ABSTRACT
During 1992-93 Russia was working hard through what is bound to be a long process of changeover to a new type of statehood. Foreign policy always depends on domestic policy. Furthermore, Russia's foreign policy was not being made from scratch, although its official spokespersons tried to present it as something fundamentally new and different from past policy. This chapter explains how far the foreign policy strategies of the Stalinist, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin periods have met the interests of ensuring national security in the full sense of the term, encompassing, at least, five major aspects: preservation of national integrity and survival within the given frontiers; military-political security; economic security; legal protection of the population; and ecological security. A civil society had not yet been created. It was not its own goals that Russia's political democracy fought for; rather, it was clearing the way to power not for itself but for an entirely different social force- which called as the economic nomenklatura.
