Book tackles neglected topic on ties between Russia and S-E Asia

Senior fellow at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute Ian Storey was in his late teens when he first travelled out of the United Kingdom where he was born.

- Clement Yong Correspondent

His destination? Cold War Moscow, on the cusp of a great unravelling, with reformer Mikhail Gorbachev having just succeeded to the position of general secretary of the Communist Party in 1985.

At the time, touring the Soviet Union required the young boy to join a state-owned travel agency, much like those offered by North Korea today. The strange vistas he saw had a lasting impact “at an age where you start becoming aware of events around the world”.

He reminisces in an interview at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute: “When you buy something, you had to line up three times - once to get a ticket for that item, then another line to pay for it and then a third line to get it. It was very inefficient, but it ensured full employment because you had three people doing the job of one.”

The Singapore-based researcher and author has written the first monograph on Russia-South-east Asian relations in 30 years, this being a neglected topic of scholarship for reasons not entirely unwarranted.

Putin's Russia And Southeast Asia, published by ISEAS Publishing, comes to a conclusion most readers already intuitively grasp: that Southeast Asia does not factor highly in Russia's calculations and vice versa.

But Storey, through talking to academics, government officials and journalists from six key Southeast Asian countries - sans Cambodia, Laos, Brunei, Myanmar and Timor Leste - still delves interestingly into the diversity of regional views.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 amplified these differences and gave his research urgency.

“Had I published this before 2022, I don’t think it would have quite the same impact,” he says.