International Affairs No. 4, 2018 – Table of Contents

FRIENDS,

We come together annually at this time of the year to mark the greatest date in the history of our country, Victory Day, the day when we celebrate the great achievements of our fathers and grandfathers, and a day of sorrow for those who did not return from the battlefield. Those included employees of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs and the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Trade, whose memory has been eternalized in this room. As we render homage to their feats, let us remember the efforts of those who operated on the foreign policy front to provide a diplomatic backing to the fight of the peoples of the Soviet Union against Hitler’s Germany. …

The 50th Anniversary of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty

JULY 1, 2018 is the 50th anniversary of the opening for signature of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) that entered into force on March 5, 1970 after the three depositary states (the Soviet Union, the United States and the UK), as well as 40 other countries, deposited their instruments of ratification. …

TODAY, the media all over the world, with Russia no exception, are discussing the sanctions Washington is steadily piling up on the countries and governments it finds unpalatable, its unprecedented pressure or even armed intervention being used all over the world to establish America’s domination in the material and spiritual spheres.

What has happened to the great country and the great people respected by many across the world? …

DRUGS ARE THE MAIN SOURCE of financing for all Afghan anti-government factions without exception – the Taliban, Islamic State’s Afghan branch, which is also known as Wilayat Khorasan, the Haqqani terrorist network, numerous crime rings, and terrorist groups consisting of immigrants from Central Asian countries, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and Ansarullah among them.

The production of narcotics increased by a factor of 40 during the stay in Afghanistan of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).** Deliveries to Afghanistan of acetic anhydride and other substances that can be used as heroin precursors were put on an industrial-type footing.*** According to Western sources, there are about 500 clandestine drug laboratories in Afghanistan. …

The tall and stiff is of inferior rank.

The supple and weak is of superior rank. …

An International Research to Practice Conference

ON APRIL 3, 2018, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, together with the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, held an international research to practice conference, “Priorities of International Cooperation in Countering Extremism and Terrorism,” at the V.Ya. Kikot Moscow University of the MIA. …

THE BASIC PRINCIPLES for the State Policy of the Russian Federation in the field of International Information Security for the Period until 2020, which were approved by the Russian president on July 24, 2013,¹ t clearly state the objective of Russia’s policy on international information security – to help develop an international legal regime to underlie such a system.

This objective is achievable only through practical measures such as a wide range of specific international initiatives addressing various legal, organizational and other points. …

RIVALRIES AND CONFRONTATIONS between states in the information space are a feature of today’s international relations. Information is becoming one of the priority instruments in fighting for global domination.

The National Security Strategy of the Russian Federation, approved by presidential decree No. 683 of December 31, 2015, said in part: “The intensifying confrontation in the global information arena caused by some countries’ aspirations to utilize informational and communication technologies to achieve their geopolitical objectives, including by manipulating public consciousness and falsifying history, is exerting an increasing influence on the nature of the international situation.” This trend has gained momentum since 2015. One of its most salient manifestations in 2017 was an unprecedented hysteria in the U.S. establishment over alleged meddling in the American presidential election by the Russian government and Russian hackers who were supposedly supported by it. …

Editor-in-Chief of International Affairs

TODAY, the international community devotes considerable attention to the political, military and economic aspects of cyber security. This is only natural. Disruption of critical infrastructure, cyber espionage, hacking attacks on big business and the banking sector – indeed, these are extremely acute problems now. However, let’s talk about a no less important aspect of information security, its humanitarian dimension, specifically the security of children and teenagers on the Internet. There is a well-known expression: “Children are our future.” There can be no sustainable development of the state or the international community as a whole unless children, as the most vulnerable social group, are provided appropriate protection and rights in cyberspace. It may be recalled that, according to expert estimates, every third Internet user in the world is under the age of 18. This is a substantial figure. …

Armen Oganesyan, Editor-in-Chief of International Affairs: Yury Konstantinovich, let’s begin our discussion with the price of oil and the price of energy as a whole. Of late, the United States has been exerting pressure on OPEC to make member countries of this organization increase their oil production and therefore reduce oil prices. How does this benefit the U.S. ? After all, it is an oil-producing country.

