[Interview with Foreign Minister Andrey Kozyrev by unidentified correspondent; place and date not given--recorded]

[Correspondent] Andrey Vladimirovich, so far the reaction of the world community to the results, the preliminary results, of the elections and the constitutional referendum in Russia has been very restrained. Nonetheless, fears are already being voiced that our foreign policy guidelines may yet alter in some way in connection with the victory of the opposition. How justified are these fears?

[Kozyrev] I would here welcome this restrained reaction because we are talking about a purely internal matter of ours. At the same time this reaction is, on the whole, a positive reaction. As usual, our foreign partners show interest not in a precise distribution of seats among parties and in what sort of parties these will be, for this is our own affair, but in Russia's advance along the democratic path, the safeguarding of human rights, let us say. This is a matter of concern for us in other countries and these are the issues we always discuss with our foreign partners, not just as applicable to Russia, but as applicable to what is taking place in the relevant states.

As for foreign reaction, the issue which happens to be the main issue for us, too, is singled out: The constitution has been adopted. It is, in fact, the Yeltsin constitution and everyone understands that. The president has taken the initiative and played the leading role in the elaboration of the constitution, although the best minds and experts were also involved, you will recall the painstaking work, but, of course, it was the president's initiative and it is the president's constitution, just as the De Gaulle constitution in France, let us say, or the Jefferson constitution in the United States and there is nothing special about it, nor does it signify any sort of authoritarianism--it is a natural situation. A president legitimately elected by the whole of the people favors the construction of Russian statehood. The constitution has been passed, and this is the main thing. It makes our foreign partners and us ourselves confident that foreign and internal policy will remain the same in its essence--reformist, democratic, open, and so on and so forth. Our foreign policy is being made by the president; It has been, it is now, and always will be, I would like to stress this. Naturally, we want the Duma, the Federal Assembly as a whole, and the parties and individual deputies who come to work in it to contribute to the strengthening of the foreign policy of the Russian state, but its fundamentals, its fundamental policy will remain the same because it is being made by the president.

The presidential mandate is incontrovertible. In the space of two years the president in fact received his third vote of confidence from all the people--here I mean the vote for the constitution--and, incidentally, in the course of the election campaign the main principles of the foreign policy were not questioned, if you ignore perfectly irresponsible statements which their authors are already repudiating with the same ease with which they made these irresponsible statements, having so frightened the world which has apparently still failed to distinguish between serious politicians with serious programs and, forgive me here, the jester-cum-buffoon types.

That is the way it appears, because these people, or this person immediately made a statement completely contradicting what was said before. Well, that is what they are worth, these statements, the ones made before and, evidently, the ones made later. It is difficult to consider them seriously, although we will, of course, take account of the spectrum of views voiced in the Duma on the part of all sorts of parties and individual deputies.

[Correspondent] Andrey Vladimirovich Kozyrev, it's understood that, according to the new constitution, it's the president and the government who design and carry out foreign policy, but parliament, of course, cannot and should not be detached from our foreign affairs. Yet, you have already said, and everyone knows that some leaders of the opposition who gained the upper hand in the elections just now have very original views on the subject of international affairs.

[Kozyrev] To begin with I would ask: What would we want from the new parliament? What does the country, the state, require from it? What do I, personally, as a representative of a party bloc, or as a deputy from Murmansk Oblast, require and what does the country require? The country needs stronger legislation pertaining to those foreign policy matters, those foreign policy problems with which we are permanently occupied: for example, protection of the Russian-speaking population in countries near our borders [v blizhnem zarubezhye], as they say, that is, in the republics of the former Soviet Union. This is an acutely difficult problem. No easy answers or easy approaches will do, like: everything has been transformed into a guberniya [pre-1918 administrative district], so the Russian-speaking population is protected. This, on the contrary, works against the Russian-speaking population. Why? Because it causes an even greater explosion in those areas where there is already nationalism, or in many cases simply causes offense, you understand, and then you get people showing that strange desire to prove that they fear no one. It all spills over into anger, indignation and so on against the very Russian-speaking population that was supposed to be protected by these heroic statements.

