ABSTRACT
On an April morning in 1996 under the solemn toll of church bells and the benediction of the Holy Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, Boris Yeltsin and Alexander Lukashenka made a public pledge in the Kremlin's Sobornaya Square to reunite the two brotherly people. There is no shortage of explanations why Russia and Belarus have engaged in repeated attempts to reunify since the breakup of the Soviet Union. These include, for example, Russian President Yeltsin's alleged desire to assuage his 'historic guilt' for destroying the Soviet Union, Belarusian President Lukashenka's search for an economic fix without reform, and the perennial ethnic dictum of pan-Slavism. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book analyzes the impact of electoral politics on the policy making process. Integration under President Putin has had slightly different dynamics mainly because of his continuing high popularity.