There are numerous factors in pricing. Thus, way back in the 1990s, our Energy Strategy Institute developed a price forecast model that we still use at present. Almost all of our forecasts proved correct. About 40 factors are taken into account: conflict situations in the world, for instance, Iraq and industrial strikes, and the situation on stock exchanges, among others. …

NOW that the new German government’s unprecedentedly lengthy birth throes are over (that government isn’t actually all that new), and Germany is back to its political routine, one would naturally wonder whether Russian-German relations would undergo any changes.

Alas, so far there somehow aren’t too many reasons for optimism. On the other hand, opinion polls suggest that the gap formed between Russia and Germany in 2014 might not have been as deep as it is. …

ON FEBRUARY 13, 2018, Stefano Feltri, well-known in his country as a political analyst and deputy director of Il Fatto Quotidiano daily, published his new book Populismo sovrano.¹ He has written that populism revived in Europe and outside it is rooted in the current demand for sovereignty, concerns over the negative effects of globalization and the crumbling of the West that for a fairly long period of postwar social contract based on integration that guaranteed peace and prosperity remained responsible for sustainable development. The crisis of political discourse caused by the shop-soiled ideas and programs of the traditional mainstream parties, which offered no adequate answers to the new challenges of contemporary globalism, rekindled populism in the West. This crisis provoked a deep-seated mistrust in the party system, parliamentarianism, political elites, and international institutions that in the eyes of the common people look not amenable to any reform. People have no faith not only in the results of the procedures of representative democracy, but in these procedures themselves up to and including the mechanism of delegated responsibility and the importance of compromises between different political positions.

Stefano Feltri has demonstrated that populism is growing increasingly “sovereign” not only because it adds more weight to sovereignty in the eyes of the public; this happens because it has won. Today, all political …

International Affairs: Mikhail Leonidovich, recently a historic session of the Ninth Legislature of the National Assembly of People’s Power (parliament) took place, where Cuba’s new leadership was elected. The country is going through a process of adjustment; the country’s socioeconomic foundations are transforming, but its commitment to the socialist cause with its national specifics remains unchanged. At the same time, there is an ongoing change of generations in the republic’s ruling establishment. How are Russian-Cuban relations developing under these complex conditions?

In short, I am convinced that the course toward developing wide- …

INTERETHNIC CLASHES are not a rarity for many Asian and African countries, and foreign media outlets do not sensationalize them. However, what has happened around the Rohingya community in Myanmar in recent months has largely broken with this pattern. TV screens and newspaper pages have been filled with reports of the purported genocide of the Rohingya perpetrated by the Myanmar authorities: thousands of dead Rohingya, hundreds of burned villages, and thousands of refugees fleeing to Bangladesh. Tough statements were made by leaders, public and religious figures in a number of Muslim states, and the issue was raised at the UN. On certain days, the Rohingya issue in the media was so off the scale that it almost completely eclipsed the situation around Korea, fraught with nuclear conflict.

What is the reason? We will try to get to the bottom of it. …

OVER 140 YEARS have passed since Ferdinand von Richthofen, a German geologist, geographer and traveler and the president of the Berlin Geographical Society, coined the term Silk Road. Several more decades had passed before scholars in different countries became seriously interested in this phenomenon of the antique and medieval world and began to study specific routes of caravan trade where Turkmen land had an important place. The Silk Road era, which lasted for more than 15 centuries, has left thousands of monuments and landmarks along the entire route from the Mediterranean to the Far East. Many of them are located on the territory of Turkmenistan. At that time, towns such as Merv, Koneurgench, Amul, Zamm (Kerki), Sarakhs, Abiverd, Nisa, and Dehistan evolved and emerged as real medieval agglomerations. Roads between them were built, as were routes leading from them to Bukhara, Balkh, Herat, Nishapur and other centers.

In the modern era, the legendary route is being restored in a new quality, carrying the idea of revitalizing and strengthening trade, economic, humanitarian, and cultural ties between states and peoples. In his book, “Turkmenistan, the Heart of the Silk Road,” Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, citing facts of national history, ancient tales and legends, as well as events and developments from the country’s modern life, notes that a fundamental role in the evolution and active use of the Silk Road, each of its branches being on the UNESCO List of World Heritage Sites, belongs to, among others, the Turkmen people. …

IN GLOBAL SPORTS, 2018 is a remarkable year with its two outstanding events, the XXIII Winter Olympic Games in Pyeongchang in South Korea in February, and the FIFA World Cup in Russia in June and July, the first FIFA world cup to be hosted by Russia. Since 1994, Winter Olympics and FIFA world tournaments have always been held in the same year, the end-year of a four-year cycle in top-class sporting contests. But the period from 2014 to 2018 was probably the first four-year cycle when, in defiance of all common sense, it was not athletes or fans who called the shots but behind-the-scenes lobbyists in international sports organizations and functionaries in them who were fulfilling odious political contracts. In looking at our numerous athletes who have fallen victim to the global anti-Russian campaign, one has to admit, sad as it is: 0 Sport, you have become war.

