ABSTRACT
The Soviet Union and the new Russia will be treated together, but in sequence. If the Soviet Union was a global power, the new Russia is more of a regional power. The demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 and its replacement by Russia have fundamentally changed the character of the relations between the Eurasian state and the countries of the Asia-Pacific, as has indeed happened even more strikingly elsewhere in the world. In addition to the loss of the capabilities of a superpower, another significant change was the abandonment of communism and the concomitant claim to lead a worldwide communist movement. Nevertheless, there are important continuities. First, it is important to recognize that despite its universalist communist pretensions, a Russian imprint on Soviet conduct was always evident, even though its depth may have been disputed.1 Second, and by the same token, the Soviet legacy is evident in many respects even as the leaders of the new Russia grope towards a different future. Importantly, the new Russia has been regarded internationally in some respects as the heir of the Soviet Union. For example, it assumed without question the permanent Soviet seat on the UN Security Council. And, like the Soviet Union before it, the new Russia still aspires to be recognized as a global power alongside the United States. In this respect Russia still disposes of a nuclear arsenal of superpower dimensions and its military industries can still produce advanced weapons systems. The new Russia has also inherited the borders of the former Soviet Union,
except, of course, where these were taken over by the new states formed from the old Soviet Republics. In the Asia-Pacific, broadly defined, these include the five Central Asian Republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. The last three together with Russia share a border with China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region, and accordingly impinge directly on the narrower definition of the Asia-Pacific used in this book. All five states are members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), with Russia as the key member. Those bordering China negotiate remaining border issues collectively, which in practice tends to mean that the new Russia has inherited most of the old border and territorial disputes of the former Soviet Union, which it itself had inherited from Tsarist Russia. Despite the loss of vast tracts of land to the former Soviet Republics, Russia is
still the world’s largest state, stretching across the vast Eurasian landmass from the
Baltic to the Pacific. In that respect, both the Soviet Union and Russia have tended to regard the Far East as an outpost, a point of vulnerability to be defended, rather than a gateway to the Asia-Pacific – even though the rhetoric of Presidents Gorbachev and Yeltsin may have suggested otherwise. The conduct of Soviet policy towards the Asia-Pacific since 1945 has been
shaped by the competing priorities of global, regional and domestic security and ideological concerns. Ideological concerns, as understood here, do not refer only to the doctrinal matters of Marxism-Leninism, but rather to the practical consequences at home and abroad that arose from the claim by successive Soviet leaders to be at the head of a worldwide communist movement. Global issues centred primarily on the strategic relationship with the United States and regional ones focused primarily upon China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam. Domestic concerns about the region arose largely as a consequence of the vast
geographical expanse of the Soviet Union. This contributed to a sense of insecurity, at one level, about the thinly populated Russian Far East that was supplied by the Trans-Siberian Railway and by sea via the Indian Ocean, both of which were vulnerable to interdiction in wartime. Indeed, it was the tyranny of distance that caused the Russian explorers and traders to retreat from northern California in the first half of the nineteenth century and the government to sell Alaska to the United States in 1867.2 The wars fought with Japan in the first half of the twentieth century for dominance in Korea, Manchuria and Inner Asia established a linkage between defeat abroad and upheaval at home, and they also came to illustrate the strategic necessity of avoiding having to fight a war on two fronts. That historical legacy, combined with the Soviet goal of matching and perhaps exceeding the United States in military terms as a fellow superpower, found expression in an over-militarized approach in the Far East. At perhaps deeper levels, the distant Russian outposts in the Far East illustrated
ambiguities about the sense of identity of this vast Eurasian state. The uneasy suspension between East Asia and Western Europe has led Russian people, as Dostoevsky noted, to be regarded as Europeans in Asia and as Asiatics in Europe.3 It has been argued persuasively that ‘the Soviet far east is an extension of European Russia into Asia’.4 Although three-quarters of the Soviet Union lay in Asia and about 30 per cent of the Soviet population lived in its Asian lands, the Soviet Union neither considered itself nor was it considered by others to be Asian. It was not invited to the first Asian and African conference in Bandung in 1955, nor did it evince any desire to attend. When it sought to attend the abortive follow-up conference ten years later in Algeria, it did so mainly in order to spike the guns of its Chinese adversaries. At most, Soviets and Russians have thought of themselves as Eurasians. Any Asian identity that was claimed was done for political advantage, as for example when Stalin greeted a visiting Japanese foreign minister in 1941 with the toast: ‘You are an Asiatic, so am I.’5 The Soviet Union has been rightly described as ‘a power in East Asia but not an East Asian power’.6
Pacific Russia has not been integrated into the region. With the exception of the decade of the special relationship with China in the 1950s, the economic links with East Asia have been of minimal significance. Since the break with China,
trade with Pacific Asia has averaged out at between 5 and 10 per cent of total Soviet trade, and with the exception of the Asian communist countries Soviet trade accounted for a negligible proportion of that of individual Asian countries.7
