ABSTRACT
Andrei Kozyrev, Russian foreign minister from 1991 to 1996, begins his informative and sobering memoir recalling how, in December 1991, he called president George H.W. Bush from a Belarusian hunting lodge to inform him that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. He hoped for a democratic Russia and a bright new future for relations with the West. His book recounts in vivid detail how and why that dream remains unfulfilled. Kozyrev set out to radically alter Russian foreign policy, seeking good relations with Russia’s neighbours, integrating Russia into the West and developing cooperative ties with other countries. During Russia’s brief period of openness in the 1990s, political emigration ended. Instead, compatriots began to return to Russia, to make money and to try to unify Russians who had remained and Russians who had left. The Russian–Ukrainian energy relationship symbolises the dilemma that Kyiv faces as it confronts Moscow.