Baron de Coubertin,* the founder of the modern Olympic movement and the first director general of the IOC, considered sport to be a rare form of activity that, due to its nature, could not be a source of conflict or social confrontation. Sport was, moreover, an opportunity to satisfy a desire for rivalry, and even aggression, that is part of the human character. In his famous Ode to Sport, which has become a classic with parts of it quoted widely as aphorisms, Coubertin says: “O Sport, you are Peace! You forge happy bonds between the peoples by drawing them together in reverence for strength which is controlled, organised and self-disciplined. …

ARMENIA experienced events in April and May 2018 that have been dubbed a “velvet revolution” and resulted in the radical replacement of political elites. The government of President Serzh Sargsyan was forced to resign, and the leader of the protest movement, opposition parliamentary deputy Nikol Pashinyan, was elected prime minister. This has given rise to serious worries about the future of Russian-Armenian relations despite numerous assurances by Armenia’s new leadership that there were no geopolitics behind the change of government.

For Armenia as a small country burdened with grave historical, economic and political problems, maneuvering between key global political players is probably the only way to maintain stability not only in international relations but also in domestic affairs. Complementary policies in relations with various countries without giving preference to any nation or group of nations is Armenia’s main foreign policy principle. Complementarity as a security principle is enshrined in the National Security Strategy as the basis for “partnership” and “effective relations with all interested forces in the region.”¹ …

DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS between Brazil and Russia, which were established on October 3, 1828, reached the level of strategic partnership in 2002. In 2010, the Russian Federation and Brazil adopted a strategic cooperation plan of action, outlining an array of bilateral goals and tasks to deepen dialogue between various institutions in a bilateral format, within the framework of BRICS, and in a multilateral format.

The rapprochement between Brazil and Russia is facilitated by the similarity of approaches and visions. Both countries have similar positions on issues related to building a multipolar international system, preserving the central role of the UN, the priority of international law and the rejection of unilateral measures based on the use of force. Brazil and Russia are strengthening their partnership relations within the framework of BRICS, constructively cooperating within the framework of the Group of 20 and advocating for a reform of multilateral governance institutions, including the UN Security Council, the IMF and the World Bank. …

VIKTOR STEPANOVICH Chernomyrdin, a remarkable and original man, a prominent statesman and organizer of industry, a prime minister of Russia, and a politician who has also left his mark on Russia’s foreign policy, would have been 80 years old on April 9, 2018.

There is probably no need to recount Chernomyrdin’s biography, because its key events have been widely covered in the media. But I would like to mention several points that characterize him as an individual. First, he had an inherent desire to learn wherever he was, both as a schoolboy and as a statesman. He went through school, technical college, and two higher education institutions, obtaining a Ph.D. (Candidate of Science) even before he became deputy minister. During his life, he climbed all the rungs of the professional ladder: from worker to foreman, engineer, shop manager, chief engineer, plant manager, directorate head, minister, and so on, always trying to understand the specifics of his new job. The strength of such leaders lies in their ability to make sound decisions based on their extensive knowledge and practical skills, so that they cannot be fooled by their subordinates into accepting sloppy work. …

THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION of 1917 in Russia removed the regime of czarist autocracy from the stage; the Foreign Ministry, however, survived with minimal losses. The Provisional Government brought to power by the revolution was determined to follow the previous foreign policy course. The Foreign Ministry returned to the scene after four days of revolutionary turmoil even if the situation in the country looked more like a war than anything else which inevitably affected the ministry’s functioning and the course it tried to follow. As could be expected, political power could not leave the ministry alone. Its interference in foreign policy had caused disagreements that gradually spread to the Provisional Government.