I would advise those leaders who make such easy statements about former Soviet republics to visit them themselves and live somewhere for a week after making such a statement, but I do not mean they should do this surrounded by soldiers, by their own bodyguards, or under the protection of Russian servicemen--who serve so heroically in the most difficult conditions in many places, like Tajikistan, Georgia, and so on, and the Transdniester--I mean simply to live as the ordinary Russian population does. The ordinary Russian population does not live behind tanks, you understand, or behind barbed wire, but in normal conditions. Their children attend school. People go to work. If the leader who made the irresponsible statement were himself to go to work and listen to what his colleagues say--the Kazakhs, the Uzbeks with whom he would have to work, and with whom people in fact do work with no problems in many cases, thank God. We should help such people to continue to work without problems, not have people point at others, saying: You hate us; you want us again to be a dependent people, and so on. This, you understand, is pure provocation.

Now can the Duma, or the whole parliament, in actual fact take part in settling this issue? It can and it is obliged to! And very concrete measures must be applied. Thank God that the current constitution--which is in force now, which has been passed--thank God there is an article in it which stipulates clearly that there will be dual citizenship in Russia. This means that we can now approach our partners to conclude agreements on granting dual citizenship. this would represent protection for the Russian-speaking population.

If a Russian, an ethnic Russian, or a Russian-speaker, someone who feels close to Russia--there are Uzbeks and Kazakhs and Kyrgyz who consider themselves in essence Russian-speakers; you understand the position--if all of these people, or some of them, wish to have Russian citizenship as well as Kyrgyz, Kazakh, or Uzbek citizenship, of course they will be under the protection of the Russian state, they will have the rights and so on. People want this.

Our so-called patriots and national-patriots loved waxing lyrical on this theme in the former Supreme Soviet--how many speeches were made, how many accusations against the Foreign Ministry and so on--but they never got down to passing a law which would allow people to receive Russian citizenship when it would mean dual nationality for those living in the states of the former Soviet Union and, by the way, many people in more distant countries wish to receive dual nationality. These include our writers who emigrated and some businessmen including those wanting to do business in Russia, people who left perhaps a couple of generations or one generation ago. These are also Russian people, Russians. They feel goodwill for the country. Why can they not have dual citizenship?

Thus they waxed lyrical for two years, they accused the president and me, personally, of every mortal sin but they did not pass a law. The Foreign Ministry, however, on its part, put forward to the president a proposal, a draft for such law, which was drawn up by the best legal minds, and underwent scrutiny by world experts. We submitted this draft law to the president. The president sent it to the former Supreme Soviet. The former Supreme Soviet, I suppose, did not even notice that the president had submitted such a draft.

Well, the draft law is ready. If the Duma, instead of waxing lyrical on this theme, instead of making provocative threats which will only cause additional annoyance and so on, simply gets on with adopting this law--of course debating all its aspects and subjecting it to criticism and so on, but using it as a basis to resolve this task--we shall be making a huge step towards in supporting the Russian-speaking population.

I will give you a second example. The same irresponsible source, the same leader, who said during the election campaign that we will show everyone, we will force them all, etc.--those were the sorts of expression. Well, how can one now restore the former Soviet Union, and how can one turn all the republics into provinces [gubernii], even if we wanted to? Incidentally, I am not sure that that is our aim, since there are a great many questions here. Do we need that? But even if we did want that, for the sake of argument, by what means could it be done? Only by one means: force. In other words, troops, tanks, and so on have to be sent in.

Yesterday, literally yesterday, this same leader declared, without batting an eyelid, that we would be removing all troops, and not a single Russian soldier would be anywhere in the countries of the former USSR and he even, in effect, dissociated himself from those countries and from our republics. Now listen, those are, after all, two demagogic extremes. On the one hand, we either send in troops and restore the Soviet Union, or we all leave and abandon everything as though it had nothing to do with us, as though links had not been established through the centuries with those republics, as though we had no economic interests there, although in many cases the shutdown of factories there would lead to a situation in which we couldn't do anything here either.

What is more, that leader and people who argue casually in that vein--there are a lot of politicians like that, incidentally--has now completely forgotten that there are millions of Russian-speakers living there, whose lives sometimes depend directly on the Russian peacekeeping forces, but the Russian forces should not be occupation forces, not imperial forces; they should be peacekeeping forces--blue helmets, if you like. In other words, doing what they are doing now, and I say nothing about the contempt, the snobbery, the--I'm sorry--impudence towards those servicemen, Russian officers and men, who are already paying with their lives for that peacekeeping mission on the Tajik-Afghan border.

