Russia's Foreign Policy

The Internal-International Link

Aldo Ferrari, Eleonora Tafuro Ambrosetti

• Publisher: Ledizioni
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9788855264914
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Geopolitics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Who decides what in Moscow? The answer is not always "Vladimir Putin". However, when explaining Russia's foreign policy, the consolidation of Putin's autocratic tendencies and his apparent stability despite many economic and political challenges have contributed – at least in the West – to an excessive "Putin-centrism" and the relative neglect of other agents of domestic politics. As a result, many facets of the country's foreign policy decisions are misunderstood or shrouded under a thin veil of vagueness and secrecy.This Report attempts to fill this gap, exploring the evolving distribution of political and economic power under the surface of Putin's leadership to assess the influence of different "lobbies" on Russia's foreign policy. All of the contributions in the volume underline the complexity of Russia's decision-making process beneath the surface of a monolithic and increasingly personalistic government.

1. Influential or Irrelevant? The Role of Foreign Policy Think Tanks in Russia

Alexander Graef

Russian foreign policy think tanks have rarely been the focus of empirical analysis. With some notable exceptions,1 studies about domestic political players in Russian foreign policy-making either ignore them completely or mention them only in passing. This chapter draws on previous publications by the author2 and reflects on the political influence of these institutions in light of the complexity and secrecy of the foreign policy-making process, which rarely makes it possible to identify conclusive evidence. This is true for all states, but the informal nature of Russian politics exacerbates this methodological problem. Tracing and measuring the political influence of think tanks is therefore difficult.

According to the 2020 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report, Russia currently has 143 think tanks.3 This comparatively high number follows from a broad definition of organisations in terms of their functions, namely to offer “policy-oriented research, analysis and advice”.4 Most Russian think tanks work on social, economic and financial issues, conduct opinion polls, or support the election campaigns of governors and regional lawmakers, for whom foreign policy plays no particular role. The subgroup of foreign policy think tanks is rather small and diverse in terms of institutional form, ownership and historical trajectory. These think tanks include various research institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) and entire university departments, but also state-sponsored platforms and (private) policy research institutes that either exist as non-commercial organisations (NCO) or enterprises.

By contrast, in the United States, think tanks have been traditionally understood as “nonprofit organizations” with “substantial organizational independence” from the state or single-interest groups,5 in order to set them apart from (semi-public) administration bodies. This conception builds on the historical tradition of private funding and philanthropy in a highly competitive liberal democratic political order. These conditions, however, do not travel well to most other political cultures.6 Even in Western liberal democracies such as Germany, France, Spain and Italy, policy research and advisory institutions in foreign and security policy receive substantial parts of their funding through public grants or are even direct foundations of state agencies and political parties. Russia belongs to this state-centric tradition,7 but its authoritarian, neo-patrimonial political system creates unique conditions.

Historical Legacy

The Russian system of foreign policy knowledge production beyond the state bureaucracy emerged historically from the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in February 1956.8 At the time, the rise of Soviet power increasingly required high-quality analyses of the global economy that went beyond empty ideological formula predicting the collapse of Western capitalism. The establishment of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO; today the Primakov Institute of World Economy and International Relations) as part of the Soviet Academy of Sciences a few months after the Party Congress subsequently inspired the foundation of further research institutes studying the culture, politics and economies of different world regions.9 These included the Institute for African Studies (1959), the Institute for Latin America (1961), the Institute of the Far East (1966), the Institute for US and Canadian Studies (1967, ISKAN; today ISKRAN) and the Institute of Europe (1987).10

Until 1991, these institutes provided access to restricted information for selected intellectual elites and served as alternative in-system platforms for policy research and debate beyond the Communist party and the Soviet military. Nevertheless, they remained alien bodies in the Soviet foreign policy decision-making process.11 Rather than being generators of new policy ideas, their role was, with few exceptions, limited to the public legitimation of official policies. At times, researchers also served as informal ambassadors to intellectual elites and think tankers in the West. Their role in Soviet policy-making changed only in the late 1980s under CPSU General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.12

In the context of perestroika and glasnost, Gorbachev for the first time opened up broader access to operational politics, particularly for researchers at the ISKAN and IMEMO. The General Secretary’s willingness to reform required both new ideas and allies against more conservative party and military elites. The intellectual exchange was also facilitated by personal relations between the academic and the political leadership. In 1985 IMEMO Director Aleksandr Yakovlev, the “spiritual father” of perestroika, moved to the Central Committee as secretary of the Department of Ideology. His successor at the IMEMO, Yevgeny Primakov, who eventually would become Russian Foreign Minister and Prime Minister, was appointed chairman of the Union Council of the Supreme Soviet in 1989.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the social and political position of these institutchiki – literally “people from the institutes” – changed radically.13 The academic institutes, which were entirely state-funded, lost much of their previous funding. In the face of economic crisis, many, especially younger employees left academia and sought new employment elsewhere or emigrated altogether. At the same time, the institutional integration of the academic institutes into the overall policy process, previously organised by the CPSU, ended, and foreign policy issues largely receded into the background.

The greater degree of openness in the immediate post-Soviet era, however, also enabled younger employees of academic institutes and universities to establish contacts with the political elite or become part of this elite themselves, either as members of the State Duma or as part of President Yeltsin’s administration.14 This direct involvement in the construction of the new state, together with the limited supply of young academics, laid the foundation for the long-lasting dominance of Soviet baby boomers among Russian foreign policy experts. The shared Soviet experience between this older generation of researchers and leading Russian diplomats also provided important social and intellectual bonds that facilitated personal exchange.

The new degree of political pluralism, however, resulted in powerful opposition to President Yeltsin in the State Duma. In 1992, parts of the wider foreign policy elites joined forces in the Council for Foreign and Defence Policy (SVOP). As a private network of academics, businessmen, military officers, diplomats and journalists, it would go on to play both a coordinative and an agenda-setting role in the 1990s. For example, the network succeeded in advancing debates about the union with Belarus, the fight against drug abuse, and the urgently needed military reform, partially because of the important political offices held by...