On March 15, 1917, the talks between the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies and the Interim Committee of the State Duma had ended with an abdication of Emperor Nicholas II¹ in favor of Grand Duke Mikhail who, in his turn, abdicated leaving the Provisional Government alone on stage. …

DISAPPOINTMENTS caused by the lost chances to start a “new post-Cold War history” of world politics made counterfactual history the latest trend of historical studies. Alexey Arbatov has rightly written: “In the early 1990s, the U.S. had a unique historical chance to lead the creation of a new, multilateral world order together with other centers of power. However, it unwisely lost this chance” thus making wars, crises and misunderstandings between Russia and the West unavoidable.

This explanation is too simple as if history is made by dimwits. Everything becomes more complicated as we move back to the more remote turning points of history such as World War I or the 1917 Revolution in Russia. In this context, the collection of articles Historically Inevitable? Turning Points of the Russian Revolution¹ edited by Tony Brenton, former UK ambassador to Russia, occupies a place of its own. The authors have asked many questions of “what if type: what would have happened if Pyotr Stolypin had not been murdered, if World War I had not broken out, if Nicholas II had not abdicated; if Lenin had not returned to Russia with the help of the German General Staff; if there had been no conflict between General Kornilov and Kerensky; if Lenin had been arrested on October 24, and so on and so forth. Those of the historians that believe that history has no subjunctive mood declined the invitation to join the project. Many, however, agreed being convinced that counterfactual history helps better understand the events and, probably, confirm their inevitability. …

IN ITALY, attitude to its Jewish community was different at different times. Early in the twentieth century, it was mainly tinged in religious colors; Catholics objected to Judaism as a religion that opposed the principles of the Roman Catholic Church.¹ Fascism added chauvinism to the Jewish Question and made it sharply politicized.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, Italy was in an acute social and political crisis; the ruling circles that could no longer rely on the government obviously unable to cope with the mounting workers’ movement had no other option but to turn to an alternative political power able to contain the massive actions of pauperized population groups. It was in this context that fascism became a platform on which class contradictions were suppressed and various social forces consolidated. …

WITH 61 STATES (representing four-fifths of the planet’s total population) involved in WWII, and 110 million people taking part in hostilities,¹ the political, economic and military status of the Arab peoples did not allow them to play any prominent role in the victory of the Allies over the Axis Powers. For seven postwar decades, the Middle East and North Africa remained a zone of large-scale armed conflicts and permanent military-political turbulence that, from time to time, pushed the world to the brink of global armed confrontation. This explains the close attention of historians and political scientists to the recent history of the Arab East and, in particular, the role its population played in World War II.

In Soviet and Russian historiography, the issues related to the role of Arabs in World War II were covered in numerous scholarly publications by A.S. Avetyan, V.N. Grak, A.P. Demyanenko, Kh.M. Ibragimbeyli, A.M. Nekrich, N.O. Oganesyan, S.A. Sherstyukov and others. Prominent experts in the Arab East, likewise, paid a lot of attention to the subject. Suffice it to mention the works by A.M. Vasiliev, A.Z. Egorin, R.G. Landa, G.I. Mirsky and many other Soviet and Russian scholars (V.P. Klimentov, V.B. Lutsky, P.V. Miloradov, A.B. Podtserob, N.I. Proshin, O.V. Romanko, R.B. Samofal, M.Yu. Frenkel, Ya.Ya. Etinger, S.A. Vorobyev and others). In Soviet times, scholars paid special attention to the positive role of Arab units in the Allies’ armed struggle in North Africa, in the Middle East and Europe; in post-Soviet Russia, attention was shifted to cooperation between German Nazism and certain Arab religious, political and military figures. Today, in addition to scholarly works, there was a fairly big number of publications that negatively assess the same events and the role Arabs played in them.² …

RUSSIAN and U.S. politicians, diplomats, business figures, and scholars gathered in Veliky Novgorod, Russia, on May 21-22, 2018, for a conference that was part of Fort Ross Dialogue, a project involving annual international conferences on Russian-American relations. The 2018 conference was overseen by the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Interdepartmental Working Group for Preserving Russian Historical and Cultural Heritage in the United States. The group was set up in 2017 as a consultative body in the coordination of efforts to strengthen Russian-American cultural ties and in organizing support for the conservation of Russia-related memorial and cultural sites in the United States.

Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov is chairman and Georgy Borisenko, who is director of the ministry’s Department of North America, is first deputy chairman of the group. Alexey Korzhuyev, who is deputy director of the Department of North America, is deputy chairman and head of the coordinating expert council of the group. The group consists, among others, of members of the Russian Federal Assembly and Moscow city government, officials at the Foreign Ministry and other Russian ministries, scholars, and senior managers of the Transneft, Sovcomflot and Renova companies. …

October 22, 1932-June 8, 2018

of the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet prime minister and foreign minister made their statements. Pyadyshev’s distinctive style was detectable in principal foreign policy documents. It was often Pyadyshev who penned content in central newspapers that stated our country’s position at international forums and negotiations. …

RUSSIA in general and its social thinkers in particular began to take interest in Europe during the reforms of Peter the Great. This interest was very much alive during the subsequent string of female reigns, the years when the imperial throne was occupied by Anna Ioannovna, Elizabeth Petrovna and Catherine the Great. It was a period of rapid Europeanization of the country’s ruling strata. The most significant 18th-and 19th-century works of Russian literature raising the Europe theme are Letters of a Russian Traveler by Nikolay Karamzin (he wrote it in 1791-1792, when he was still young), some chapters in Alexander Herzen’sMy Past and Thoughts (1855-1868), and, of course, Russia and Europe by Nikolay Danilevsky (1869). After that, books on this theme multiplied and ran into dozens, and from the turn of the century onward into hundreds.

Our interest in Europe grew steadily at every stage of our subsequent history. It underwent some changes that reflected the spirit of the times, with books on Europe and on Europe-related subjects having increasingly diverse readerships and offering increasingly diverse assessments of problems of European history and culture and of relations between Russia and Europe, and providing increasingly high-quality analyses of European economies and policies. …

IGOR MAXIMYCHEV, Doctor of Science (History), chief research associate of the Institute of Europe of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has written a book that has been published in the German language in Germany recently and has a title translating as To Understand Russia: What Moscow Really Thinks of Germany and Where New Confidence Can Come From* The publication of Russian scholarly books in foreign languages is hardly a rarity these days. However, works on political science, history and other social sciences account for too small a share of them to match the role one expects Russia to play in international scholarly discourse, in shaping European and global public opinion, and in supporting Russian diplomacy. Conferences and discussions are important formats for the statement of views, but books, both print and electronic, indisputably hold a special place.

On the one hand, constant study of books and positions set out in them is part of the job of any scholar. Any self-respecting researcher would study any significant new book and either express support for its author’s points or take issue with them. This automatically sets off a debate that stimulates interest in that book among readers. …

IN RECENT YEARS, much has been said about radicalism and its varied offshoots. True, the number of terrorist acts climbs up, the popularity of extreme right political forces grows, and the wave of left radical and anti-globalist movements, migration crises and international tension is rising. This is how everyday realities look in many countries of the world.

France is one of the European countries in which radical trends are only too obvious. At the 2017 presidential election, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, two radical politicians who represented anti-establishment political movements, reaped 41% and 51% respectively of the votes cast by young voters aged between 18 and 24. On the whole, the Fifth Republic is getting accustomed to violence against the law and order structures, destruction of material assets during rallies, protest acts that keep lyceums and universities blocked for a long time, and rejection of republican values that looked unshakable not long ago. Today, when fifty years separate us from the May 1968 events, we can talk about “banalization of protests” not only among the groups on the margins of society but also among its law-abiding part. …

RELATIONS between the Soviet Union and the Slovak State during World War II are the subject matter of a book published in Moscow in 2017 and entitled The USSR and Slovakia, 1939-1945: War Policy Aspects* The book was also appeared online on postoj.sk on September 6, 2017. Published by the Institute of Slavic Studies in Moscow, it was written by Valentina Maryina, a research associate at the institute. By reading it, one gets better understanding of the functioning of the Slovak State that existed during World War II.

Maryina used Slovak scholarly literature, Slovak archives, and Russian diplomatic and military archives. The Slovak State maintained diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union until the latter was attacked by Germany in June 1941. In describing that period, Maryina made use of reports sent by Soviet diplomat Georgy Pushkin from Bratislava to Moscow. Speaking about wartime events, she cites minutes of diplomatic negotiations, mainly talks between the Czechoslovak government in exile in London and the Soviet leadership, and correspondence that the Soviet command had with partisans in Slovakia, with émigré Slovak communist functionaries in Moscow, and with leaders of the Slovak uprising. The book is based on extensive research, and all the conclusions are corroborated by information from credible sources. …