CIS: Fifteen Years of Vain Efforts

Abstract

During 15 years of its existence the CIS’s economic space has become less and less integrated. The article spotlights institutional, structural, and political causes of inevitable raveling out of this space that has formerly been a single whole. Russia as its gravitation center steadily loses its attractiveness for most of the partners, though continues to feed them up with hidden subsidies. Disbalance between growing costs of such subsidies and melting expectations of the integration has reached the critical level in 2005. Disintegration of the Commonwealth evidently has crossed the reversibility line.