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Russia's Monroe Doctrine: Peacekeeping, Peacemakingor Imperial Outreach?

their titular languages as new official languages. But few Russians and other immigrants in the former republics had bothered to learn local languages; their inability to function in the new official medium has caused hardship and generated hatred and resentment. The language question remains largely unresolved throughout the area.

The issue of citizenship and the exercise of political and civil rights connected with it also remains unresolved. Most successor States granted citizenship to all permanent residents at the time of independence. Latvia and Estonia, the two exceptions, excluded all immigrants who came after 1940, the year of the Soviet invasion. This greatly aggra-vated communal relations and put both governments under intense pressure from Rus-sia, madę easier by the continued presence in both States of Russian forces. Russia is promoting dual citizenship for the Russians in the “near abroad”, who were given an option to take the Federation’s citizenship within three years. But the host States have been unwilling for the Russians to combine Russian and local citizenship, fearing an incipient fifth column.

Boundaries also represent a problem in the context of divided national communities, of which there were three basie types: contiguous communities (i.e., those cut off from the mother country); the communities divided between two or morę States; and en-claves. Drawn arbitrarily in the Stalinist period, the boundaries nonetheless have become “sacred” at independence, and thus inviolable (a phenomenon that has been typical also of the post- colonial Third World), precluding negotiated adjustments in the case of divided communities. It is not accidental, therefore, that all active hot spots which have erupted on the former Soviet periphery, and many morę potential ones, have been re-lated in one way or another to the status, treatment, and ambitions of the minorities.

2. Russia's New Policy

The Commonwealth of Independent States was established in December 1991 by Russia, Ukrainę, and Belarus as the Soviet Union collapsed. But the CIS could not get off the ground because of a fundamental disagreement between its two key members, Russia and Ukrainę, over the very naturę of the organization. Russia, the initiator, wanted to maintain the association in order to safeguard its influence and interests in the former Soviet area. Ukrainę was deeply distrustful of Russian motives and accepted the organization only as a framework for an amicable divorce. The built-in imbalance between Russia, which had half of the population and a lion’s share of economic and military

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