REINTEGRATION IN THE FORMER USSR

Russia's policies changed markedly during the course of 1993. As Gerha rd Simon and Olga Alexandrova pointed out with reference to the contex t of the Ukrainian development in their articles in issue 1/1994 of th is journal, Moscow has sought to bring its dominating influence on the territory of the former USSR to bear and to thus renew the old imperi al unity. Corresponding ideas are not only fostered in ''national-patr iotic'' circles, for example, among those who support and sympathise w ith Rutskoy and Zhirinovskiy; the policy pursued by Yeltsin and Kozyre v is also strongly pervaded with such notions. The following analysis by Andrei Zagorski, who is Deputy Director of the Moscow State Institu te for International Relations (MGIMO) and head of the Centre of Inter national Studies there, outlines the effects this will have on relatio ns inside the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the geographic al successor to the former Soviet Union. The commendable accomplishmen t of this analysis is that the problems concerned are examined in the light of the interests of both the Russian side as well as of the non- Russian partners. Efforts towards greater convergence by no means eman ate from the Russian side alone. Many - yet certainly not all - of the other new states on the territory of the former USSR seek a certain d egree of reintegration, albeit normally exlcuding the relinquishment o f sovereignty, in order to cope with the problems resulting from forme r economy dependencies. Zagorski makes it clear that the leaderships i n the other countries are by and large to blame for the fact that this lever (and others) is at Moscow's disposal. Were these leaderships to resolutely depart from the old economic system in the line with the a pproach favoured, for example, by Tallinn and Riga the relations with Russia would soon have a different character The article is based on a detailed and extensively substantiated study which the author wrote f or the Federal Institute for East European and International Studies i n Cologne and which was published in the Federal Institute's series of mimeographed Reports.