Description
Russia and the Relationship Between Law and Power addresses the development of a self-serving international policy by Moscow to serve its interests and subjugate client regimes in Eastern Europe and Southwest Asia. The events leading to the Hungarian crisis in 1956, the Czech crisis in 1968, the Afghan invasion in 1979, the Polish crisis in 1981-82, the Baltic crisis in 1990, the Chechan invasions in both 1996 and 1999, and the crisis in Georgia in 2008 (including South Ossetia and Abkhazia) are carefully explored and dissected. Each of these interventions (except Afghanistan) was executed under claim of right under Rule IV of the Warsaw Pact, or a claim, in Chechnya and in Georgia in 2008, that Moscow was defending its inherent national interests as the result of the presence of its citizens in that territory. This is a text that will have wide appeal for Russophiles, students of international law and politics, historians, students of Eastern European studies, and undergraduates, graduate students, and professors in each of these disciplines.
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That Russia kept its imperial ambitions throughout its post-tsarist and post-Soviet history is a given; the growth and development of such ambitions, however, is a much more complex and uncertain narrative. The author (a Fellow at the Center for National Security Law) traces the development of such ambitions in the post-World War 2 years. An overview of the particularly Soviet conception of the rule of law is followed by an analysis of the events leading to -- and the immediate aftermath of -- the Hungarian revolution of 1956, when the Soviet "fraternal" approach to its near-Western neighbors and satellites was first unmasked as a self-serving power grab. The events in Prague during the spring of 1968 are described then, reinforcing the thesis that the Soviet foreign policy was ultimately completely self-serving, despite lip service to international rights and equality of nations. Afghanistan and Poland, one an outright military invasion, the other an invasion "by proxy", are the subject of the next two chapters. Post-Soviet events occupy the rest of the text: a failed attempt to keep Lithuania within the sphere of Russian power in 1991, the two bloody wars in Chechnya and their inconclusive results, and the 2008 war in South Ossetia and Georgia. The current crisis in Ukraine appears to be perfectly logical and inevitable when looked at in this context. Annotation ©2014 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
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