Abstract
This chapter serves two purposes. Firstly, it assesses the ‘weight’ or significance of different elite actors’ statements on East Asia examined in the following chapters according to their likely influence on Russia’s East Asia policymaking and discourse. Secondly, it outlines the nature of policymaking under Yeltsin and Putin, highlighting the differences and continuities between the two periods. This provides the background against which we assess the greater convergence of elite perceptions under Putin. The chapter firstly characterises the Russian foreign policy elite according to their likely influence on policy. It then examines each actor in more detail with regards to their role in East Asia policy.
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Notes
Mark Webber and Michael Smith, (eds),Foreign Policy in a Transformed World, (Essex: Prentice Hall, 2002), p. 39.
William Zimmerman, The Russian People and Foreign Policy (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 21.
The Council’s formal role is to be a consultative body that would make recommendations and proposals to the president on security matters and serves as the president’s principal private council where major foreign policy issues are discussed and decided upon. However, the influence and exact function of the Council ebbed and flowed depending on who was the secretary and how were his relations with the president. When Putin’s close friend, Sergei Ivanov, was Secretary (1999–2001), the SB was a major participant in security-related foreign policy issues. Once Ivanov became defence minister, the SB’s role as a major foreign policy player diminished under Vladimir Rushailo and Igor Ivanov. Leszek Buszynski, Russian Foreign Policy after the Cold War (Westport: Praeger, 1996), pp. 18–21;
Bobo Lo, Vladimir Putin and the Evolution of Russian Foreign Policy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, RIIA, 2003), p. 36;
Neil Malcolm, ‘Foreign Policy Making’ in Malcolm, et al., Internal Factors in Russian Foreign Policy (Oxford: OUP, 1996), pp. 110–17;
and Dmitrii Trenin and Bobo Lo, The Landscape of Russian Foreign Policy Decision-Making (Moscow: CMC, 2005), p. 11.
Allison, Light, and White, Putin’s Russia and the Enlarged Europe, pp. 41–2. On the ascendancy of the siloviki see Olga Kryshtanovskaia and Stephen White, ‘Putin’s Militocracy’, Post-Soviet Affairs, vol. 19, no. 4, 2003, pp. 289–306;
Pavel Baev, ‘The Evolution of Putin’s Regime: Inner Circles and Outer Walls’, Problems of Post-Communism, vol. 51, no. 6, 2004, pp. 3–13;
Amy Knight, ‘The Enduring Legacy of the KGB in Russian Politics’, Problems of Post-Communism, vol. 47, no. 4, 2000, pp. 3–15;
and Bobo Lo, ‘The Securitisation of Russian Foreign Policy under Putin’, in Gabriel Gorodetsky (ed.) Russia between East and West (London: Frank Cass, 2003), pp. 12–27. On economic liberals see ‘Medvedev in St. Pete group’, Moscow Times, 12 December 2007. 12. The PA’s influence stemmed from certain individuals rather than as an institutional body. ‘Russia: Towards a Presidential Foreign Policy’, September 2003, Oxford Analytica, http://www.riia.org/pdf/research/rep/PA_OA.pdf (accessed October 2004). Under Yeltsin, according to Prikhod’ko, the responsibility for formulating foreign policy rested with the foreign minister, who had unimpeded and regular access.
Robert Donaldson and Joseph Nogee, The Foreign Policy of Russia (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), p. 134. Under Putin, analysts noted that the PA ‘exerts the greatest influence on foreign policy’ relative to other actors. Gregory Feifer, ‘Putin’s Foreign Policy a Private Affair’, Moscow Times, 2 April 2002.
Gordon Bennett, ‘The SVR: Russia’s Intelligence Service’, CSRC Occasional Paper, C103, March 2000, pp. 5–8. On SVR’s influence in the early 1990s see J. Michael Waller, ‘Who is Making Foreign Policy?’, Perspective, vol. 5, no. 3, 1995. There is some operational rivalry between the SVR and GRU, the latter under the MO. Carolina Vendil Pallin, ‘The Russian Power Ministries: Tool and Insurance of Power’, Journal of Slavic Military Studies, vol.20, no.1, 2007, p. 15.
Tobias Dougherty, Russian Arms Transfers in the Post-Cold War Era, D. Phil thesis, (Oxford: University of Oxford, 2005), pp. 162–5, 170–2.
Rosvooruzhenie was headed by former SVR officers in the late 1990s. The SVR and FSB also have good relations with the TEK. For instance, the FSB has a department charged with supporting the activities of Gazprom. Tor Bukkvoll, ‘Arming the Ayatollahs’, Problems of Post-Communism, vol. 49, no. 6, 2002, p. 33.
MID had a central role in the formulation of Russia’s China policy ‘by default’, given the relative lack of attention and expertise of Yeltsin and the PA on China. Jeanne Wilson, Strategic Partners: Russian-Chinese Relations in the Post-Soviet Era (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2004), p. 7
Buszynski, Russian Foreign Policy after the Cold War, p. 17; and Ivan Tiouline, ‘Russia: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs’, in Brian Hocking, (ed.) Foreign Ministries: Change and Adaptation (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 170–87.
Konstantin Kosachev, ‘Vneshnepoliticheskaia vertikal’, Rossiia v global’noi politike, vol. 2, no. 3, 2004, pp. 26–8.
