Abstract:
Created in 1992 with view to coordinate activities of the executive and legislative powers in matters of foreign and security policy, Security Council (SC) did not become a key mechanism in the foreign policy decision-making system.
The model of foreign policy decision-making formed in the 1990’s absorbed the institutional achievements of the USSR and was characterized by a decrease in the role of state institutions and their replacement by personal connections with the leading role of the president.
Partial decentralization of the process of foreign-policy decision-making in the beginning of the 1990’s led to emergence of several centers of influence” – the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Presidential Administration, the Ministry of Defense, the Foreign Intelligence Service, the Ministry of Security which all tried to establish their control over separate segments of the foreign and security policy. With regard to the Security Council, at the beginning it was “deterring” the Foreign Ministry, headed by the pro-Western Kozyrev, but was later redirected to deal with internal aspects of national security, in particular – with resolution of the conflict in Chechnya, and as a result appeared to be informally subordinate to the Head of the Presidential Administration.
SC’s cooperation with other bodies demonstrated that political weight of each institution of the executive branch was in direct dependence on the degree of its head’ ‘proximity’ to the president and ability to influence Yeltsin. As a result Russia's foreign policy was formed by a narrow group of people.
Balancing between different groups of influence in Russian political elite was an important element of Yeltsin’s political strategy; those groups still included a lot of supporters of traditionally Soviet views on foreign policy. This resulted in inconsistencies and contradictions in foreign policy, e. g. issues connected with support former Yugoslavia, countering NATO expansion, reintegration of post-Soviet space, etc. Series of the Russian Federation failures on the international arena in the late 1990’s
were a result of the fact that officials shaping foreign policy had ideological preferences,
vision of the world and Russia’s place it in, and views of the means to achieve objectives that were not always correspond with the reality.
