Reflecting on Twenty Years of Post-Soviet Experience

Abstract: Two decades of post-Soviet knowledge have produced a host of new realities and a wealth of material for political scientists to study. One major shift is that since 1991, Russian policy has been primarily reactive. But in the last two to three years, homegrown policy initiatives have emerged, both international and regional, leading to new rounds of geopolitical challenges, successes, and failures for the Russian Federation. Nomenclature New region, new independent states, new identities and new names--the political lexicon in post-Soviet regional studies has changed since the early 1990s so that it can reflect new realities. In Russian, the names for the sub-regions in Eurasia and for the post-Soviet space itself originally were very Moscow-centered. New identities and foreign policy orientations demanded re-branding. Used in Soviet times and in the early 1990s, the term "Transcaucasia" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]) means a region behind the Caucasus Mountains, but only if you look from Moscow. So now it is South Caucasus. "Middle Asia," ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]) which in Soviet times did not include Kazakhstan, renamed itself to Central Asia ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]) in the early 1990s to include all five states of the region. "The Ukraine" dropped the article in English and changed prepositions in Russian ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]). The Baltic States are not the "near Baltic" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]) anymore. The main problem is how to name the whole region. Another question is whether a coherent region still exists. "Post-Soviet space" could mean all former republics plus Central and Eastern European countries from the former Soviet bloc. The "Near Abroad" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]), a term widely used to describe post-Soviet countries, remains Russo-centric and makes sense only from a Russian perspective. The term "Eurasia" is not very widespread in Russia and other post-Soviet countries because it connotes Eurasianism--a geopolitical intellectual school drawing from 19th century (and 1920s) Slavophiles. The "CIS region," especially after Georgia's withdrawal, also does not cover the entire region. "Newly independent states" are not so new by now. So the question about a politically neutral name for the region still stands. Schools of Thought One of the ideas of this collection of articles was to look at the main trends in theoretical and empirical analysis seeking to explain the processes in Eurasia during the last 20 years. Among the Russian community of international relations scholars, it is widely believed that Western political science is too attached to methodology while the same rather trivial conclusions can be made by armchair theorists without tiring and expensive field research. Another claim is that Western theories do not explain the post-Soviet realities. But, in fact, such reasoning may be just an excuse not to develop our own theories. In Russia, in international relations and security studies, all original research is made at the empirical level. Ideas, such as the concept of an energy superpower or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and BRICS as anti-hegemonic balancing coalitions, usually are not backed up by theoretical explanations. Most Russian international relations (IR) theoretical works are secondary and draw from the already existing Western grand and middle-range theories, mainly realism. The only theoretical school that organically grew from Russia's empirical soil is geopolitics, which dates back to the 19th century. It is the only IR theory that views Russia as a great power because of its unique and favorable geographic position. In realist and liberal theories, other types of resources are considered crucial. From these theoretical perspectives, it turns out that Russia, even with its nuclear arms and UN Security Council veto, is still relatively weaker than other great powers because it has fewer resources to project its power in any form, whether by military might or the strength of its ideas. …