ABSTRACT
The contemporary debate about the future of politics in the Eurasian space comes back again and again to the “Russian question”: Will the Soviet Union, having collapsed, reassert itself, this time as a new Russian empire? Analysts in the West and elsewhere moved quickly from euphoria over these long-suppressed nations’ new independence to concern over whether they would be able to resist or survive in the face of any renewed Russian imperial drive. Within two years of the Soviet collapse, books and articles started to fill the shelves—analyzing Russia’s potential strength, assessing the foreign policy impact of its domestic political divisions, speaking of the Russian impulse to empire, and chronicling the near-total obsession that elites in neighboring countries have with managing their relationships with Moscow. 1
