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Soviet Strategy: Development or Expansion?
| Article
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15986 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1989 |
2,187 Words |
| Author
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Herbert J. Ellison
Herbert J. Ellison is chairman of Russian and east
European studies at the University of Washington. He was
formerly secretary of the Kennan Institute for Advanced
Russian Studies in Washington, D.C. |
Russian and Soviet leaders have long emphasized the Asian mission of their vast Eurasian state, and Mikhail Gorbachev's milestone speech at Vladivostok in July 1986 was part of a long tradition. It reflected a historic duality of Russian strategic thought about Siberia and the Far Eastern region that has repeatedly emphasized two missions: the task of settlement and development, including development of productive economic relations with other states of the region; and the use of a unique geopolitical influence and power in Asia.
For a long time--certainly through the 19 years of the Brezhnev era--the second mission has been the most heavily stressed, both in word and deed. Gorbachev emphasizes the tasks of internal development and the economic dimension of foreign relations. Thus far, however, there is little significant reduction of the power role and its instruments, which he inherited.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the two purposes competed very actively in the policy of the Russian government. The brilliant statesman Sergey Witte stressed the economic task, especially the Great Trans-Siberian Railroad project that would build commercial links with Asia and facilitate settlement and development of the vast new territories. This was consistent with the program of general economic reform he had conducted since the 1890s, which laid the foundations for Russia's rapid economic modernization in the last generation before World War I. His contemporary Vyacheslav von Plehve supported expansion of Russian power in Korea and Manchuria, leading the country into a futile and costly struggle with Japan that brought on the Russo-Japanese War and the 1905 Revolution, the "dress rehearsal" for 1917.
The Soviet leadership's strategy has contained both elements of policy, though as Gorbachev has acknowledged, neither the internal economic development of the region nor the USSR's economic ties with other states in the region has been satisfactory. Domestically, Siberia and the Far East have been treated as a vast storehouse of raw materials for the economic development of the rest of the country, and the centralization of economic management has provided scant opportunity for an independent Siberian development plan. Moreover, Soviet foreign trade and economic relations have historically been weakly developed, and nowhere more conspicuously than in East Asia, where the spectacular economic upsurge of the region has simply bypassed the Soviet Union, and has only recently begun to involve the Soviet eastern lands.
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