This week, the Levada Center released the results of two surveys, one conducted in May 2005 and the other in the same month a year ago. In each case, 1,600 Russians were asked to name the five countries that they would call the closest friends and allies of Russia and the five which they would identify as the most hostile or unfriendly to Russia.

In addition to the direct results of the poll, the Center's analysts ranked the countries of the world in terms of how positively or negatively the entire sample in 2006 viewed them by subtracting the percentage identifying any one country as an enemy from the share identifying it as a friend.

At the top of the list of friends of Russia is Belarus, with 47 percent of the sample identifying that former Soviet republic as a friend and only two percent saying it is an enemy, for a combined score of 45 percent. Other countries where the combined net was more than ten percent positive included Kazakhstan, China, Germany, India, Armenia, and Bulgaria

At the top of the list of Russia's enemies was Latvia with a net minus 45 percent. One percent of the sample identified it as a friend but 46 percent said it was an enemy. Georgia and Lithuania got net scores of minus 41, the United States got a net of minus 32 percent, Estonia got a net of minus 27, and Afghanistan got a net of minus 11 percent.

Among these "enemies," the United States suffered the biggest change in rating between 2005 and 2006. In the first year, 11 percent of Russians viewed it as a friend while 23 percent said it was an enemy of Russia. But this year, only five percent of Russians said it was a friend, while 37 percent said it was antagonistic to Russia.

In presenting these data, the Levada Center's A.A. Golov drew attention to three things in addition to the fact that a majority of Russians do not agree on any country being either a friend or enemy of their own.

First, he pointed out there has been relative stability in the overall rankings of both friends and enemies over the last year. China displaced Ukraine in the top five friends of Russia identified by the sample, but there was little change in the ranking of countries the Russian sample identified as enemies.

Second, over the past twelve months, he noted, Russian attitudes towards friends and enemies have become "clearer but only a little clearer." That is, to judge from this sample, Russians now tend to give more positive marks to those they consider their friends and more negative ones to those they consider their enemies.

And third, he observed, there were at least some countries which one part of the sample identified as friends and another part viewed as an enemy. The clearest example of that is Ukraine. Ten percent of Russians classify that country as a friend, a figure that places it in the eighth place overall, but 27 percent consider Ukraine to be unfriendly to Russia.

Both the relative stability of these rankings and the fact that Russians are divided in their assessments of many of the countries they mentioned have the effect of calling attention to the constraints within which Russian officials must operate -- and also to the possibilities that they can dramatically change direction and still be able to count on some popular support.

--

(Paul Goble teaches at the EuroCollege of the University of Tartu in Estonia.)