International Affairs No. 2, 2015 – Table of Contents

Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation

WE HAVE GATHERED AGAIN in this room on the occasion of our professional holiday. I would like to warmly welcome to this event all of our current and former employees and our friends and colleagues from sister agencies, such as the Presidential Executive Office, the Government Staff, the Security Council and other agencies with which we interact on a daily basis. …

Deputy Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation

Armen Oganesyan, Editor-in-Chief of International Affairs. Alexey Yurievich, you are in charge of European affairs at the Foreign Ministry. For a long time, you were the ambassador to Rome. Now that the vector of relations with Europe has changed, is it more difficult to work? …

AFTER THE ESTABLISHMENT in 1955 of diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and what was then West Germany, Russia and Germany have accumulated an impressive reserve of confidence and traversed a difficult historic path of conciliation between them. Despite turbulent times, Moscow and Berlin for a long time gravitated towards each other and valued this. Relations between the two countries’ leaderships were developing rapidly on the basis of bilateral documents and there were strengthening ties in economy, trade, energy, education, science, arts, and environmental protection. There were increasingly frequent youth exchanges and there were indications that the civil societies of Russia and Germany were drawing closer together in practical terms. Russian and German politicians, public figures, and civil society activists constantly stressed the unique character of Russian-German partnership, which became an important factor of peace and stability in Europe. Diversified cooperation between the two countries became a vivid example of good-neighborly relations between two European nations.

Historical Experience …

THE WORLD’S MAIN REGION of oil and gas extraction; the world’s busiest trade route; the only year-round route between Russia’s European part and its Far East; the home region of Afghanistan and Iraq, the seats of the largest armed conflicts, and of Iran, the target of Western attacks for over three decades – now the Indian Ocean and its littoral zone is an entanglement of numerous problems. Some of the local states cannot boast domestic stability while pirates have made the coastal waters of the Horn of Africa and the Strait of Malacca very dangerous.

A Zone of Peace or an American Sea? …

Editor-in-Chief of International Affairs

MANY PEOPLE still wonder why Angela Merkel performed her “U-turn over the Atlantic” toward Washington. Indeed, there should be reasons which forced her to abandon the eastern political vector in favor of a center of power which, while retaining appearances, is losing real instruments of global governance. …

Armen Oganesyan, Editor-in-Chief of International Affairs: The Union State of Russia and Belarus has turned 15. How would you assess its performance?

A segment of this wide-ranging plan has largely been carried out, and very effectively so, especially the first, social segment. Both neighbors feel quite comfortable: There is freedom of movement (there is a state border, but there is no border or customs control). This creates a sense of involvement in the common space. A number of agreements have been signed guaranteeing the equal rights of citizens, allowing them to freely choose their place of residence and employment. Belarusians are employed on the same basis as Russians, and the same applies to …

THERE IS a well-known legend of Phrygian King Gordius, who tied a highly complex knot that defied all attempts to untie it. An oracle predicted that the man who would untie it would rule the world; the knot was finally undone by Alexander the Great, who did so by cutting through it with a sword. “Cutting the Gordian knot” is often used as a metaphor for solving an intractable problem by using a non-standard and very efficient method.

For twelve months now, Europe and the world have been trying to untie the Gordian knot of Ukrainian developments and their dramatic echo in the country’s east. Rabid nationalists and Russophobes who captured power in Kiev by force and, supported by the United States and Europe, deposed the legally elected President of Ukraine tied one of the most complicated geopolitical knots in the post-Soviet space. Today, we all know that the aggressive and anarchical philosophy of Maidan was knocked together by the theoreticians of color revolutions from Washington and those who had implemented their theories in Yugoslavia, Georgia and elsewhere. They pushed Europe into one of the most painful and dangerous crises in its postwar history and moved the continent dangerously close to a total “hot” war. …

THIS YEAR will see the 70th anniversary of the Great Victory, one more illustrious jubilee date commemorating the end of the Great Patriotic War. But this year, along with voices from progressive forces that make objective assessments of events and results of the Second World War, stressing their significance and prominence, in some countries obnoxious (there is no other word) officials are coming forward and so-called historians are waking up who are painting upside-down pictures of all that has to do with that global tragedy.

