International Affairs No. 3, 2020 – Table of Contents

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF INTERVIEWS

“The Political Striptease Show Amid the Coronavirus Pandemic Is Unattractive, Off-Putting” S. Ryabkov… 1 …

Key words: Germany, United States, NATO, European Union (EU), transatlantic partnership, European integration.

DONALD TRUMP’S TENURE as U.S. president has shaken the Germans’ trust in the United States as guarantor of their security and well-being. They are going through a painful and complicated process of trying to comprehend the United States’ policy of economic protectionism, its diplomacy of sanctions, and its demands that European nations raise their contributions to NATO’s budget to 2% of their gross domestic product (GDP). …

Key words: Black Sea region, European Union, Black Sea Synergy, Eastern Partnership, BSEC, energy resources, regional security.

THE BLACK SEA is a traditional crossroads of civilizations through which run currents of Orthodox Christianity, Islam and Western culture. Located at the crossroads of Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East, rich in natural resources, and containing significant economic potential, the Black Sea region is a strategically important zone. Its location and growing role in matters of energy transit are raising its geopolitical significance as a link between Europe and the Caspian region, while also playing a role in heightening security problems. …

Key words: World War II, rewriting of history, the truth of history.

THE APPROACHING 75th anniversary of the end of World War II gave a new lease of life to the so-called “memory wars.” …

Key words: Middle East, WMD, WMD-Free Zone Treaty, NPT, IAEA, OPCW.

THE MIDDLE EAST remains one of the zones of high tension and instability in the contemporary world. Today, new challenges – e.g., international terrorism, the crises in Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Syria – are adding to the old and deeply rooted problems created by the Arab-Israeli conflict. The unresolved issue of the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) increases regional destabilization even though the issue of a zone free from nuclear and other types of weapons of mass destruction (WMD-Free Zone) in the region has been discussed by the international community for several decades now. So far, almost no results have been achieved in fulfillment of the 1995 Resolution on the Middle East. …

Key words: China, USA, trade war, “Wolfowitz Doctrine.”

THE U.S.-INITIATED disruption of the status quo in trade with China has laid the foundation for fundamental changes in relations between Washington and Beijing, and established a confrontational track for their development in the coming years and possibly even decades. A significant increase in trade barriers between the two largest economies in the world has left its mark on global trade and economic ties. At the height of the tariff war in late 2019, the U.S. levied duties on $375 billion worth of Chinese imports, and China imposed duties on $110 billion in supplies from the U.S. According to the IMF, this led to a 0.8% decline in global GDP by 2020.¹ In January 2020, Beijing and Washington signed the “first phase” of a trade agreement that was supposed to iron out the disagreements between the countries. But the truce has so far raised more questions than answers. …

Key words: military conflict, technological revolution, information and communication technologies, cyberspace, cybersecurity, informational and psychological impact, U.S., Russia.

AMID the current technological breakthrough, the spread of information and communication technologies (ICT) is one of the important factors shaping a new political reality in Russia and the world as a whole. Scholars note that at the present time, government agencies, the business community and private users are increasingly dependent on computer technology and access to information networks [2]. Likewise, participants in world politics have significant advantages in achieving their goals when one of the tools they use to pursue their objectives is the global information and communication space, which essentially has no borders. …

Key words: productive forces, new technologies, international relations, developed countries, developing countries.

Industrial Revolutions …

Key words: Austria, Switzerland, world order, international relations, evolution, European Union (EU), neutrality.

THE WORLD ORDER is undergoing yet another transformation, and one whose result is hard to foresee.¹ Europe is getting ready to get involved in rivalries among options for globalization, and this means it is again important for scholars to take up something that until recently was in danger of becoming a peripheral area of research – holistic studies of individual countries, including analysis of behavior models of smaller states and their desire and resources for relationships with larger actors. …

Key words: India, Russia, Indian diaspora, outsourcing, Indo-Pacific.

INDIA is invariably mentioned among new major international actors. This is logical. Populated by 1.38 billion people, India is the world’s second-largest country in terms of population. Its economy grew by a factor of 3.3 between 2000 and 2017 and, with its gross domestic product accounting for 7.4% of global GDP in terms of purchasing power parity, became the world’s third-largest economy in 2017 after the economies of the United States and China. India’s armed forces are the world’s fourth-most powerful military after those of the United States, Russia and China. India possesses nuclear weapons and runs a space program comparable to those of the European Union, China and Japan. India holds a key geostrategic position along with increasingly powerful China, the oil- and natural gas-producing Middle East, and Africa with its growing economies. India also controls key shipping routes in the Indian Ocean. …

Key words: Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Chile, free trade, Asia Pacific.

