ABSTRACT
After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the Russian leadership did not perceive Central Asia as an important area in its foreign relations. The Atlanticist stance of President Boris Yeltsin and his Foreign Minister, Andrei Kozyrev, suggested that Moscow’s priorities would aim at integration with the rich, enlightened and democratic West. The newly independent Central Asian republics were looked upon as aziatshchina, an area of alien Asian values, and a developmental black hole, from which Russia ought to isolate itself. Regional threats were to be dealt with in the spirit of liberalism, using international norms and institutions. As Kozyrev put it in December 1992,
We must prevent a drift to ‘Asiaticism’ [aziatshchina] . . . We must draw the region in the CSCE [Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe] process with all its lofty principles . . . Russia’s goals and interests demand ensuring that our international environment is not ‘Asiaticism’ but the CSCE area with its democratic standards and market rules, or all that is inherent in European political culture.1
