In recent years, Moscow's relations with Nato evolved along a vicious cycle of love and hate: musings about potential Russian membership in the Alliance were followed by Nato's eastward enlargement and mutual animosity. This essay analyzes Russia's internal debate on its relations with Nato over 1990s and the reasons behind Russia's contradictory policies on Nato expansion. These were determined to a large extent by Russia's authoritarian modernizers' craving for a seat in the Alliance perceived as a military-political equivalent of "the West" and of the center of the world system. This holistic image neglected the controversial status of Nato and its expansion within Western world, not to speak of the rest of the global community, and the intensity of debates between Euroatlantic expansionists and their domestic opponents. This misperception, along with the Kremlin's short-term interests, enabled Western expansionists to engage Russia on their terms in a bargaining process, which made the bulk of Russia's foreign policy elite an often unconscious participant of Nato expansion and intervention. Russia's policies oscillated between utopian embrace of a North Atlantic community from Vancouver to Vladivostok (which, if ever achieved, might lead to an institutionalization of the North-South divide, thus pitting Russia against its own southern neighbors), and, on the other hand, fatalistic resignation before an enlargement that was perceived as inevitable, however unpleasant, geopolitical development. In addition, Moscow's approach to Nato was driven by internal cold war between Russia's authoritarian reformers and the parliament, which was not to be allowed to set the agenda and emerge as a decision-making force in foreign policy. This helps explain Moscow's consent that the Nato-Russia Founding Act be in fact an executive agreement rather than a legally binding treaty. These internal and self-imposed constraints on Russia's diplomacy helped to shape an outcome that, judging by Western sources, was far from predetermined.