An interesting bit from Anatolii Adamishin (Russian Deputy Foreign Minister in the early 1990s). He recounts a meeting of the @mfa_russia collegium, where the Minister, Andrei Kozyrev, spoke about the importance of partnership with the United States. 👇🏿
"The most important thing is to be partners with the US. Furthermore, we have to be the primary partner of the United States, or nothing will remain of our great power status."
I should add that this reveals *a lot* about the underlying motives of Russia's foreign policy. The expectation - to some extent under Gorbachev and more so under early Yeltsin - was that the United States would willingly free up space for Moscow to serve as second-in-command.
This would mean being something like a vizier to the American sultan. The expectation was flawed of course. For a start, no one in Washington ever dreamed of allowing such an increase in Russia's global status. Also, there were already plenty of contenders for the vizier's job.
Britain comes to mind, with its very "special relationship." Interestingly, in the early 1990s, the British foreign policy and defence establishment was rather concerned about losing this status... only not to Russia - to France and especially Germany.
There we are, a spanner in the more conventional, "ideological" take on Russia's early 1990s. Here's the link to Adamishin's memoir: vesmirbooks.ru/books/catalog/… [in Russian].