The most prominent role among such “experts” belongs to Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk, who has announced that the Soviet Union attacked Ukraine and Germany, and Polish Foreign Minister Grzegorz Schetyna, who has suggested either Warsaw or London instead of Moscow as the venue of the Victory Parade. For justice’s sake, it needs to be admitted that Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski has apologized for that, though it looks strange when the president of a country apologizes for something his foreign minister has said. …

THE NUCLEAR CRISIS on the Korean Peninsula is escalating and is increasingly difficult to resolve. The six-nation mechanism for negotiating a solution, which brings together Russia, China, the United States, lapan, North Korea, and South Korea, has remained stalled for more than five years. Agreements enshrined in the sextet’s Joint Statement of September 19, 2005 have never been put into practice. Relations between the two Koreas are as sour today as ever, and time and again tensions between Pyongyang and Seoul reach extremely dangerous proportions.

All this is part of an overall aggravation of the situation in Northeast Asia. There are increasingly intense territorial disputes between China and Japan, between South Korea and Japan, and between South Korea and China. Beijing’s decision to set up an air defense identification zone in the South China Sea has become a new irritant. …

Session One The Evolution of Integration Processes in the Post-Soviet Space: A Glimpse into the Future

Armen Oganesyan, Editor-in-Chief of International Affairs …

Armen Oganesyan, Editor-in-Chief of International Affairs: In 2014, we paid tribute to the memory of victims of World War I, which was especially sorrowful because of what happened in Russia after the war. The heroism of those who had fought in the war was remembered in many countries and cities, Russia which had been directly involved in it being no exception. One of the events which contributed to the correct understanding of the history of World War I took place at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia. I mean the presentation of the collection of documents of World War I published by the ministry’s Department of History and Records.

Alexander Igorevich, as the department’s director you studied the documents of that time and probably acquired fresh impressions of this event, which can be described as a tragedy for Russia. What do you think about World War I? …

During that week, they discussed the world’s postwar reorganization and postwar borders. The decisions that were made at that time and a little later, at the Potsdam Conference, on the borders and spheres of interests were for the most part observed over half a century. The situation turned around in the 1990s. Nevertheless, despite the breakup of Yugoslavia, the invasion of Iraq, and so on and so forth, our Western partners still kept speaking about their commitment to the postwar system, i.e., the Yalta-Potsdam system.

Today, when the world is balancing on the verge of dangerous instability, it would seem that the anniversary of the Yalta Conference – a truly epoch-making event, unprecedented in international relations – could provide a conceptual and ideological underpinning for the disintegrating world. By reaffirming the fundamental principles of the Yalta system we could move in an evolutionary way toward building a new political system, recognizing the polycentric character of the present international space. …

IN THE NORWEGIAN CAPITAL’S largest cemetery, there stands a monument to Soviet soldiers with three words on the pedestal, “Norge takker dere” – “Norway thanks you.” These are simple words but they express the deep feelings that the Norwegians had after the Soviet army, in October 1944, drove the invaders not only out of the Soviet Union’s own Arctic areas and Kola Peninsula but also out of Eastern Finnmark, a Norwegian province that in those days bordered the Soviet Union and today borders Russia.

On October 25, 1944, vanguard forces of the Red Army moved into Kirkenes. That small town had practically been razed to the ground by the Nazis as it had constantly been bombed, and, besides, the German army had used the “scorched earth” tactics during its retreat. The Germans demanded that the entire local population be evacuated, but many of the local people were able to hide and stay though they had no homes and nearly no means of subsistence. …

International Affairs: Yuri Alexeevich, the year 2014 was marked, among other things, by large-scale national conflicts in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. I should say that in the course of its history Russia, a multiethnic state, has been successfully coping with this challenge. What is the most striking feature of the development of our multiethnic state between 1914 and 2014?

