Chris Doss The Russia Journal ------------------
slate.com June 10, 2002 Was Clinton complicit in Yeltsin's massive crookedness? The Russia Hand
From: Anne Applebaum To: Strobe Talbott Subject: A Look in History's Mirror Posted: Monday, June 10, 2002, at 8:13 AM PT Dear Strobe,
I read your book as if it were a detective novel—I was unable to put it down until late in the night, picked it up again first thing in the morning, and didn't stop until I had finished. This isn't just because it is well-written (which it is) but because for 10 years I watched, and sometimes wrote about, many of the incidents you describe—albeit from the perspective of someone working in Russia, not someone managing U.S. policy to Russia. Reading your version of events felt like looking at the past in a mirror.
In a few cases, I discovered that my past perception of events had been wrong. I was bemused to discover, for example, that it was you and not Al Gore (as I had incorrectly surmised) who came up with the phrase "Russia needs less shock and more therapy" at a critical moment in 1993. At the time, there had in fact been no deep economic reform in Russia at all—that is, there had been no "shock" as there had been in Poland a few years earlier. Gore's phrase (your phrase) seemed to me emblematic of an administration determined to spend millions supporting a "Russian capitalist system" that didn't yet exist.
Now, of course, I know it was a diplomatic slip of the tongue, which, you write, you spent most of your Christmas holidays trying to retract: "My explanations never caught up with the original sound bite and the furor it caused." Or, in the words of your colleague Leon Fuerth, "Loose quips sink dips."
In other cases, however, I learned that I had guessed right about what was going on in all of those private meetings in Kremlin palaces. As you must know, the centerpiece of your book is its account of the fascinating relationship between Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, two men who couldn't be more different yet appear to have identified with one another. Clinton even uses language about Yeltsin that he could easily have used about himself. "The thing about Yeltsin that I really like," Clinton says at one point, "is that he's not a Russian bureaucrat. He's an Irish poet. He sees politics as a novel that he's writing or a symphony that he's composing. That's one of the things that draws me to him."
In its way, it was an admirable and unique partnership—although (intentionally or not) I think you also reveal how naive it was. Clinton appears to have accepted Yeltsin at face value: as a bona fide democrat who wanted his country to join Western institutions and the global marketplace. Yet while I don't want to knock Yeltsin's very real political achievements, he did also fire on his own parliament and launch the first Chechen war (which you argue the United States ought to have condemned more vociferously). Far more important, he also presided over the criminalization of the Russian economy and a "privatization" process that amounted to outright theft of billions of dollars worth of state assets—hardly the return to the "rule of law" that American Yeltsin-boosters claimed to be backing.
To those Russians who didn't participate in this massive swindle, the very name of the first Russian president is associated with the decay of Russia's institutions, with the deterioration of public services, and with their own impoverishment. After a while, Clinton's personal support for Yeltsin also began to look like American support for the massively crooked system Yeltsin created: To this day, many Russians don't distinguish between "democracy" and "corruption" and the "United States of America," figuring them all to add up to much the same thing. Similarly, the word "capitalism" does not connote economic freedom and prosperity in Russia, but rather poverty and crime—even though Yeltsin's oligarchic, state- and monopoly-dominated system was a far cry from what we think of as "capitalism" in the United States.
You treat the question of corruption very lightly in your book—which is why I began to wonder, at a certain point, about the president's real motivations. Was he really supporting the formation of "democratic values" in Russia, as he so often claimed to be—and if so, why was he wholeheartedly backing a man who so often veered far away from them? Or was he supporting the man who happened to be in power in Russia, just as every American administration has done since the war, in the name of stability?
Yours, Anne Applebaum
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From: Strobe Talbott To: Anne Applebaum Subject: A Very Big Man and a Very Bad Boy Posted: Monday, June 10, 2002, at 8:30 AM PT
Dear Anne:
You've obviously read the book closely and astutely. For that, thanks.
Before responding to your specific points, let me make a general one about my purpose in writing it.
Any presidency is a complex, confusing and, to one degree or another, controversial subject: lots of people involved, lots of issues, lots of judgments—and often recriminations—flying in every direction. The Clinton presidency, I need hardly tell you, was especially tumultuous and remains especially supercharged as a topic of debate. My role in the administration was focused on foreign policy in general and Russia policy in particular. I thought it would be helpful if I were to do a narrative reconstruction of that policy, getting down the facts as I saw them unfold and offering as much interpretation as I could about how events looked at the time to those of us involved. I did this because of what I see as the intrinsic importance of the U.S.-Russian relationship and the extent to which I think the subject has been obscured or distorted by other public preoccupations that were swirling around at the time and continue to do so now.
We can come back to this point if you wish.
Now, on your points: Yes, the two Big Guys—as we who worked for them sometimes referred to Clinton and Yeltsin—did indeed identify with each other. After a particularly embarrassing (and drunken) Yeltsin performance at a summit in Hyde Park, during which Clinton tried to cover up for him in public, I had the realization that part of Clinton's affinity for Yeltsin was that he saw in his Russian friend someone who was, as I put it in the book, a very big man and a very bad boy.
But more than that, Clinton saw Yeltsin as a political leader focused ("like a laser") on one very big task—which was to drive a stake through the heart of the old Soviet system. To support Yeltsin so that he might succeed in that task was, in Clinton's view (and mine), the overarching justification for putting up with a lot of the other less noble or downright stupid stuff.
Also, the Clinton-Yeltsin bond made it possible for the United States to advance specific, difficult goals that couldn't be achieved through any other channel: getting nukes out of Ukraine, getting Russian troops out of the Baltics, getting Russia to acquiesce in NATO enlargement, getting Russia to participate in Balkan peacekeeping. All that said, you're right to zero in on the problem of criminalization and corruption. It was mighty frustrating to us not to have made more of a dent there. One thing to keep in mind, however: Criminalization and corruption didn't begin with the end of the Soviet Union; they were part of the Soviet system—big time. What happened in 1992 was that they, like everything else, were privatized. The solution is for the Russian people to elect legislators who will, over time, turn that country into a rule-of-law society; and for the Russian independent media to survive the current Putin crackdown in order to keep government honest (or at least keep it from being too dishonest).
As for Russian anti-Americanism, you bet it's there—and one of the reasons is disillusionment with "market," "democracy," and other values and institutions that a lot of them see as the victors in the Cold War imposing on the vanquished. Some of that is inevitable: a kind of morning-after phenomenon; some of it is generational (it's a lot more prevalent among the older folks); some of it resonates with resentment of the pre-eminence of American power (hard power and soft power, as Joe Nye would say) that is now to be found almost universally around the world. Over time, it will die down if two things happen: 1) Russia continues to make progress toward being (in the phrase so many Russians use) "a normal modern country"; and 2) the United States doesn't overplay its hand with Russia—i.e., make good on the implications of "partnership" rather than just paying lip service to the word.
Yours, Strobe