia.
The formation of the five–country contact group in 1993 provided Russia with several new opportunities. By participating in the first place and then pushing itself forward as the only possible mediator with Serbia, Russia had its status as a great power publicly reaffirmed. By playing off the Americans, who felt something had to be done, and the west Europeans—and especially the Germans and British—who opposed taking any step that might lead to a wider war, Moscow could advance its broader geopolitical agenda. And by keeping the talks going and demanding that the international community avoid any use of force, Moscow provided the Serbs with the opportunity to expand their gains. While Russian diplomats might bemoan this at contact group meetings, Russian politicians and some groups in the Russian population saw this as a major victory for their fellow Slavs. During this period Yeltsin and Kozyrev also successfully insisted that the West not blame Belgrade for the behavior of the Bosnian Serbs. This was a first step toward satisfying a demand heard ever more frequently in the Russian parliament in 1994 and 1995: that the international community lift its sanctions against Belgrade and that the West readmit Serbia into the community of nations.
But precisely at this time, both Kozyrev and Yeltsin themselves again began to draw an explicit comparison between developments in Yugoslavia and those in Russia, a linkage that others in the Russian political milieu had been drawing from the beginning. This appeared both to signal Yeltsin's realization that he could make this case without sacrificing his ties to the West and especially to Washington—which had now invested in the Russian president personally, just as it had with Gorbachev before him—and to point to an ever harder Russian line within both the contact group and the U.N. Security Council. Even if it were argued that Russia was simply being a good international citizen, it must be conceded that the results of Russian policy, whatever it was intended to do, were in that period precisely those desired by the Russian right wing.
After Yeltsin dispersed the parliament in October 1993, many in the West were hopeful that he would move toward a more balanced approach, retreating from the increasingly nationalist line that the old parliament had insisted upon. In fact, there was no time for that hope to be realized, for in December 1993 the parliamentary elections revealed both strong support for the Russian right, including for Zhirinovsky, who openly advocated Russian intervention on behalf of the Serbs, and the weakness of those parties that had pushed for a more Atlanticist position, one stressing cooperation with the United States even at the possible cost of support for traditional allies. In light of these developments and also because he calculated that Washington was not prepared to use force in the former Yugoslavia, Yeltsin toughened his position still further, thereby winning on both counts, at least for a time. In the contact group, Kozyrev protected Serbian interests by attacking ever more vociferously the Bosnian Muslims—undoubtedly having realized how effective such attacks on Islam and especially Islamic "fundamentalists" could be in paralyzing American and west European policymakers.
Moscow's support for the Serbs began to backfire in late 1994 and early 1995. At first the shift was not dramatic, but it has had significant consequences: after the Serbian government agreed and the Bosnian Serbs rejected the contact group's proposed partitition of Bosnia, and after the west Europeans demonstrated that they were not willing to use force to defend either the split or the safe havens set up for Bosnian Muslims, Yeltsin and his government sought to force Washington and the West to adopt a more evenhanded policy regarding Belgrade. From the Russian president's point of view, he could kill two birds with one stone—he could appease the still–strong nationalists at home and he could reaffirm his status as an international good citizen in the eyes of the West. Such a calculation, along with Russian concerns about the enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), helps to explain Yeltsin's sharp criticism in August 1995 of the West's continuing tilt toward Bosnia. 10
But continuing Bosnian Serb intransigence and aggression, the entry of Croatian forces into Bosnia, and the strengthening of the Bosnian Muslim army relative to its opponents combined to create a situation in which Moscow was ever more trapped. At the same time, these factors opened the door for a tougher American approach, one that largely excluded Russia by using NATO rather than U.N. forces. Whether Washington and the West more generally will stay the new course remains to be seen, however, and if the West retreats at any point, past Russian complaints about the possible use of Western power in Yugoslavia could ultimately work to Moscow's advantage if the use of force fails—as it might—to achieve its ends.
Throughout the Yugoslav crisis, Yeltsin and Kozyrev shifted their policies in response to both domestic and foreign pressures, but they also seemed to learn by observation one fact that is profoundly disturbing: namely, that although Washington seeks to deny it, sphere of influence politics is back. 11 While the phrase cannot be said, the concept has, in fact, been acknowledged. That is perhaps the most frightening implication of the West's mishandling of the Bosnian crisis.
