ABSTRACT
Subregionalism is a political issue that brings together the central problems in Russia's internal and foreign policy, revealing both their interdependence and their fundamentally unresolvable conflicts. It is hard to expect any consistency from Moscow in formulating its subregional approaches when it remains obsessed with the logically flawed task of defining simultaneously the substance and the form of the present (leftover) state, in other words, its character and its borders. I It might seem that the identity debates have subsided and that the state borders are politically beyond question, but in fact President Boris Yeltsin's 1997 presidential order to produce a "national idea" was ridiculed by the intelligentsia precisely because of the impossibility of formulating any such thing.2 Russian borders are widely perceived as "unnatural" and are challenged by the Chechen secession, Dagestani chaos, South-North Ossetian "reunification," and Russian-Belarusian rapprochement.3 Paradoxically, the boundaries of most of Russia's regions seem to be much more recognized and stable than the state's external borders.