I do not know whether those who argue in that way have been there. Many of these critics spend their time in the United States. Many spend their time making speeches on television, and so on. I have been there many times recently, on the Tajik-Afghan border, in all the conflict areas, and today hundreds of our officers and men, Russians, citizens of Russia, are operating in all the conflict areas. Sometimes they are killed, sometimes they are wounded. Incidentally, diplomats work hand-in-glove with them in all the hotspots. Not just the minister, but dozens of diplomats have given up their receptions and their office work for work in the field, under fire. Recently, there was the well-known case of Kazimirov, who came under fire on the Armenian border, and so on. In other words, that is where the real-life work to ensure Russian interests is today, in those conditions, and we have no right to leave there.

Then again, let us return to parliament, to what parliament might have done and ought to have done. It is the same old story. From the very beginning, as soon as the CIS was formed and Russia became an independent state, we in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs together with the military prepared a draft law on the peacekeeping actions of the Russian troops which was studied by international experts and so on--not on someone's instructions, but because we wanted to make use of international experience in this field. Naturally, these forces were to be used first of all in the near abroad, but not only there--we have our battalion serving in Yugoslavia at this moment--and this is our current, concrete contribution towards the defense of Yugoslavia and the settlement of the Yugoslav conflict, and so on: 800 men altogether, all of them Russian soldiers and officers. I went there too. There is occasional shooting there, even in the area where they are deployed. No one is crying there, no one is engaged in heroic posturing. They just serve, in the Russian way, they are doing their job, and all the time these people here were just engaged in idle talk. These people were talking like this for two years, but have managed neither to adopt this law nor even to discuss it in the committees--either in the committee for international issues, which used to enjoy calling me up for questioning so much, or in nay other committee. Nothing has moved, and I hope that the newly elected Federal Assembly will bring together not only people who, perhaps having already cooled down after this pre-election struggle during which many of them have seriously come to believe that politics is indeed a dirty job and decided to start their political careers with dirty tricks--you understand, what I am trying to say? But I do hope that there will be enough sensible people there who will adopt the law on the peacekeeping missions and, at long last, create a legal basis for those soldiers and officers who are doing their job today, risking their lives.

[Correspondent] Andrey Vladimirovich, it is clear that you are a diplomat of a highest rank, but is it right to go on using such words as you have used several times today: a certain leader. Everyone knows already who is this certain leader--it is Vladimir Zhirinovskiy who has won the elections, after all--however unexpected this was for many people. What is this, caution or the unwillingness to get engaged in polemics?

[Kozyrev] You know, if you are interested in what I think about Zhirinovskiy--incidentally, I have known him for a very long time--yes, Vladimir Volfovich has been legitimately elected, his mandate will be as legitimate as the one I will be receiving. He can talk to people in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs if he is very unclear as to what has to be done. In any case, I would like to ask deputies to refrain from the statements similar to one he made yesterday. Although, yesterday he took back all his aggressive claims to the former USSR republics and so on and so forth, he said at the same time that we are prepared to have the Kaliningrad Oblast run jointly, as far as I understand, by us and the Germans since his next sentence sounded something like this: And we will have a joint border with Germany there.

Do you understand? I do apologize, but in no case will we give up the Kaliningrad Oblast. We have a very clear-cut treaty with Germany regarding this matter, which determines present borders, and the Kaliningrad Oblast is not something which is being questioned. Even in the FRG, even their extremists and fascists, recognize this, as far as I know, as being a historic reality and do not lay claims to it. It would be very odd, indeed, if we now start giving away areas which, I repeat, no one is laying claims to. That is why I would ask him to forget it. If Vladimir Volfovich needs any consultations in the field of political geography, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is prepared to give them to him since he is a candidate deputy.

It is a different matter that his statements in my view--this is my personal, moral, and political, not a legal assessment, but my moral and political assessment--his statements verge on utter irresponsibility and, in general reek strongly, to put it bluntly, of fascist-style demagogy.

I must say that Hitler, in the past--I am not whipping up tension in this case and we really have nothing to fear, but we must remember some similarities--did more or less the same in Germany in 1933. At first he came out with the totally irresponsible question of redrawing all the borders with extreme, xenophobic nationalism with its aggressive attitude to other peoples. Then after victory at the elections--by the way he was victorious in the German elections in 1933--he pursued a policy of legitimization. He seemed to dismiss all that had gone before, with the same rare smoothness, and it seemed many people were reassured. Many people thought: Well, what of it? And by the way, in Munich in 1938 when the Western democracies, the Western leaders, cut a deal with Hitler, this was probably because he played his part and said: No, no, that is just what I said at the time--but he never directly renounced this. An when in 1941--World War II began in 1939--and when on 22 June 1941 he attacked the Soviet Union, then he said: What did I tell you in 1932? You understand what this is about?

