The Tsar Legacy: Russian foreign Policy in the Mediterranean Area from the Romanovs to Putin

This paper aims at offering an analysis of the attempts of Russian empire before, and the Soviet empire later, until to now, to exert its influence in the Mediterranean area. Drawing also from Russian archival sources, the relations between the Soviet Union and Russia, on one side, and some countries in the Mediterranean or Adriatic areas, like former Yugoslavia or Syria, will be examined. Part of the historiography, firstly Soviet and then Russian, continued to maintain a theory, according to which Stalin’s foreign policy choices were made as a sheer reaction to English and American challenges in the Region which goes from the Adriatic to the Persian Gulf. According to others, Stalin’s foreign policy was formed during and immediately after world war II and was dictated by Stalin’s personal ambitions, reinforced by the victory over Nazi Germany. However, the documents consulted until now allow for a new approach and a new evaluation of the events. The picture that emerges from an analysis of the new documentation is more complex than what could have been imagined. The clarification of the objectives and actions to be undertaken in various European countries, where communist regimes were intended to be established, was dictated by pragmatic considerations and by the development of the situation in the various countries under the Soviet influence. In addition, the USSR indirectly aimed at influencing foreign as well as internal policy in countries, such as Italy, which did not belong to the Soviet sphere.