ABSTRACT
Russia’s relations with China and Japan are important for a range of reasons. First, in geographical terms, these two countries abut Russia’s Far East, which has increased in significance in the 1990s. Second, since Gorbachev’s famous speech at Vladivostok in 1986, the Asia-Pacific was widely expected to become a new opportunity for the Soviet Union in both economic and political terms. Third, these relations can tell us much about the new Russia’s foreign policy as a whole, as the debates over Russian national identity have tended to crystallise around relations with on the one hand, ‘the East’, and on the other, ‘the West’. What was particularly interesting about Russia’s policy towards China and Japan under El’tsin, in terms of the East/West debate, is that there were in effect two different ‘Easts’ in operation in the minds of the Russian elite, or at least they were used to mean different things in different contexts. For some in Russia the East implied the economic dynamism of the Asia-Pacific – with Japan as the main player. For others it meant a chance to reassert Russia’s claim to be a great power, based mainly on its geopolitical position as an Eurasian power: for these China is the power to engage with. Looking at the two powers from the traditional geopolitical perspective, China and Russia together could control both ‘Heartland’ and ‘Rim’1 – both Eurasia and Asia-Pacific, while Japan and the Russian Far East sat on the periphery.