Therefore, when I meet Vladimir Volfovich Zhirinovskiy in the Duma or somewhere else I shall not offer to shake his hand, at least not until he says, not just smoothly but as a good solid man, simply as an honorable man, not even as a politician but simply as an honorable man, until he says to me and to those around: Yes, I made a few statements during the election campaign--well I wanted to be a deputy, I wanted to be a leader--I made several irresponsible statements but I have renounced them and I have reviewed my position. If he does this, I shall be glad and evidently it will be possible to shake hands with him and with other people. I think that many of those who are members of his party, themselves, have not realized...[pauses] Well in any event when we speak about fascism or the threat of fascism with reference to this situation, of course, we are not referring to those people who voted in this instance for Zhirinovskiy.

I think that this is a very complex phenomenon--the way people voted. it is possible that they voted against many things, including our own mistakes, especially, organizational mistakes made during the election campaign. I myself had dropped out of the central election campaign during its last stages because of my workload and should admit that I bear certain responsibility for this, since I was one of the leaders and one of the founding members of the Russia's Choice. I was too engrossed in my own campaign in Murmansk, my constituency, as well as some foreign policy matters, and so on. Therefore, I cannot deny that I also bear a certain share of responsibility--and it seems that everybody else was just as busy. Yegor Timurovich Gaydar was busy dealing with various economic issues, and many others were too busy as well. We should have been paying more attention to the mainstream election campaign and not leave the field to others.

In reality, all these theses are nothing but empty words. A whole range of simply astonishing myths is being spread about. I can tell you exactly what the real situation is like with, for example, the Indian cryogenic engines. I know that our Aleksandr Semenovich [not further identified] and, I think, Vladimir Volfovich as well as many others are now returning to this question. There is a myth being spread to the effect that we have revoked a profitable multibillion deal with India on instruction from America. Well, let us recall this story. The whole deal, first of all, was worth $300 million. Not all that much, anyway. Second, 84 percent of this deal has already been honored and it will be completed in full. there is only one obstacle for as far as the last 16 percent of this order is concerned--and you can imagine how much this comes to out of 300 million, it is pennies as far as international deals go. The matter is that we indeed to not wish to pass on the missile technology although we are prepared to send them blocks already assembled by ourselves. In other words, to give them what India needs for a purpose of launching a cryogenic powered missile. But this technology can have be used for other purposes.

The cryogenic engines in question are not used for carrying nuclear or other weapons for military purpose. But exactly the same technology can be used to create combat missiles. And what Russian interests do we have here and what are the interests of the United States? Any man who knows his geography will see by looking at the map that creating a missile potential in Asia will create potential threat to Russia--I am speaking only of potential threat, of a possibility. An so, the threat of these missiles striking Russia, including Moscow, is far more serious, due to Russia being much closer, than the threat of them striking Washington or other U.S. cities where they have to cover the distance of thousands of miles across the ocean. Here is your answer.

Apart from that, unfortunately there are states here that traditionally have conflicting relations with India. We are doing our best to see that they are good, but there are well-known disagreements between India and Pakistan. There are also other states, Islamic states, many of which are also located in areas of conflict. Do we need these countries to possess missiles? Many of them are on the threshold. We are struggling to see that they do not furnish themselves with nuclear weapons.

So, they are our neighbors. They are the neighbors of Russia. They are the neighbors of the CIS, and so it is a matter of concern to us that it should not happen there. If India can, then why not Pakistan as well? You see the point? So we are in favor of stiffening, of strengthening the regime for the nonproliferation of missiles and missile technology. India understands us perfectly well. We have splendid relations with India. Boris Nikolayevich has been on a visit there. Highly important documents have been signed there. Economic cooperation is developing between us. We have no problems with India over this deal. That's the myth about the Indian deal, you see. There are lots of myths like that. I hope that the new parliament will have ears to hear, as Jesus Christ said: Those that have ears, let them hear.

