Parliament and the Transition

One of your main concerns in the Parliament has been the issues that were the focus of your research when you were an academic: foreign policy, international relations, and so on. During the period of your entry into politics, an international relations specialist would say that Russia was going through a period of decline in its standing in the world. What are some of the problems that you've had to address as a parliamentarian in dealing with this very stark transition that Russia has been going through, from being a superpower to just being one of the major powers?

Since I'm on the Defense Committee, my primary area is Russian defense policy, and in particular, military reform. In a new external environment and new domestic environment, Russian armed forces suffered a lot from a drastic reduction of budget, from mismanagement, from all the failures of military reform. I think that the history of ten years, since 1993, was very painful for the Russian military. My primary preoccupation was the military reform, but since military reform has to deal with military requirements and strategy and doctrine and arms control, certainly, I am very deeply involved in foreign policy and international politics as well.

I think that the Russian international weakness was largely due to failures of Russian economic reforms, which made Russia extremely vulnerable, extremely dependent on foreign financial aid. In the nineties, Russian foreign policy was getting new credits from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to serve failing economic reforms. And still it didn't help, because there was the crash of 1998, and that affected everything -- a very weak diplomacy, very uncertain relations with the West, and uncertain relations with China and with newly created nations in post-Soviet space, Russian immediate neighbors. Certainly, a very weak military, which greatly limited Russian capacity to participate in peacekeeping operations [or] to conduct efficient arms control negotiations with other countries. I think that was the main problem with Russian foreign policy and downgrading of Russia from the status of superpower to just one of the major powers.

As a parliamentarian focused on these issues in a new democracy, what processes are key to doing your work? Is it educating the people about the issues? Is it holding hearings and finding out what the story is about procurement policies or military personnel? Or is it what you did before, namely, studying the broader strategic picture and trying to link it to the actual policies which you hope to have money for?

The work of a Russian parliamentarian is very much like the work of an American congressman. It's mainly affecting the policymaking of the government, which is a major preoccupation. We do that through adopting all kinds of laws which define Russian defense establishment and separational procedures, the start of some various armed forces, the allocation of decision making, the power between various agencies. And also through the budget, which provides money for everything that armed forces do.

So that is the principal task of every member of Parliament in the area in which he or she works. For me, it's on the Defense Committee; that is, the budget, a legal process of adopting new laws or amending laws.

Just to give you an example, I'm in the midst of a process of proposing a new law which was drafted under my leadership and my responsibility during the last three years. Now it's out and will be discussed in the Russian Parliament in May. The law is called, "On the Status of Participants of Armed Conflict and Combat Actions," and that defines the status of the military who are sent to fight in local wars or peacekeeping operations, so that these people have various benefits and social security, and that their rights are secured because they have to sacrifice whatever the military sacrifice is during a war.

Actually, in peacetime, when the rest of the people live in peacetime, I had to travel a lot to combat zones, to what we call "hot spots" in Tajikistan, Dagestan, many times in Chechnya. I was twice in Kosovo during the war. I've been to many other places where there is combat action. That's an example of the work that I have to do in Parliament.

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