Vitaly Portnikov. Commonwealth for Putin

Commonwealth for Putin
Vitaly Portnikov

Publication date: December 27, 2000

Did the new Russian president manage to revive the CIS structure, which had fallen into complete disrepair? Most observers will answer this question in the affirmative: meetings of the leaders of the CIS countries began to take place according to a much more rigid and verified scenario, Russia began to insist that its interests should be taken into account both at the level of regional and bilateral cooperation. All this is true, and all this hardly has anything to do with the CIS. Let me remind you that the incapacity of the Commonwealth was recorded by the leaders of the former Soviet republics several years ago, during the Chisinau summit . And it was then that the majority of participants in the discussion that shocked Boris Yeltsin rejected the idea of ​​the Commonwealth as an organization based around Russia.

It is no secret that, faced with such obstruction from his colleagues, the Russian president simply lost interest in the CIS. It was from that time that the Commonwealth was rather used - both by Russia and its other members - in its own interests. The response to the incapacity of the CIS was the creation of a number of integration associations focused on Russia - these are, first of all, the Russian-Belarusian Union State , the Eurasian Economic Community , the Collective Security Treaty ... Countries that do not want to build relations with Russia according to this scheme have created an alternative association GUUAM ┘ And note, all this construction took place as if within the CIS.

But it was with the election of Vladimir Putin as Russian President that the Commonwealth - I would completely abandon this designation, which has become customary over the last decade, replacing it with the term “post-Soviet space” - finally began to look like an anachronism. Russia has quite firmly declared the priority of its own interests in relations with the former Soviet republics. By and large, she is no longer interested in who demonstrates a desire to revolve around Moscow and who demonstrates attachment to the West - the main thing is that the desires of the partners correspond to the desires of the Russian leadership itself.

In addition, a strategic component that had been missing for many years appeared in Russia’s actions. How were relations with the former Soviet republics initially built? Rather, based on the principle of what agreements and arrangements are convenient today. However, the recent results of the meeting between the presidents of Russia and Ukraine in Minsk convince us that they are now beginning to be interested in what agreements will work tomorrow. From the point of view of the political logic of the past, Russia should not have agreed to the restructuring of Ukrainian energy debts and lending to a neighboring country. From the point of view of the desire to gain a foothold in the Ukrainian market in the future and ensure a calm attitude of Kyiv (and Warsaw) towards the construction of an “alternative” gas pipeline, it was just worth agreeing.

And one more very important point that destroyed the CIS as a political structure. For many years, the Commonwealth served as a kind of “club of interests” for old acquaintances. The development of relations between the former Soviet republics was often determined by the personal relationships of their leaders. It was not Boris Yeltsin who invented the diplomacy of meetings without ties , but it was under him that it became the leading direction in the development of dialogue in the post-Soviet space... As the presidents decide, so it will be...
You won’t be able to be “friends” with Vladimir Putin like that. He is a stranger to the leaders of the CIS countries: he is much younger than them, has never been a member of the Polutburo and has not even managed a factory or collective farm... So it turns out that relations in the CIS countries are beginning to look less and less like a get-together of old acquaintances and more and more like interstate relations .

By the way, we already observed something similar during the years of perestroika. The relations of the Soviet Union with the countries of the socialist camp were largely determined not only by the fact that there were regimes loyal to Moscow there, not only by the presence of Soviet troops and specialists there. The general secretaries of the fraternal parties simply knew each other very well. But what worked well under Brezhnev or Chernenko stopped working under Gorbachev. The famous Crimean meetings of elderly leaders of socialist countries were replaced by trips of the new General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee to satellite countries, unprecedented conversations with people on the streets of Sofia or Prague...

It is difficult to draw parallels here, and, probably, impossible, but it is characteristic that at the end of the 80s, attempts were made to replace the elderly leaders of the Eastern Bloc countries with Gorbachev’s peers , to establish equal relations, to find effective models of economic interaction...
However, all this is already in the past. Now we are witnessing an attempt to change the entire system of relations in the post-Soviet space - an attempt that may have very significant consequences in the near future.