The first of them crops up at the early stage of capitalism. It can be described as a trend toward national isolation which led to an internal economic market limited by the state borders and a national state. The second trend in the national question goes beyond the dividing walls to internationalize all sides of the nation’s social existence. This happens at a later stage of capitalist development or, to borrow the current term, at the stage of the development of industrial society. At the early stages, monopolist alliances of all kinds were the most obvious result. …

THE YEAR 2014 marked three good round figures in the nearly century-long history of the relationships between Soviet Russia/Soviet Union/Russian Federation and Afghanistan. Last spring, the 95th anniversary of the recognition by Moscow of sovereignty and independence of Afghanistan remained unnoticed; in February, veterans of the Afghan war widely celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Soviet pullout of Afghanistan, while in December we pondered once more on the decision of the Politburo of the CC CPSU to move Soviet troops into Afghanistan adopted 35 years ago. The first date belongs to a prologue of a new stage of international relations launched by the end of World War I and the 1917 October Revolution in Russia; two others belong to the epilogue of the post-World War II international developments and the beginning of the Soviet Union’s disintegration.

From the very first days of Soviet power, Moscow did not let Afghanistan out of sight: it occupied an important or even special place in the Soviet Union’s Asian politics since the day when in the mid-1920s the CC All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) created a commission on Afghanistan; a similar structure was functioning in the CC CPSU in the 1980s. Every year on August 19, the day when Afghanistan had proclaimed its independence in 1919, Pravda or Izvestia invariably carried an official article about the Soviet-Afghan relationships, the huge impact of the October Revolution in Russia on Afghanistan’s determination to put an end to its semi-colonial dependence on the UK, and the role played by Lenin and great reformer Amir Amanullah Khan in the process and the huge economic and military assistance the Soviet Union extended to its southern neighbor. All this was true as well as the fact that the relationships between the two countries were never cloudless. …

POPE FRANCIS continues to enjoy growing popularity. This is seen from the polls in many countries and conclusions made by international media and the worried reaction among broad public to the pope’s words at the end of August of 2014 giving himself another “two or three years” to live.¹

Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was only elected head of the Roman Catholic Church on March 13, 2013, but there have already appeared substantive studies focusing on the pope’s character and his activities. Having read studies published in the West on this subject, I focused on the Pope’s biography published in 2013 and written by Paul Vallely, a leading British writer on religion and political issues, “Pope Francis: Untying the Knots.” …

RUSSIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY has never thoroughly examined the foreign policy doctrine of France under President Georges Pompidou. This gap has been filled by a special research “The Foreign Policy of France during Georges Pompidou’s Presidency (1969-1974)” carried out by Ye.A. Osipov under the auspices of the Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Having relied on numerous sources for the first time used in an academic research, the author provides a panoramic overview of Pompidou’s foreign policy activities. Osipov has painted in bright colors a detailed political portrait of George Pompidou. According to the author’s mot juste, the latter’s personality fancifully combined universal humanitarian values of a teacher of literature and connoisseur of the French poetry with a pragmatic approach of a Rothschild bank director.

Following his death in 1974, the French news magazine L’Express wrote in a special article dealing with the outcomes of the French President’s European policy that Pompidou’s activities were ineffectual: “Europe has been blocked, relations with the U.S. worse than ever, and France finds itself in a complete isolation. That’s how it had been back in 1969, immediately following de Gaulle’s resignation. Five years later, on the next day after Pompidou’s death, France found itself in the same situation” (p. 80). Ye. Osipov’s position on this matter differs considerably: “Indeed, the European Economic Community (EEC) was undergoing a crisis in both 1974 and 1969. It does not mean, however, that in the five years from 1969 the European integration process was at a stalemate; on the contrary, a series of events which took place during the five years of Pompidou’s presidency raised the process of building a new European community to a qualitatively new level and predetermined the future development of a ‘unified Europe” (p. 80). …