Three Lessons for the Future
Despite the hopes of many in the West, the end of the Cold War did not herald the end of history or repeal the imperatives of geography. Indeed, as with virtually all other conflicts that the United States has been engaged in, Americans have redefined the nature of the conflict both to ennoble their past actions and to ease the transition to peaceful cooperation with former opponents. Thus, the Cold War, which was in fact about containing Moscow's expansionism in Europe, is now said to have been about ending communism. (If that is the standard for declaring victory, the continued existence of communist China suggests that the war is far from over.) This shift in perspective, however, has had an enormous impact on NATO and on the Western alliance's response to the tragedy of Bosnia in particular, as well as on Russian perceptions of what the post–Cold War international system will tolerate and what it will not.
It has been observed that NATO was designed to keep Russia out of Europe, America involved in Europe, and Germany contained within Europe. Those tasks are important still, especially in view of the fact that Moscow's involvement in the former Soviet Union has changed, but it has not been completely transformed. Moreover, in some ways, Moscow is a far less predictable participant in international affairs than it was during the Cold War. The opening up of Russian politics forces Russian elites to pay more attention to popular attitudes and parliamentary pressures—just as in the West—inclining them to be far less cooperative and rational than they might otherwise be. The good thing about such an opening up, of course, is that the public and the politicians may like the rhetoric of expansion, but they may not be prepared to bear its probable costs. Neither group is likely to be quite as willing to see Moscow change course 180 degrees overnight, as frequently happens in more authoritarian political systems. Thus, the widely shared assumption that a more democratic Russia will inevitably be more likely to cooperate with the West in every case does not hold true. With regard to Bosnia, Russian politicians and the Russian people have on occasion imposed serious constraints on the ability of the Russian foreign minister and the Russian president to cooperate with the West—assuming, that is, that these men do not already share many of the attitudes they are "forced" to manifest.
Nor has the geopolitical situation changed. 12 Russian elites are interested in projecting power into the Balkans both to advance their own interest in dominating the region or—at the least—to deny others influence and to win the support of an apathetic and suspicious Russian public. Russia has very real interests in eastern Europe; the issue is how it will advance its interests and whether the projection of Russian power will take place at the cost of the integration of the states of the region and of Russia itself into the democratic and free–market West. Moreover, Russia has an interest in preventing the "Yugoslavization" of the Russian Federation and its immediate neighbors. Ethnic Russians in northern Kazakhstan and Ukraine's Crimea certainly have been encouraged by what has happened in Bosnia to believe that Moscow ultimately will find a way to support them, and Moscow certainly was able to move against Chechnya far more brutally because it was able to tap into continuing Western opposition to any change in international boundaries, fears that help explain why Washington has made the integrity of Bosnia a major goal. 13
The tragedy of the former Yugoslavia suggests that NATO's original purpose of containing Russian expansionism remains just as valid as it was earlier despite all the changes in Europe since 1989. As the major institutional link between western Europe and the United States, NATO institutionalizes a countervailing role for Washington in Europe. In the absence of American involvement in Europe, no European country or even concert of countries will be able to protect itself from Russia as it recovers its position, and west Europeans will remain both divided and inactive and thus that much more susceptible to Russian influence. Clearly, it is in Moscow's geopolitical interest to promote divisions between Washington and western Europe, to play on European concerns about too much American power in Europe, and so on. Despite its shifts in tone, Moscow has continued to harp on that fundamental theme in most of its statements on the former Yugoslavia. But Washington will not stay engaged in Europe unless it perceives a threat, and at the moment, it does not want to perceive one. Thus Washington must either dismiss the Bosnian disaster as marginal to its concerns—or change its tune and admit that the stakes in Bosnia for the credibility of the West and as an indication of what will and will not be tolerated in Europe are far greater than many want to believe.
Twice before in this century, the United States and the west Europeans concluded that conflicts in eastern Europe need not have broader consequences for themselves: first with regard to the Balkan wars of 1908 to 1912 and then in the 1920s, when many assumed, in Churchill's oft–quoted words, that "the war of the giants has ended [and] the quarrels of the pygmies have begun." In both cases, those making these assumptions proved to be wrong, and the world slid toward larger conflicts from which the great powers could not remain aloof. Bosnia represents the latest version of such a "quarrel." It will be a tragedy if those who want to believe that it has no broader implications for the region, for Russia, and for ourselves, carry the day.
