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This chapter describes Izvolskii and his successor's efforts to steer Russian foreign policy between Germany and Britain that determined the nature of Anglo-Russian relations from mid-1907 to the beginning of 1911. The reception of the Anglo-Russian Convention in both countries was largely favourable. British policy was to ensure that Izvolskii's efforts did not affect British interests and for Britain to remain strong against any German threat. The great expectations of the Anglo-Russian Convention held in 1907 had not been realized. At home, Edward Grey faced the unrelenting opposition of the Radicals in his own party towards anything suggesting a closer relationship with Russia. Abroad, Grey had to deal with German diplomacy. Germany's endeavours, alternately threatening and cajoling to sunder Russia from France and Britain, and her attempt to induce Britain to agree to naval arms limitation, but always within the context of a general political agreement that would isolate Britain in Europe.

This chapter examines the Russian foreign policy discourse. For the purposes of discussion, the leading schools of thought and policy practitioners in Russia in 1992–2011 are categorized into three groups: pro-Western Liberals; Great Power balancers; and Nationalists. It is shown that the main magnetic pole in Russian debates over identity and foreign policy orientation is the status of the Western democratic market development model as well as the role of the United States and the West more broadly in international relations. The three categories of pro-Western Liberals, Great Power balancers, and Nationalists can be approximately correlated to pro-Western, neutral toward the West, and anti-Western. The main axis of debate revolves around the first two categories of liberals and Great Power balancers. The most significant factor with the potential to push the needle in one direction or the other is the world economy and how it affects the oil price. The lower price environment favors liberals who call for deeper structural reform of the Russian economic and political system to increase efficiency, while the higher price environment discourages reform and fuels greater assertiveness.

This chapter discusses the Anglo-Russian Convention, which was the culmination of continuous British attempts to come to a diplomatic understanding with Russia. The shock of defeat in the Russo-Japanese War led to a complete reassessment of Russian foreign policy, a move personified by Izvolskii as foreign minister. Given Russian weaknesses, a policy of recueillement was necessary. Russia mended her diplomatic fences comprehensively. In addition to negotiating the Anglo-Russian Convention, Russia restored good relations with Japan and tightened her relationship with France.

Responses to the independence of the Greek Church and the creation of new ecclesiastical institutions illustrate the central distinction within Greek society in the post-revolutionary era, between the indigenous Orthodox and traditional element of Greek nationalism, and the modern and secular component of Greek nationalism. In the 1830s, traditionalist Greek clergy and intellectuals, supported by the Russian embassy and ecclesiastical mission, emerged as the principal defenders of the religious element of what became the new Hellenic-Christian imagined community. As a potent source of influence and resources, the Russian ecclesiastical mission symbolized the traditions of Orthodoxy and conservatism held sacred by the Greek masses. The protection and support offered by the Russian embassy and its ecclesiastical legation to the pro-Orthodox element of Greek society helped galvanize traditionalist policy-makers and the church hierarchy against a minority of liberal critics and foreign infiltrations of “new religions.”

This chapter examines Carl Schmitt’s theory of international relations and applies it to Russian foreign policy. It outlines the emergence of Schmitt’s thinking about the ‘Grand Space’ or the Großraum as the most important unit of analysis in international relations. This understanding of the world as divided into macroregions centred on great powers became widespread in Russian foreign policy thinking after 2012. The chapter explores different features of Russia’s regional policy in Eurasia and its sphere of influence politics through the prism of Großraum theory, including its spatial challenge to the universalism of the liberal international order.

