Each of these republics with a significant diaspora in neighbouring republics also had internal minorities. So, Serbia had the Kosovo Albanians, Croatia the Krajina Serbs. Ukrainians, Latvians, and so on, also live in the Russian Federation, but the significant minorities are those concentrated in areas that are ethnically-designated constituent republics of the Russian Federation. The Russian government therefore has its own problems to face with minorities that might wish to secede. Although Moscow now has bilateral treaties with most o f the ethnic republics, the Chechen republic obviously remains a primary concern. In the long term, the influx of Chinese to the Russian Far
East may also pose significant problems, ‘similar to those in the Serbia-Kosovo-Albania triangle’.^®
Consequently, Russia has ‘interests on both sides o f the borders-versus-diaspora issue’. T h i s would seem to mitigate against arguments of the form: because Russia faces this problem, it should support X in the Yugoslav conflict because X faces a similar problem. For example, should Russia support Serbian efforts to aid the Serb minority in Krajina in 1992, because o f the situation in Moldova, or support Croatia in its attempts to put down what might be seen as a threat to its territorial integrity, because o f Chechnya?
If policy towards former Yugoslavia is influenced by such considerations, then it is likely to reflect the Russian leadership’s priorities. Russia’s most vital security interest is considered to be the maintenance of the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation; the second is the ‘near abroad’. T h i s suggests, for instance, that Chechnya is of more concern than the issue of ethnic Russians outside the Russian Federation; in other words, the borders issue is more significant than the diaspora issue. Applied to the conflicts in former Yugoslavia, this would mean that Russian diplomats are more likely to support Croatian control o f Krajina and Slavonia than to encourage independence for the Serb minority (while still expressing concern over the rights of that minority, just as they have expressed concern over the rights o f Russians in the former Soviet Union). And they are more likely to have been tolerant of Serbia’s actions in Kosovo than o f its support o f the Bosnian Serbs, because those actions were aimed at upholding the maintenance of Serbia’s territorial integrity.
Russian opposition figures held different views from the Yeltsin administration on the needs o f Russian domestic policy and policy in the former Soviet Union, and this was reflected in their interpretations o f the Yugoslav conflicts. In other words, they viewed the conflicts through the prism o f the former Soviet Union. Cultural Eurasianists and neo-imperialists supported what they saw as the efforts by the federal Yugoslav authorities, the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), and the Serbian government to preserve a South Slav state, believing that their equivalents in the Soviet Union should have acted in a similar way. Nationalist-communists after 1991 viewed the Milosevic regime as a model for the kind o f socialist, nationalist state that they wanted to create in the former Soviet Union. Ethnic nationalists saw the Serbian government in 1992 as
Arbatova (1995), p. 53. Gow (1997a), p. 189.
aiming to create a Greater Serbia. They wanted a Greater Russia, or at least a Russian policy o f supporting ethnic Russians in the ‘near abroad’. They were therefore sympathetic towards Serb aims. As we shall see, many were critical o f Slobodan Milosevic after 1994 for ‘abandoning’ the Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia, just as they criticised Yeltsin for ‘abandoning’ the ethnic Russians in the former Soviet republics.
Russian ethnic nationalists also identified with Serb grievances relating to their status within the SFRY. For example, there were Serb complaints about the 1974 Federal Constitution, which established Vojvodina and Kosovo as autonomous provinces; these provinces were allowed to have a say in Serbian affairs, but Serbia had no say in their affairs. This constitution ‘was considered to be discrimination o f Serbia in Yugoslavia and became the primary target of the Serbian intelligentsia after Tito’s death’. T h e intelligentsia also aired other complaints of discrimination against Serbs within the SFRY, as shown by the famous ‘Memorandum’ of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) o f September 1986.^"^ Milosevic, of course, addressed these grievances, particularly with regard to Kosovo, thus embarking on a policy that led directly to the wars of Yugoslav succession.
Many Russians had similar grievances, which began to be aired with the onset of glasnost ’. There was the complaint, for example, that Russia had suffered in comparison to other republics in terms o f having to subsidise their development, and also that the Russian Federation lacked institutions possessed by other republics (it had no Academy of Sciences, nor even a Communist Party, separate from the Union institutions). Arbatova suggests that they also had grievances over borders similar to the Serb grievances over the 1974 constitution, particularly over Nikita Khrushchev’s transferral of Crimea from Russia to Ukraine in 1956.^^
After war broke out in former Yugoslavia - first in Slovenia, then in Croatia, and then Bosnia-Herzegovina - the devastation and the isolation that it brought the Serbs served as a disincentive to the reformist Russian leadership to play an equivalent role in the former Soviet Union. Kozyrev, for example, in May 1992 urged the Supreme Soviet to adopt ‘well-thought out’ and ‘balanced decisions’ in relation to Crimea; otherwise ‘we may find ourselves in a Yugoslav position’.A c c o rd in g to Arbatova,
Arbatova (1995), p. 54.
The memorandum is included in Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (1995). Arbatova (1995), p. 54.
[i]t goes without saying that the Yugoslav experience had a strong repercussion on the foreign policy of Russia both in the near abroad and in the far abroad. The mirror effect of the Yugoslav conflict was in general positive: in bloodshed, destruction and in an atmosphere of hatred and mistrust Russia saw its own probable future and shivered with horror.^^
But the politicians who urged the JNA attack on Vukovar, or oversaw ‘ethnic cleansing’ within Bosnia-Herzegovina, did not shiver with horror. Eduard Limonov (a ‘very, very famous’ Russian writer, according to the leader o f the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic) in the documentary ‘Serbian Epics’, did not shiver in horror when he visited Serb forces besieging Sarajevo. Instead, he praised the glorious bravery o f the Serbs:
You are very courageous people: despite anything what is against you, it is a great power, it will always be. Fifteen countries are against you, and you resist... And I repeat again, we Russians should take an example from you. You are people of my blood, of my religion. I really admire ... I have found the right word now, that is ‘admiration’.^*
This admiration was representative o f the views o f the red-brown coalition in Russia. While the Russian government was determined not to re-create the Yugoslav events on an incalculable scale in the former Soviet Union,
the communist-nationalist opposition in its own approach in just the same way proceed[ed] from a direct projection of the Yugoslav situation onto the former [Soviet] Union, striving in former Yugoslavia to create a precedent for its reproduction within the former Soviet Union.^^
As we shall see, these differences highlighted the deep divisions over the future of Russia, reflecting profound political, philosophical, and moral differences.