ABSTRACT

In many ways, the economic issues represent the continuation, within a transformed political and economic context, of the 1990–91 debates over the Union of Soviet Sovereign Republics Economic Union. Now the debate concerns not whether, but how far the leaders would like economic integration to go. As the documents collected here reveal, while the non-Russian commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) leaders support the principle of forming a single economic space, they still hesitate when it comes to assigning supranational authority to any CIS economic executive agency. Throughout the economic debate, articles have appeared in CIS media which have pointed out Russia's use of its economic prowess and leverage to blackmail the countries of the "near abroad" into accepting its policies and vision for the CIS. By mid-1993 economic integration was seen as the only way out of the crisis in which each state found itself.