Candidates Unite in Criticism of Foreign Policy

Few issues are as capable of raising politicians' blood pressure these days as the question of Russia's status in the world. It seems that candidates of all ideological colorations have something negative to say about the status quo, and with parliamentary elections now just two months away, all are eager to play the foreign policy card.


"Unfortunately, Russia's relationship with the West is on the downswing," said Andranik Migranyan, political analyst and candidate for the My Fatherland electoral bloc, speaking Monday at a roundtable organized by the Moscow office of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace. "There is nothing left of the old optimism, the altruism, the naive, almost childish conception we had."


Instead of being integrated into the world community, continued Migranyan, Russia had been isolated, marginalized by the West.


Migranyan's discontent was echoed by most of his fellow lecturers.


"Russia's foreign policy has been dealt a double blow," said Alexander Shokhin, former deputy prime minister, who was representing the centrist Our Home is Russia bloc. He, along with many other speakers at Monday's gathering, was referring to the recent round of diplomatic wrangling over NATO air strikes in Bosnia and over NATO's proposed expansion plans. "There has been significant damage."


But with expansion plans apparently shelved for the near future, and vigorous negotiations underway in Belgium over the status of Russia troops in the Bosnia peacekeeping mission, it would seem that Russia might have reason to pat itself on the back just a bit for its handling of September's international crises.


But even Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, appearing on the weekly news program "Itogi" Sunday night, conceded that Russia had been relegated to the back burner of international diplomacy.


In response to a remark by journalist Yevgeny Kiselyov that "Russian diplomacy had been ignored by the United States and its NATO allies," Kozyrev replied, "That's true. What conclusion do we draw from this? ... We have our own point of view, but many do not share this view. This is the nature of the democratic process."


At the same time, continued Kozyrev, Russia was regarded as a great power. When Kiselyov interjected that this seemed like a bit of wishful thinking, Kozyrev's answer was a bit light on evidence. "No. I am telling you what I know to be true."


Kozyrev has been under attack from all sides; he received a stern rebuke from Yeltsin at a September press conference, and rumors of his imminent resignation are rife. Kozyrev himself appears unruffled, saying that he expected to continue in his job.


The foreign minister came in for a fair share of criticism at the Carnegie roundtable, which was called, significantly, "Foreign Policy and the Elections." But most of those present sought to widen the scope of the debate.


"Everyone criticizes Kozyrev except the hopelessly lazy," said Alexei Arbatov, of the liberal Yabloko faction. "But getting rid of him would accomplish little. The roots of the problem are higher. It is the president who coordinates foreign policy."


While the roundtable speakers were virtually united in their condemnation of Russia's present course, there was a wide divergence of opinion on how to improve matters.


Alexei Mitrofanov, from the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, advanced his party's agenda, sprinkling his speech with the LDPR watchword, "geopolitics."


"The collapse of the Soviet Union gives us new geopolitical possibilities," he said. Among those, added Mitrofanov, was the chance to create a new military-political alliance with such world powers as Serbia, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Macedonia, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Algeria, and India.


This elicited some genuine mirth from the speakers and journalists present, one of whom dubbed Mitrofanov's line-up "the club of marginal states."


Arbatov, on the other hand, counseled patience, and said that any attempts to build a new military alliance would be counterproductive, by making Russia's former satellite states even more nervous, and more anxious to join the North Atlantic alliance for protection."Much depends on Russia's foreign policy," he said. "The more effectively Russia works for European security, the less attractive NATO will become."


?If parliamentary elections were held next Sunday, the Communist Party would receive 13.4 percent of the votes, the liberal bloc Yabloko would get 6.7 percent and the center-nationalist Congress of Russian Communities 5.4 percent, according to the results of a poll carried out this month by the Public Opinion Poll Fund, Interfax reported Monday. In the nationwide poll, 18.9 percent of the respondents said they would not vote at all.