TWELVE COUNTRIES. Roughly 40% of global GDP. One-third of world trade. More than five years of talks, 30 topics of negotiation and 6,000 pages of text. All of this went into the Trans-Pacific Partnership Treaty, a free trade agreement (FTA) that was one of the world’s most ambitious economic projects but never came into force. It was an accord of a new type that stated a new perception of trade, was to be a major step in its liberalization, and reflected all key international trends from e-commerce to gender equality.¹ …

Key words: Slacktivism, daily political agenda, social networks, new media, political communication, informational support.

HUMAN INTERACTION with the political sphere of society takes place by means of information and communication channels. The public communication space is where the political agenda is set, the balance of power in the national and international arenas is adjusted, and where interested parties “take a seat at the table” to discuss these and other issues. This space is under constant transformation, as developing ICTs are opening up new methods of communication between political actors and society, articulating the positions of opinion leaders and pressure groups, as well as establishing effective feedback. …

Key words: corporate security, conference, public-private partnership (PPP), International Institute of Energy Policy and Diplomacy.

WITH BUSINESSES and governments interacting closely today, often facing the same threats and challenges and following the same economic laws, it is essential to base corporate and national security strategies on effectively the same principles. …

Key words: Russian State, Bessarabia, Prut-Dniester region.

IT IS A WELL-KNOWN historical fact that since the Rurikids there was a firm rule to include into the official title of the autocratic rulers of Russia all lands that belonged to the Muscovite State and all the territories attached to Russia, the population of which differed from the Great Russians by its national composition and religious affiliation. The Romanov dynasty, proclaimed the legal heir to the Grand Princes of Moscow, invariably observed this tradition. The crowned family was convinced that enumeration of the existing and newly acquired possessions in the official titles of the Russian monarchs spoke of Russia’s might and greatness and confirmed its prestige both inside and outside the country. …

Key words: Vlasovites, ROA, Nazism, fascism, propaganda, denazification, neo-Nazism, radical nationalism, collaborationism, anti-Semitism, victory.

Invented truth can be no less or even much more interesting than fiction. …

THE MEMOIRS of Ye.P. Palievskaya (1912-2008), written in the 1970s, cover almost 30 years of family history against the backdrop of our national history. Coming from a Russian pre-revolutionary intelligentsia family, she had a trouble-free childhood. Her youth coincided with the first years of Soviet power. Then came war, life under occupation, fascist camps, and, finally, her return to the Motherland. She wrote only for her family. Under the circumstances of the times, she could never even bring up that during the war, she, along with her husband, parents, and four children, had been under occupation and locked up, so she thought up a pseudonym for herself, Vera Ivanovna. Her husband, Vasily Mkhailovich, became Nikolai Ivanovich. Gradually, the more intent she became to tell her story, she put aside her fear and began to write in the first person. We offer the reader several excerpts from these recollections about the trials of a Russian family during the Great Patriotic War. These memoirs are being prepared for publication.

Keywords: Ye.P. Palievskaya, war, occupation, fascist camp, return to the Motherland. …

IN 2020, the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation mark their 300th jubilee. On February 28 (March 10), 1720, Czar Peter I published a General Regulation of State Collegiums, one of the chapters of which dealt with archives and instructed to concentrate all documents of the central organs of power, except for financial documents, in the archives of the Collegium of Foreign Affairs (CFA). This laid the foundation for not only departmental but also national archiving.

For many generations, Russian archivists were collecting documents related to the diplomatic history of Russia and the efforts of diplomats who lived in different epochs to tune up dialogues with partners, to defend, skillfully and persistently, Russia’s national interests, establish and develop relations with other countries and contribute to creating international law. Peace treaties with Poland, Sweden, Turkey, France, and Persia are kept in the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as well as Catherine IPs Declaration of Russian Armed Neutrality, decisions of the Vienna Congress and the Act of the Holy Alliance, letters of foreign monarchs, politicians, cultural figures, and prominent artists. In the 18th-19th centuries, the archives were entrusted to prominent scholars Nikolay Bantysh-Kamensky and Alexey Malinovsky who preserved and systematized documents and replenished archival collections. At different times, archives attracted such scholars as M. Lomonosov, N. Karamzin, S. Solovyov, B. Klyuchevsky, N. Kostomarov, S. Platonov, F. Martens, N. Dubrovin, P. Pekarsky, V. Sergeyevich and many others. …

Key words: RIC, monograph, S.V. Uyanayev, dialogue format, world order, polycentrism.

THE RUSSIAN ACADEMY of Sciences’ Institute of the Far East (RAS IFE) has published a new study on the establishment and evolution of the Russia-India-China (RIC) dialogue structure. Sergey Uyanayev’s book “Russia-India-China in the Context of a New World Order”* is the first monograph in Russia’s studies of the East that analyzes the main stages in the evolution the Russia-India-China strategic triangle since 1998. when Academician Yevgeny Primakov, a Russian political figure and statesman, underscored the need to strengthen trilateral relations and collaboration between Moscow, Delhi and Beijing. …