[Correspondent] It is not a secret to you or anyone, that Russia has been in a somewhat panicky mood over the last two days. A shattering defeat for democracy. A fascist plague is coming. A catastrophe, well nigh civil war, is approaching. As far as I can judge by your words, you do not share this point of view.

[Kozyrev] No, I do not share this point of view. I do not share a panicky mood. The situation on the whole is far from panicky--the economic situation, Russia's prestige in the world. You know, people are trying to suggest to the population and many other people, trying to present their inferiority complex and their ignorance---as in the case with the Indian deal--as their patriotism and their concern for the Motherland. In actual fact they are not patriots. A patriot, above all, is confident of himself. Such an enormous country as Russia...[pauses] I cannot understand this at all, where it is coming from, what for, and who has invented that we should be afraid of anyone, that we cannot live in the surrounding world, that we cannot be partners with other states and dispute our interests at the same time? This simply means that people don't really know their own country. They don't even know what great potential we have.

Yet again, I would like to say the following: We have the constitution of a democratic state. We have the president who has received his mandate three times in two years. There is no other president like him in the whole world. Yeltsin fully guarantees the continuation of the policy of reforms. We have the government. We have the chairman of the government, Viktor Stepanovich Chernomyrdin. We have a normal country which is developing. Yes, Vladimir Volfovich has been elected. Perhaps, he himself feels that he has gone too far and therefore started talking (?differently). It is a pity that he is doing it so frivolously. One would like to see that the man, let's say, has been thinking for a week, gets acquainted with some documents, and then changes his point of view. Certainly, it is not nice that we will have such deputies who are saying one thing today and literally the opposite the next day.

A threat of fascism? Yes, it does exist. We have always been saying this. The threat does exist and, unfortunately, there are some features in Zhirinovskiy's behavior today, let's face it, which even remind us of the behavior of some leaders in Germany in 1933. Yes, but this is a complete nonsense that this pest will now spread all over the country, that we must panic and therefore keep silent, that we must get frightened, let others intimidate us and terrorize us.

I think we will get away with an inoculation. This is rather like an inoculation when the temperature goes up. This is very good that there has been such a reaction in society to the inoculation--the voting results--when the temperature has gone up quickly. This is a very good indication. It means the body is healthy and it has a normal reaction to a pest. High temperature, mobilization of immunoprotection mechanisms, is a normal reaction.

Therefore I think we should see a danger. We should mobilize ourselves on an antifascist basis. We need an antifascist front, if you want. On an antifascist basis we are prepared to cooperate: for example, I am prepared to cooperate with any parties and movements in the new Federal Assembly, in particular and especially, with the Communists. Incidentally, communists have always been against fascism. We can look differently at our communist past in the Soviet Union, but nobody can take away the fact that communists were fighting against fascism in the World War II, communists in Europe, France, Yugoslavia, Poland and everywhere. It would be strange indeed if the Communists were to stand aside from antifascist movement.

We can also cooperate on many other issues, if the Communists, for example, are really interested in protecting the rights of the Russian-speaking population, and I think it is quite possible. We might disagree with the communists on the issue of the economic reform. Some of us want it to be more liberal while the others want it to be done centrally. But as regards the protection of the Russian-speaking population, I think we can cooperate with the Communists. I think they will help us and vote for adopting a law, if, of course, they do have some beliefs and not a purely demagogical approach.

That is, I do not think that the so-called opposition in the Federal Assembly will immediately start flatly blocking everything. Yes, there will be issues on which there will be great and serious disagreements. But I also hope that there will be issues, inter alia in the field of foreign policy, where not interparty squabbles as regards who is in the opposition and who is in power but the interests of Russia and its people will get the upper hand.

This is absolutely obvious that it is in our interests to have a law on dual citizenship. It is in our interests to have a law on the involvement of peace-making forces. I can mention dozens of such laws. We need a civil code. We need to protect investments. This is also a non-party, if you want, and purely economical issue. And so on and so forth.

I do not think we should panic. I do not think we should give up for lost the Federal Assembly. It will convene.

I would like to repeat the following: If Zhirinovskiy continues to behave frivolously, if he carries on making fascist statements, I will not shake hands with him. We agreed on this at the meeting of the Russia's Choice bloc yesterday. If he gives up his fascist statements publicly, clearly, like an honest and solid man, and maintains his other disagreements, including moreover a demand for my resignation as he is doing now--and this is his sacred right--there will be no problems.

[Correspondent] Thank you very much.