This chapter examines the purposes of Russian power projection abroad under the regime of Vladimir Putin. The chapter reviews the various dimensions of Russian power in international politics, including its geographic domain in its immediate neighborhood and globally, as well as areas where Russian policy influence is particularly weighty. The chapter then looks briefly at different means of Russian power, like economy, conventional and nuclear defense capabilities, and human capital. It concludes that Russia is never as weak as it seems. Although it is not necessarily “the strongest” in all areas of international politics, Putin’s Russia has considerable usable power resources for the purposes of its leadership. The chapter then looks at the purposes of Russian power projection abroad. It looks first at realist arguments that insist Russia has national interests that any Russian regime would defend. These interests, according to this argument, are historically and geographically determined. Any Russian leader would seek to defend what is described as a “traditional sphere of influence.” In contrast, the author argues that Putin’s patronal autocracy has come to behave more aggressively in building and using Russia’s formidable power resources in order to maintain social stability for the sake of the regime’s survival. In this way, the chapter links Russian domestic politics to its foreign policies under Putin.

Jack Matlock Jr., U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991, is the author of Autopsy on an Empire: The American Ambassador's Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union (1995) and Reagan and Gorbachev: The End of the Cold War (2004). He assessed the impact of Putin's illiberal measures on Russia's nascent democracy and on U.S.–Russian foreign policy in two interviews between 2003 and early 2005. He believes that Putin has a better understanding of Russia's interests than Yeltsin. The danger is that he will go too far in recentralizing political authority and rely too heavily on police methods. He pointed out that the end of the Cold War gave the Soviet leadership an opportunity to reform without the pressures of an adversarial U.S.–Soviet relationship.

This chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book draws on social identity theory (SIT) for insights into how status concerns and social identity shape Chinese and Russian foreign policy. SIT argues that social groups strive to achieve a positively distinctive identity. When a group's identity is threatened, it may pursue one of several identity management strategies: social mobility, social competition, or social creativity. Using SIT as a framework, the book addresses several questions. First, how important were status considerations in shaping Chinese and Russian foreign policy? Second, why did China and Russia choose a particular strategy in a given context for improving their state's international standing? Third, how effective were their chosen strategies as measured by the perceptions and beliefs of the leading states.

Winston Churchill's references to Spain in May 1944 intensified fears in the Soviet Union of the formation of a Western bloc, a long held axiom of Russian foreign policy. So far as the United States was concerned, no bloc was yet envisaged and certainly not one which would include Francisco Franco. If Churchill's speech had been a miscalculation, difficulties increased a month later, when, during the United States Senate debate on foreign policy, questions were asked as to whether Churchill had extracted promises of aid from Franklin D. Roosevelt before 1941. By the end of 1944, disquiet in the United States and Britain on the Spanish question was rising. There were also reservations as evidence continued of Franco's support for the Axis powers. It was during September that the British realized that their own position in Spain in contrast to that of the United States was rapidly slipping.

This chapter probes the process of nation-state building in Greece based on Russian archival materials during the transition period from anarchy to absolutism (1833–5). It elucidates prevailing attitudes among Russian officials toward the establishment of a state apparatus in Greece, including the formation of political factions and the key symbols and ceremonies that promoted the growth of nationalism. The focus is on the methods pursued by St Petersburg to implement Official Nationality in Greece and the reactions of the Russian elite to the reform program of the Regency of King Othon. The chapter argues that Russian patronage and intervention helped engineer crucial aspects of the new imagined community that took shape. Ideologically, the Tsar and his ministers sought to promote a robust monarchy completely free from foreign influence. Yet, in its relations with the King and the Regency, Russia was more than a passive observer.

This chapter explores the 1843 Revolution and National Assembly of 1844 in Greece from the perspective of Russian archives. Analysis of the background and course of these events provides a means of evaluating Russia’s attitudes toward constitutionalism, nationalism, and foreign intervention when tsarist ideology was under threat. Russian archival materials help clarify many misconceptions in the historiography regarding the coup and the actions of the Russian ambassador. The episode sheds light on the reactions of Russian officials to a revolt led by their partisans, and provides an interesting case study of the functioning of the tsarist government when absolutism was under siege. Although tsarist censors sanitized the events, the Russian reading public remained well informed about the changes taking place in Greece. Although Tsar Nicholas opposed the rebellion, he abstained from forceful intervention, in part because the National Assembly of 1844 championed the religious aspect of Greek national identity.

