The formation of the post-USSR Russian Federation's foreign policy in the context of the interaction between domestic politics and foreign policy

This thesis; aimed to reveal the domestic-foreign policy interaction and the continuity of the Russian foreign policy arising from this interaction. According to the argument of the thesis, since the elements that make up the domestic-foreign policy are elites/interest groups, socio-cultural structure, and ownership of mass media, it tried to reveal how these units systematically turned into foreign policy output. This thesis, which examines the historical development of the foreign policy literature in the first chapter; claimed that factors such as economic power, military capacity, and the psychology of decision makers, which are widely emphasized in the literature, are "side" factors and determined that the formation of domestic-foreign policy actually occurs as a conflict (or consensus) between elites/interest groups, also determined that factors such as the general public, active public opinion, and NGO's can participate in policy formation to the extent that they have organization and class consciousness, and finally, it has revealed the importance of mass media in the policy formation process between elite groups and other units. The systematics of this statement revealed that RF has been ruled by state elitism throughout history, that the oligarchic period (oligarchs) seen during the transition from the USSR to the RF was an anomaly period that moved away from state elitism, and that with Putin, it turned back to state elitism. Based on these determinations, this thesis put forward four claims and tried to prove these claims in the thesis. First claim is that foreign policy prioritizes elite interests, not domestic welfare; secondly, state elitism is a constant state in RF and this creates continuity in the formation of RF foreign policy; third, the distinction between domestic and foreign policy in RF is extremely vague (due to state elitism), and fourth, state elitism (read together with other claims) is a persistent feature of RF and therefore the Putin factor is of secondary importance to RF.