234 12 Towards neoclassical realist thinking in Russia? Tatiana Romanova and Elena Pavlova Even given the relatively recent emergence of international relations (IR) as a discipline, it is still at a young age in Russia. Its development there started in the Soviet Union in the 1970s but it was conined to Marxist critiques of other (bourgeois) schools, and most studies took place in Moscow, which made it easier to control their content. With the demise of the Soviet Union, Russia saw a rapid increase in IR studies. he disci- pline became much more pluralistic. However, it has stayed empirical rather than oriented towards the construction of distinct theoretical concepts. Various theoretical paradigms have been borrowed from the West to explain events or developments in Russia or elsewhere. For that very reason, there are limits to how far we can talk about the develop- ment of IR theoretical studies in contemporary Russia. Realism swiftly acquired a central role in Russian IR studies, for reasons explored below. Its application to empirical cases has ensured its irm link with oicial documents and speeches. Still, Russian realists have been quite heterogeneous, and in the course of the chapter we will identify historical, structuralist, geo-political and politico-economic currents before coming to neoclassical realism. At the same time, Marxism was rejected due to the historical failure of communism in the Soviet Union, liberalism was judged to be too naive, and constructivism and post-structuralism were considered to be too speciic and lacking real-world explanations. Studies of these paradigms in Russia were much more theoretical than empirical and their inluence on the IR discipline in Russia has so far been marginal. In Russia, neoclassical realism has only recently gained ground; in a nutshell, it is about ‘bringing the state back in’ to the debates about the international system and the pressure it exerts on national interests. At the same time, it has followed the Russian tradition, in that neoclassical realism has mostly been used for empirical purposes rather than for any sort of theoretical advance. Even those who are not neoclassical realists toje ch 12.indd 234 11/28/2011 8:54:58 AM