ABSTRACT
While Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s freely elected president, broke apart the Soviet Union in order to remove the last of the general secretaries, he had no intention of relinquishing Russia’s position of international power. The Soviet Union’s permanent seat in the UN Security Council, including its veto rights, was transferred to Russia with Western agreement. The development of relations between Russia and its “near neighbors,” the former Soviet republics, within the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) framework will also play an important role. The Soviet Union was an involuntary assemblage of countries with extraordinarily different traditions, cultures, and religions, which were heavily restricted by Russian colonial power. Just as Soviet Russia, upon renaming itself the Soviet Union, refused to do without any piece of “holy Russian earth,” Yeltsin intended to preserve Russia’s imperial greatness by binding the former Soviet republics to the CIS.