This chapter introduces the debates surrounding the formation of the movement for Greek independence and the emergence of Greek national identity. It reviews Russian foreign policy in the Ottoman Empire and the Near East during the reign of Nicholas I (1825–55), comments on the nature of nineteenth-century Balkan independence movements, and situates the study in relation to the historiography. It also explores Russia’s involvement in the Orthodox East in the decades surrounding the Greek War of Independence (1821–30), with emphasis on the religious motivation behind Russian foreign policy. Finally, it reviews the archival sources of the study, outlines the structure of the book, and briefly summarizes the contents of each chapter.

Unlike the CIS, the Eurasian Economic Union, which was set up in 2015, but follows a long line of regional organizations which existed since 1995, focuses exclusively on economic affairs. The chapter discusses the governance and the membership of the EAEU, as well as its economic and political implications. It analyzes possible influences of the EAEU on the political regimes of the member countries, and concludes that the EAEU itself does not seem to exercise autocracy-promoting influences. However, the chapter shows that, by studying the EAEU, it is important to take into account an indirect effect: the existence of the EAEU triggers changes in Russian foreign policy, which in turn can contribute to the stabilization of authoritarian regimes.

Although Greek ties with Russia are very old, this chapter sketches Russia’s concern with the movement for Greek independence from the 1770s until the assassination of President Kapodistrias in 1831 and its aftermath. It establishes a foundation for an understanding of Russia’s relationship to the Greek kingdom and provides the historical context for the avenues of political and religious intervention once the state gained sovereignty. The chapter summarizes the main events leading to the formation of the Greek nation-state, with particular emphasis on the period from the Battle of Navarino in 1827 to 1833. The reports of Russian ministers, officers, agents, and consuls in areas within and near the zones of contact between Greek rebels and Ottoman forces provide unique vantage points from which to illuminate tsarist personnel choices and policy formation in the decades of nation-state engineering to follow.

Russian responses to the question of Greek Church independence demonstrate the centrality of religion to the foreign policy of St Petersburg during the reign of Nicholas I. Considering the relations between the two states as a whole, St Petersburg devoted more energy and resources to the church question than any other single issue. A direct challenge to Russia’s underpinning principles occurred in 1833, when a small group of Greek clerics unilaterally declared the Greek Church autocephalous from the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, closed down the majority of monasteries, and announced the restructuring of the church administration. The Russian Foreign Ministry viewed these actions as grave errors that opened dangerous avenues for an influx of non-canonical practices and the unholy influences of non-Orthodox proselytizers. The issue was urgent, for it challenged the traditions of Eastern Orthodoxy and engaged Russia’s professed exclusive protectorate of the Orthodox world.

This chapter explores the role of messianic thinking in Russian foreign policy. Russia’s international role was increasingly expressed in terms of exceptionalism, reviving a long historical tradition of messianic thought in Russian political philosophy and spiritual thinking. This messianism, however, also borrowed from more modern philosophical trends, including Carl Schmitt’s interpretation of the biblical figure of the katechon. In Russian reinterpretations, Russia is the katechon, playing a role as the ‘restrainer’ in the international system and acting as a bulwark against global chaos.

In nineteenth-century Greece, secret societies and oracular prophecies provided nationalists with a powerful repertoire of myths and symbols easily adapted to modern politics. During the Eastern Crisis of 1839–41, the uncovering of a secret association in Athens called the Philorthodox Society, a major military rebellion on Ottoman Crete, and a surge in oracular prophecies about the resurrection of an Orthodox Empire provided an opportune moment for politically minded individuals to implement their vision of national revival. Capitalizing on the turmoil unleashed by the Eastern Crisis, a group of Greek nationalists drew upon the reservoir of myths and symbols relating to Russian salvation to mobilize traditional society toward certain implied goals, including the overthrow of the King and the “liberation” of territory under Muslim rule. Suspicions about a tsarist-backed conspiracy led to sweeping changes in the Greek government and Holy Synod, which, paradoxically, undermined the traditionalists in power.