May 8, 1997

By V. Litovkin

There was a session of the Security Council of Russia on May 7, which was chaired by Boris Yeltsin. For the first time over the past years it dealt with the concept of the country's national security.

The very notion of "national security" was first mentioned in Russia in 1989 at one of the sessions of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. That was when the Supreme Soviet authorized a group of academicians headed by the chairman of the Committee for Science and Technology, Yuri Ryzhov (currently Russia's ambassador to France) to work out the basic provisions and concepts of national security. The group coped with that task.

That was when the priority of the individual's security over the security of society and the state was first announced and when a broader approach to the very notion of national security was worked out. As a result, it came to comprise not only the military and specific aspects, but also economic, cultural and ecological security and many other notions. It was also then that the idea of a special body of the state, the Security Council which should be headed by the president, began to be shaped and formalized.

The Security Council, though, was formed only as late as 1992. Throughout the subsequent years it tried to work out a concept of national security which would set real goals for the country and point to clear ways of their attainment. Nothing has come of these plans, however.

The main reason for these failures, according to experts' opinion was the split between the political elites in Russian society which has not been overcome to this day.

The draft concept has never been published.

One of the most reputed experts in this sphere, Vladimir Rubanov, who has worked for several years in the executive staff of the Security Council and who is the author of 40 articles on the issue of national security, has told Izvestia that the main faults of the present draft concept is that it lacks an in-depth socio-philosophical analysis of the present views of Russia, its history and, alas, unpredictable future. Without this the conceptual document does not look viable enough.

"Order and stability in Russia are certainly not guaranteed," says Rubanov. "They call for a unanimous understanding and approval as well as clarity of the goal, for a special organization, public initiatives and mass efforts at implementing all-inspiring perspectives (like the "American dream" in the eyes of Western philistines, for example). There are no such perspectives or prospects in the document, and without them the concept of national security is completely senseless".

Nevertheless, at the May 7 session of the Security Council the Russian president spoke highly of the drafted document. The work to draft the national security concept lasted a whole year, noted Boris Yeltsin, and the document has "all the hallmarks of quality." The president expressed the hope that the Security Council would approve it.