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SEVEN YEARS AFTER ITS CREATION, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) has failed to integrate the Soviet successor states in any meaningful sense. Although, on paper, it has been the forum for several ambitious projects of cooperation, in reality the CIS has been gradually emptied of responsibility and has been witness to a diminishing base of collaborative activities. Indeed, so far has the CIS declined in importance that even its advocates have become used to judging its merits in largely negative terms. Speaking after a meeting of the CIS Council of Heads of State (CHS) in October 1997, Sergei Prikhodko, international relations adviser to Boris El’tsin, likened the organisation toa drowning man (who) has reached the bottom and has pushed himself up from it’. 1 In March the following year Russia’s First Deputy Foreign Minister, Boris Pastukhov, made a similar analogy, comparing the CIS with a …