THE RUSSIA HAND A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy By Strobe Talbott Random House. 478 pp. $29.95
ARMAGEDDON AVERTED The Soviet Collapse 1970-2000 By Stephen Kotkin Oxford Univ. 245 pp. $25
The American experience of Russia during the Yeltsin years was a roller-coaster ride to disenchantment. Starting with expectations of instant market democracy, we were quickly confronted with thieving oligarchs, mafia lawlessness, a disintegrating economy and an increasingly incapacitated president. By decade's end, the question of the day was "Who lost Russia? -- the assumed answer being the Clinton administration, with its soft-headed policy of remaking Russia in our image. Strobe Talbott, a lifelong student of that troublesome country and a sophisticated connoisseur of its culture, now gives us, in The Russia Hand, an insider's view of how that policy was made.
As deputy secretary of state during the Clinton years, Talbott obviously wants to defend the Russia record of his onetime Oxford roommate. His memoir is no mere partisan brief, however, but a meticulous chronicle of his personal involvement in the events described. Much as he did during his tenure as a writer for Time magazine, Talbott gives us a low-key and factual presentation. (We must suppose that the extensive quoted conversations were reconstructed from notes taken at the time.)
Talbott served as political contact with the Yeltsin government. (Economic relations were handled by then-Undersecretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers, now president of Harvard University.) Since the administration's Russia policy was very much Clinton's own, we hear little about Talbott's nominal bosses, Secretaries of State Warren Christopher and Madeline Albright, and much about "Boris and Bill," almost all of whose 18 summits Talbott attended. Between summits, Talbott worked with second-rank counterparts, chiefly Deputy Foreign Minister Yuri Mamedov. At this level, discussions were open and frank, with each party confidentially informing the other about personalities and policy debates in their respective governments, and both trying to influence events to keep them on an even keel. These contacts later came to include other specialists to form a Strategic Stability Group, an arrangement paralleled by meetings between Vice President Al Gore and Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin.
Relations between Washington and Moscow were governed by a series of conflicts that Talbott and his chief interlocutor strove successfully to contain. The dynamic each time was this: As the sole surviving superpower, the United States could impose policies that Russia found threatening or humiliating, thus necessitating face-saving compensation for Yeltsin.
The first crisis was NATO enlargement, which Talbott cushioned with the device of a "partnership for peace." The next was Bosnia, in which Moscow was soothed by limited participation in the peacekeeping force engineered by America during the 1996 negotiations at Dayton, Ohio. The final and most dangerous crisis came in the wake of the Kosovo war, when Russian troops from Bosnia grabbed the Pristina airport to horn in on NATO's occupation of the province. This confrontation was defused only by intricate shuttle diplomacy involving Chernomyrdin, Finland's president and Madeline Albright with a big assist from Talbott. So "strategic stability" was maintained throughout the years of Boris and Bill.
And what of their personal chemistry? Talbott shows us Boris's need for American recognition -- and his bluster when it was not adequately forthcoming. He treats us also to Bill's inveterately optimistic, often naive view of "Ol' Boris's" problems. Given this potential for trouble, Talbott and especially Mamedov often had to exercise their diplomacy as much on their chiefs as on each other. Yet mutual self-interest always managed to keep the odd couple functioning: Yeltsin was genuinely committed to modernizing Russia along Western lines, however poorly he understood what this entailed; Clinton, drawing on his friend's Russia expertise, made it an article of faith that Russia was capable of such a transformation, however poorly he understood the depth of the problems involved. As Clinton once confidentially summed up the pair's dynamic: "Yeltsin drunk is better than most of the alternatives sober."
Clinton later considered that his wager had paid off. He contrasted believers in Russia's possibilities with critics "who were always saying that the sky was falling." The former may have been wrong about many details, but they were right about the basic "storyline" and "the big picture," while the latter had things "just the other way around." And Talbott elaborates: Clinton's success was, as much as anything, "about what hadn't happened. . . . Russian politics had recovered from the brown surge [of right-wing nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky] in December 1993 and the red one [of Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov] in December 1995, and the Russian economy had survived the meltdown of August 1998. By the summer of 2001 the statistics actually showed some healthy trends: gross domestic product was growing, budget deficits were shrinking, capital flight was down, foreign investment was up, small and medium-sized enterprises were doing brisk business."
