Russia’s Changing Identity: In Search of a Role in the 21st Century

... (others, from Ukraine to Uzbekistan, had such organizations). Russia was not proposed for founding membership in the UN, unlike Ukraine and Belarus, and so on. Eventually, however, the Russian elites’ unhappiness about the terms of their relationship with the rest of the Soviet Union emerged as the single most important factor leading to the demise of the USSR. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, ethnic Russians have constituted about 80 percent of the country’s population,...