Endnotes
Note 1: See Paul A. Goble, "Serbians' Success Echoes in Russia," New York Times, August 23, 1992; ———,"Russia's Extreme Right," The National Interest, vol. 20 (Fall 1993), pp. 93–96; Frank Umbach, "The Consequences of Western Policy Towards the Yugoslav Conflict and Its Impact upon the Former Soviet Union," European Security, vol. 2 (Summer 1993), pp. 244–70; S. P. Ramet, "The Bosnian War and the Diplomacy of Accommodation," Current History, vol. 94 (November 1994), pp. 380–85; and S. K. Pavlowitch, "Who Is `Balkanizing' Whom?" Daedalus, vol. 111 (Spring 1994), pp. 203–23. Back.
Note 2: For a discussion of this use of ethnicity, see Paul A. Goble, "A New Age of Nationalism," in Bruce Seymore, ed., ACCESS Guide to Ethnic Conflicts in Europe and the Former Soviet Union (Washington, DC: access, 1994), pp. 3–4. On the origins of this system, see ———, "Rozhdeniye stalinskoi natsional'noi politiki," in P. that the stakes in Bos Goble and G. Bordyugov, eds., Mezhnatsional'nyye otnosheniya v Rossii I SNG (Moscow: 1994), pp. 14–20; and A. N. Nenarokov, "Sem'desyat let nazad: natsional'nyi vopros na XII s"ezde RKP(b)," Otechestvennaya istoriya vol. 3, no. 6, 1993, pp. 111–24, and no. 1, 1994, pp. 106–17. Back.
Note 3: For a fascinating discussion of this conjunction of reactionaries and liberals in Moscow, see Marina Pavlova–Silvanskaya's account of the ways in which Armenian activists have collaborated with the Serbs, Obshchaya gazeta, no. 5, August 20–26, 1993, p. 9. Back.
Note 4: For an unintended example of this phenomenon, see the roundtable of Russian experts in Novoye vremya, no. 31, August 1994, pp. 34–35. Back.
Note 5: For a useful discussion of this use of a distant, if imperfect, mirror in the case of Ukraine, see J. F. Dunn, Ukrainian Attitudes to the Crisis in the Former Yugoslavia, RMA CSRC Occasional Paper, no. 21, 1993. Back.
Note 6: See, for example, Pavlo Rudyakov's comments in Politichna dumka, no. 3, 1994, pp. 219–23. Back.
Note 7: Yeltsin adviser Sergei Karaganov remarked that "almost nobody is interested in Serbia here, but the opposition is playing it up to make things more difficult for the administration and the administration has to bow to that." Cited in Financial Times, April 20, 1993. Back.
Note 8: Pravda, January 13, 1992, p. 4. Back.
Note 9: The following discussion draws on the most comprehensive collection of documents and analyses of the Russian involvement in the Yugoslav crisis: Iugoslavskiy krzis I Rossiya (Moscow, 1993–), multiple volumes. I am indebted to academician Vladimir Volkov for making these studies available to me. In addition, see Albert Wohlstetter, "Creating a Greater Serbia," New Republic, August 1, 1994, pp. 22–27; Michael Ignatieff, "Homage to Bosnia," New York Review of Books, April 21, 1994, pp. 3–4; Misha Glenny, "Heading Off War in the Southern Balkans," Foreign Affairs, vol. 74 (May/June 1995), pp. 98–108; and Steven Greenhouse, "Year's Effort by 5–Nation Group Accomplishes Little in Bosnia," New York Times, March 22, 1995, p.1. Back.
Note 10: On the shift and Russia's isolation as a result, see David Hoffman, "Attack on Bosnia Shows Russia's Drift from West," Washington Post, September 16, 1995, p. A20. On this general pattern in Russian foreign policy, see Alexander Rahr and Joachim Krause, Russia's New Foreign Policy (Bonn: Research Institute of the German Society for Foreign Affairs, 1995), especially: "Russia's policy will collide with Western policy in several areas in the years to come. This does not necessarily mean, however, that a new strategic competition is about to begin. Russia is too weak for a new strategic competition with the West and would expose itself to new weaknesses," p. 41. Back.
Note 11: See Paul A. Goble, "And Unfortunately [Yeltsin] May Get It," Wall Street Journal Europe, September 28, 1994, p. 15. Back.
Note 12: To say this is not to fall into either an extension of Cold War thought or historical determinism. See the brilliant essay by David Hooson, "The Return of Geography," in Ian Bremmer and Norman Naimark, eds., Soviet Nationalities Problems (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 61–68. Back.
Note 13: See Paul A. Goble, "Back to Biafra? Defending Borders and Defending Human Rights in the Post–Cold War Environment," Fordham International Law Journal, vol. 18 (May 1995), pp. 1679–84. Back.
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