Perhaps the best indication that Clinton's engagement with Russia was the only feasible course is that George W. Bush, whose foreign-policy team had advocated a harsher line before coming to power, was soon pushed by geopolitical reality into a "George and Vladimir" mode. Talbott duly notes this in his last chapter, just as at the beginning of the book he stressed the continuity between Clinton's Russia policy and that of Bush pиre. Talbott concludes that unending patience has been America's unavoidable Russia policy -- as far back as George Kennan's containment doctrine.
Yet why has post-communist Russia been so troublesome? Most frequently we hear that Yeltsin's young reformers and their Western advisers were to blame (as if the new team had inherited a thriving country from Gorbachev). But the blame really belongs to the Soviet "bequeathal," as Stephen Kotkin argues in his lively, often polemical essay Armageddon Averted, appropriately subtitled "The Soviet Collapse 1970-2000." Among the quantities of chaff produced about Russia over the past decade, there was after all some wheat, especially memoir literature, and Kotkin has gathered it together in what is now our most comprehensive analysis of the Leninist endgame.
As of 1970, Soviet socialism appeared globally competitive, in part because of the crises wracking the West between 1930 and the stabilization of the 1950s and in part because of Stalin's contemporaneous success at crash imitation of Western fossil-fuel industrialization. Then came the oil crunch of 1973: The West was forced to downsize and modernize its "rust belt" economy, while the Soviets received a petro-dollar windfall that removed any incentive to do the same. Even more to the point, the system "had no mechanisms for self-correction." Thus, when the Brezhnev gerontocracy gave way to Gorbachev in 1985, the Soviet system was in a grave, though camouflaged, crisis of competitive survival.
What brought the crisis into the open was, paradoxically, Gorbachev's "romantic" commitment to the humane socialism he found in the "ideals of the October revolution," sentiments common to the generation that came of age during Khrushchev's de-Stalinization program. Much of the population, too, was wedded to those ideals "understood as state responsibility for the general welfare. The trouble was the next generation": "People under the age of thirty . . . were simply not interested in reforming socialism."
Gorbachev proved to be a "virtuoso tactician" who pursued reform by exaggerating the danger from "conservative" apparatchiki such as Egor Ligachev. This campaign culminated with the dismantling of the regime's central command structure, the Party secretariat, in September 1988, thus giving Gorbachev a free hand to rule through revived elected soviets.
But this master tactician lacked any comparably virtuoso strategy. Perestroika therefore was quickly transformed by the "treason" of the elite into what one wit called "catastroika." Freed from the Party's command structure, intellectuals used glasnost to discredit the system's legitimizing ideology, nomenklatura managers privatized the industrial enterprises they already enjoyed de facto control over, and apparatchiki in the Union's national republics appropriated their satrapies as independent states.
This "cannibalization" of the communist carcass continued, under the guise of reform, throughout the 1990s, as "officials used their positions of public power to pursue their private interests." For the Soviet legacy, alas, included none of the liberal institutions and the legal framework necessary to make market democracy really work. Nor could a handful of intelligentsia "democrats" and party cronies from Yeltsin's Urals base have possibly controlled the deluge. So the collapse continued until it hit bottom at decade's end, when a post-Soviet stabilization finally became feasible.
This picture is, overall, quite persuasive. At times, however, Kotkin's polemical verve gets the better of his sense of proportion. In hammering home the valid point that communism's collapse was essentially due to inner failure, not American pressure, he overplays perestroika's "success" and treats the class-warfare "ideals of October" as if they stood for some Scandinavian social democracy; in fact, Gorbachev's Leninism was a thoroughly expurgated version, as well as subsidiary to his concern for revitalizing communism's superpower competitiveness. Similarly, Kotkin congratulates the Soviet elite too profusely for saving us all from destruction by refusing to go down fighting -- as if the Reagan arms buildup, by demonstrating that Cold War victory was beyond Soviet capabilities, contributed absolutely nothing to this non-Armageddon. And, in reality, self-immolation never crossed the elite's minds, so eager were they to take the money and run, as Kotkin himself shows.
Thus did the Soviet bequeathal play out over the Yeltsin years. Now that the worst is over, Kotkin sees Russia "finally groping towards the very institutional reforms that people erroneously thought were taking place during the 1990s" -- which is roughly where Talbott comes out. Indeed, this is where Putin, too, has come out. He has renounced both the socialist, superpower romanticism of Gorbachev and the instant market democracy of Yeltsin to accept second-rank international status and to seek Russian recovery through long, slow integration with the West. Who can complain about that?