The General Staff, Supreme Soviet, and SB were adamantly opposed to any transfer of territory to Japan, influencing Yeltsin’s decision to postpone his visit to Japan in September 1992. Harry Gelman, Russo-Japanese Relations and the Future of the US-Japanese Alliance (Santa Monica: RAND, 1993), pp. 63–8; and
Natasha Kuhrt, Russian Policy towards China and Japan (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 70–6.
Anna Shkuropat, ‘Assessing Russia’s Entry into APEC’, APEC Study Centre Conference, Auckland, 31 May–2 June 1999, p. 6; and Sergei Goncharenko, Aziatsko-Tikhookeanskii Region (Moscow: IMEMO, 1999), pp. 46–52.
The VPK consisted of five main sectors: manufacturers of military electronics, land-based weapons systems, aerospace, shipbuilding, and nuclear weapons. Of these, the aerospace sector achieved the most success in East Asia. It also includes those defence plants based in the RFE like the Sukhoi plant in Komsomolsk-na-Amure and the state arms export monopolies Rosvooruzhenie and Rosoboroneksport (from merger of Rosvooruzhenie and Promeksport in 2000). Alexander Sergounin and Sergei Subbotin, Russian Arms Transfers to East Asia in the 1990s, SIPRI Research Report no. 15, (New York: OUP, 1999), pp. 20–3.
On the shifting nature of policymaking, see Sergounin and Subbotin, Russian Arms Transfers, pp. 44–69; Ian Anthony, (ed.) Russia and the Arms Trade (New York: SIPRI, OUP, 1998), pp. 107–23; and Dougherty, Chapter 3.
http://www.kremlin.ru/eng/articles/goverment_strukt.shtml (accessed March 2005). See also Robert Orttung and Boris Demidov, ‘Russian Business, the Arms Trade, and Regional Security’ in Andreas Wenger, et al., (eds) Russian Business Power (Routledge: London, 2006), pp. 157–74.
The TEK encompasses commercial enterprises dealing with the extraction, production, processing, conversion, and specialised transportation of fuel and power resources. It is also represented in the RFE by the energy enterprises there. Viktor Kalashnikov, ‘The Russian Far East and Northeast Asia’, in Takashi Murakami and Shinichiro Tabata, (eds) Russian Regions: Economic Growth and Environment (Sapporo: Slavic Research Centre — hereafter SRC, 2000), fn. 10, p. 313.
Valerii Zaitsev, et al., The Northeast Asia Energy and Environmental Cooperation, Research Output vol. 13, no. 1, (Tokyo: NIRA, 2000), p. 21.
Putin defended a kandidat dissertation on this theme at the St. Petersburg Mining University in 1997. Harley Balzer, ‘The Putin Thesis and Russian Energy Policy’, Post-Soviet Affairs, vol. 21, no. 3, 2005, pp. 210–25.
The Movement was approved by Putin in February 2006 and is supported by various legislators, regional heads, and academics. See Mikhail Nikolaev, ‘Eastern Dimension’, International Affairs, vol.52, no.5, 2006, pp. 138–45; and his interview in ‘“Vostochnoe Izmerenie” Rossii i stran ASEAN’, Aziia i Afrika Segodnia, no. 3, 2007, pp. 48–50.
During Soviet times, institutes concerned with foreign affairs under the USSR Academy of Sciences were often given the task to prepare background briefs; offer expert assessments on documents drafted by MID and other ministries; and were invited by these departments as experts or consultants to work abroad. During the early post-Soviet period, ties between scientific institutes and MID ‘fell into decay’ and the research community’s role in foreign policy became virtually non-existent. Nodari Simonia, ‘Priorities of Russia’s Foreign Policy and the Way it Works’, in Adeed and Karen Dawisha, (eds) The Making of Foreign Policy in Russia (London: M. E. Sharpe, 1995), pp. 26, 34–5; and Anastasiia Kornia, ‘The Sweet-Sounding Word “Advisor”’, Vremia MN, 7 December 2001, Johnson’s Russia List no.5595, 13 December 2001.
On Soviet institutes see Oded Eran, The Mezhdunarodniki (Israel: Turtledove Publishing, 1979); and Checkel, Ideas and International Political Change.
Vera Tolz and Irina Busygina, ‘Regional Governors and the Kremlin: The Ongoing Battle for Power’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, vol. 30, no. 4, 1997, pp. 401–26;
Peter Kirkow, ‘Regional Warlordism in Russia’, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 47, no. 6, 1995, pp. 923–48;
Elizabeth Wishnick’s Mending Fences: The Evolution of Moscow’s China Policy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), and ‘One Asia Policy or Two? Moscow and the RFE Debate Russia’s Engagement in Asia’, NBR Analysis, vol. 13, no. 1, 2002, pp. 39–101.
Kryshtanovskaia and White, ‘Putin’s Militocracy’, p. 301; and O. Barabanov, ‘Polpredy Prezidenta i Mezhdunarodnye Sviazi’, in O. Kolobov, (ed.) Mezhdunarodnye Otnosheniia v XXI veke (Moscow: MGIMO, 2001), pp. 20–3. Pulikovskii himself described his position’s main task as the realisation of control and of coordinating the actions of state authority in the regions.
Konstantin Pulikovskii, Vostochnyi Ekspress: po Rossii c Kim Chen Irom (Moscow: Gorodets, 2002), p. 16.
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© 2009 Paradorn Rangsimaporn
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Rangsimaporn, P. (2009). Actors in Russia’s East Asia Policymaking. In: Russia as an Aspiring Great Power in East Asia. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230244740_2
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