Zbigniew brzezinski

1. In "Our Security Predicament," Foreign Policy 88 (Fall 1992):60. 
In brief, Russia, until recently the forger of a great territorial empire and the leader of an ideological bloc of 
satellite states extending into the very heart of Europe and at one point to the South China Sea, had become a 
troubled national state, without easy geographic access to the outside world and potentially vulnerable to 
debilitating conflicts with its neighbors on its western, southern, and eastern flanks. Only the uninhabitable and 
inaccessible northern spaces, almost permanently frozen, seemed geopo-litically secure. 
GEOSTRATEGIC PHANTASMAGORIA 
A period of historic and strategic confusion in postimperial Russia was hence unavoidable. The shocking 
collapse of the Soviet Union and especially the stunning and generally unexpected disintegration of the Great 
Russian Empire have given rise in Russia to enormous soul-searching, to a wide-ranging debate over what 
ought to be Russia's current historical self-definition, to intense public and private arguments over questions 
that in most major nations are not even raised: What is Russia? Where is Russia? What does it mean to be a 
Russian? 
These questions are not merely theoretical: any reply contains significant geopolitical content. Is Russia a 
national state, based on purely Russian ethnicity, or is Russia by definition something more (as Britain is more 
than England) and hence destined to be an imperial state? What are—historically, strategically, and ethnically 
— the proper frontiers of Russia? Should the independent Ukraine be viewed as a temporary aberration when 
assessed in such historic, strategic, and ethnic terms? (Many Russians are inclined to feel that way.) To be a 
Russian, does one have to be ethnically a Russian ("Russkyi"), or can one be a Russian politically but not 
ethnically (that is, be a "Rossyanin"—the equivalent to "British" but not to "English")? For example, Yeltsin 
and some Russians have argued (with tragic consequences) that the Chechens could—indeed, should—be 
considered Russians. 
A year before the Soviet Union's demise, a Russian nationalist, one of the few who saw the end approaching, 
cried out in a desperate affirmation: 
If the terrible disaster, which is unthinkable to the Russian people, does occur and the state is torn apart, 
and the people, robbed and deceived by their 1,000-year history, suddenly end up alone, and their recent 
"brothers" have taken their belongings and disappeared into their "national lifeboats" and sail away from 
the listing ship—well, we have nowhere to go.... 
Russian statehood, which embodies the "Russian idea" politically, economically, and spiritually, will 
be built anew. It will gather up all the best from its long 1,000-year kingdom and the 70 years of Soviet 
history that have flown by in a moment.2 
2. Aleksaridr Prokhanov. "Tragedy of Centralism," Literatmnaya Rossiya, January 1990, pp. 4-5. 
But how? The difficulty of defining an answer that would be acceptable to the Russian people and yet 
realistic has been compounded by the historic crisis of the Russian state itself. Throughout almost its entire 
history, that state was simultaneously an instrument of territorial expansion and economic development. It was 
also a state that deliberately did not conceive itself to be a purely national instrument, in the West European 
tradition, but defined itself as the executor of a special supranational mission, with the "Russian idea" variously 

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defined in religious, geopolitical, or ideological terms. Now, suddenly, that mission was repudiated as the state 
shrank territorially to a largely ethnic dimension. 
Moreover, the post-Soviet crisis of the Russian state (of its "essence," so to speak) was compounded by the 
fact that Russia was not only faced with the challenge of having been suddenly deprived of its imperial 
missionary vocation but, in order to close the yawning gap between Russia's social backwardness and the more 
advanced parts of Eurasia, was now being pressed by domestic modernizers (and their Western consultants) to 
withdraw from its traditional economic role as the mentor, owner, and disposer of social wealth. This called for 
nothing short of a politically revolutionary limitation of the international and domestic role of the Russian state. 
This was profoundly disruptive to the most established patterns of Russian domestic life and contributed to a 
divisive sense of geopolitical disorientation within the Russian political elite. 
In that perplexing setting, as one might have expected, "Whither Russia and what is Russia?" prompted a 
variety of responses. Russia's extensive Eurasian location has long predisposed that elite to think in geopolitical 
terms. The first foreign minister of the postimperial and post-Communist Russia, Andrei Kozyrev, reaffirmed 
that mode of thought in one of his early attempts to define how the new Russia should conduct itself on the 
international scene. Barely a month after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he noted: "In abandoning 
messianism we set course for pragmatism. ... we rapidly came to understand that geopolitics ... is replacing 
ideology."3