Societal, Institutional, Intellectual Layers of Russian IR and Russian Public Diplomacy in Eurasia

The purpose of this paper is to use the Waever’s model and its further development to analyze the development of international relations (IR) studies in Russia at the end of the 20th century.Russian IR went through an important transformation due to the collapse of theUnion of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) as a state and the collapse of the state ideology. The international context for Russia changed from hostile attitudes of the West in early 1980s to cautious attitudes after Gorbachev’s reforms and finally, the end of the Cold War in 1990. After 1991, Russia tried to become a member of the Western democratic community, but the results were mixed since the West, in Russian view, used Russian weakness of early 1990s to establish a unipolar world order (United States plus its allies). The beginning of 1990s marked a new stage in the study of IR in Russia on the basis different from Marxist-Leninist ideology, which dominated during the Soviet era. Western IR studies became available in Russia as a result of “openness”, which led to drastic changes in the content of IR courses and textbooks. Institutional changes, such as budgetary deficit and poor funding of research and higher education also contributed to the shifts in IR teaching, while political science was just developing in early 1990s as an independent field of studies.