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Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone

policy claims “near abroad” as Russia’s exclusive sphere of influence by virtue of past imperial heritage and Russia’s status as a great power. Second, it legitimizes Russia’s interference, by force if necessary, in support of this assumption, specifically focusing on the protection of Russian minorities. Both preclude interference by interested third parties - this has been of particular importance in the case of the Islamie Southern crescent but it applies also to the Western periphery and implicitly to East Central Europę - and make the support for the leaders in the periphery contingent on their re-sponsiveness to Russian interests. In practice, the latter requirement has meant support for communist incumbents as against newly emergent nationalist forces and forces for political liberalization. Nationalists and liberals both generate instability and are unwill-ing to follow Moscow’s lead.

Russian spokesmen have compared the policy to the United States’ “Monroe Doc-trine” and have promoted it in the international arena as „peacekeeping.” The former Soviet periphery has been racked by ethnic conflicts, and Russia’s preoccupation with the maintenance of stability there has endowed its “peacekeeping” with some legitimacy internationally. This tends to obscure the frankly partisan naturę of the exercise, which once again seeks to subordinate the nations of the periphery to Russian hegemony.

1. The Legacies and Conflict Potential

Alany of the conflicts dividing the peoples of the former USSR datę to the pre-Soviet period. The non-Russians harbour resentment towards the Russians because of their hegemonial role and colonization policies in the imperial and the Soviet periods, and have themselves been divided for centuries by conflicts engendered by conquests, mi-grations, economic rivalries, and ethnicity and culture. Each region has had its own his-torical antagonisms, with the worst case scenario at the Southern rim where the ethnic mosaic has been the most complex and the conflicts fed on religious struggle between Islam and Christianity. Tribal warfare and flerce resistance to colonization have been characteristic of the peoples of the North Caucasus; Georgian Aluslim minorities have long resisted Georgian efforts at assimilation, and the Armenian struggle with the Turks (represented locally by Azeri Turks of Azerbaijan) has lasted for centuries. In Central Asia the successive invasions by nomadic Turks left residual antagonisms between the nomads and agricultural settlers, especially on the borderline between the Turkish and the Iranian area of settlement, and have metamorphosed in modern times into elan and region-based conflicts.

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