Regional
Power Rivalries
IN THE
New Eurasia
Regional
Power Rivalries
IN THE
New Eurasia
Russia, Turkey, and Iran
EDITED BY
Alvin Z. Rubinstein
AND
Oles M. Smolansky
First published 1995 by M.E. Sharpe
Published 2015 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright 1995 Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notices
No responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use of operation of any methods, products, instructions or ideas contained in the material herein.
Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Regional power rivalries in the new Eurasia: Russia, Turkey, and Iran /edited by Alvin Z. Rubinstein and Oles M. Smolansky
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-56324-622-8 (alk. paper).ISBN 1-56324-623-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Former Soviet republicsRelationsIran.
2. IranRelationsFormer Soviet republics.
3. Former Soviet republicsRelationsTurkey.
4. TurkeyRelationsFormer Soviet republics.
5. Former Soviet republicsForeign relations.
6. IranForeign relations1979
7. TurkeyForeign relations1980
I. Rubinstein, Alvin Z.
II. Smolansky, Oles M.
DK68.7.I7R44 1995
303.48247055dc20
95-6805
CIP
ISBN 13: 9781563246234 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 9781563246227 (hbk)
Contents
George S. Harris
Alvin Z. Rubinstein
Oles M. Smolansky
Gareth M. Winrow
Mohiaddin Mesbahi
Henri J. Barkey
Patricia M. Carley
Oles M. Smolansky
Alvin Z. Rubinstein
Alvin Z. Rubinstein and
Oles M. Smolansky
Alvin Z. Rubinstein is professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, and senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His published works include Soviet Foreign Policy since World War II (4th ed., 1992), Red Star on the Nile, and Soviet Policy toward Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan. His book Moscows Third World Strategy was awarded the Marshall Shulman Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies.
Oles M. Smolansky, university professor of international relations at Lehigh University, is a native of Ukraine. His published works include The Soviet Union and the Arab East under Khrushchev, The USSR and Iraq: The Soviet Quest for Influence, and numerous book chapters and articles in professional journals. His book The USSR and Iraq was awarded the Marshall Shulman Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies.
Henri J. Barkey is associate professor of international relations at Lehigh University. His published works include The State and the Industrialization Crisis in Turkey, an edited volume, The Politics of Economic Reform in the Middle East, as well as articles in Survival, Comparative Political Studies, and Orient.
Patricia M. Carley is program officer for the former Soviet Union and Turkey at the United States Institute of Peace, where she also works on broader issues such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and Western relations with the Islamic world. Her dissertation work at the London School of Economics focused on Turkic and Islamic identity in Soviet Central Asia and Turkey. Before joining USIP, Patricia Carley was a staff adviser at the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (the Congressional Helsinki Commission), where she authored numerous reports on the former Soviet republics, including the Central Asia section of Human Rights and Democratization in the Newly Independent States (1993). She has also worked as a consultant on Central Asian affairs to various government agencies, as well as the World Bank and the Rand Corporation.
Sergei Gretsky, a native of Belarus, received his Ph.D. in Medieval Islam from the Academy of Sciences of Tajikistan. From 1991 to 1993, he taught at Dushanbe Pedagogical University in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. He is also a coinvestigator in a project on Central Asia and Conflict with the Center for Post-Soviet Studies, Washington, DC. Among his publications are articles on Islam and on the Tajik civil war. At present, he is a contract researcher for the U.S. Information Agency.
George S. Harris is director of analysis for the Near East and South Asia in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Department of State, Washington, D.C. He has been a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. Among his published works are The Origins of Communism in Turkey; Troubled Alliance: Turkish-American Problems in Historical Perspective, 19451974; and Turkey: Coping with Crisis.
Mohiaddin Mesbahi is associate professor of international relations at Florida International University. In 199394 he was a visiting fellow at St. Antonys College, Oxford University. He is author of numerous articles and book chapters on Soviet-Iranian relations and security issues in Central Asia. He is editor of Russia and the Third World in the Post-Soviet Era (1993) and Central Asia and the Caucasus after the Soviet Union: Domestic and International Dynamics (1994). He is the author of the forthcoming Russia and Iran: From Islamic Revolution to the Collapse of Communism (London: MacMillan; New York: St. Martins Press).
Gareth M. Winrow is associate professor of political science and international relations at Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey. His recent publications include Where East Meets West: Turkey and the Balkans (1993), and articles on Turkish foreign policy in the Caucasus and Central Asia, regional security issues, and NATO in the journals Central Asian Survey, Oxford International Review, Il Politico, European Security, and Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. He is also author of The Foreign Policy of the GDR in Africa.
The breakup of the Soviet Union in December 1991 came with dramatic suddenness and profoundly changed the geopolitics of the Eurasian land mass. Losing about a quarter of its territory and almost 40 percent of its population, Russia accepted the independence of the other fourteen union republics that, with it, had comprised the USSR. Of these, six predominantly Muslim entitiesAzerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistanhad been created by Stalin in the 1920s and 1930s as tactical nation-states. As Vernon Aspaturian has argued, their creation was intended to play a pivotal role not in Soviet diplomacy but in world communismto generate discontent in European colonial dependencies as a prelude to their communization; but in the end, because of dysfunctional internal policies and the absence of external opportunities, they played a negligible role both in Moscows conventional and unconventional diplomacy.1 However, Stalin had several other tangible, interrelated purposes in mind for these republics: to strengthen the administration of a weak polyglot imperial system; to give form (but not substance) to the Bolshevik espousal of the principle of national self-determination; and to enable Moscow to carry out a policy of divide and rule by separating ethnolinguistic groups across two or more union republics, and in particular by weakening the separatist-minded Uzbeks by building up the Kazakhs, Turkmens, Kyrgyz, and Tajiks.
