Chris Doss The Russia Journal ---------------------------- slate.com June 12, 2002
From: Anne Applebaum To: Strobe Talbott Subject: Did We Help the Russians Kill Dudayev? Posted: Wednesday, June 12, 2002, at 8:31 AM PT Dear Strobe,
I'm not disputing the existence of American aid and support for Russian NGOs and others. I've had the good fortune to meet some wonderful grassroots reformers in Russia, from Galina Dudina, a little old lady who constitutes the entire movement for prison reform between Arkhangelsk and the Arctic Circle, to Lena Nemirovskaya, whose Moscow School of Political Studies has been preaching civil society to Russian politicians since the early 1990s. Both have been (and are still) supported by well-spent Western money.
What I'm disputing is the larger policy—which is what you also focus upon in your book: Clinton's insistence on publicly aligning himself with Yeltsin, Clinton's insistence upon publicly praising Yeltsin's democratic instincts, Clinton's belief that Yeltsin was political leader who focused "like a laser," as you write, "on one very big task—which was to drive a stake through the heart of the old Soviet system." I'm just not sure if that was all that he and his advisers were doing or even how much of the Soviet system they really wanted dismantled. Yeltsin's "family," the retinue of corrupt relatives and advisers who circled around him during his later, sicker years, were suspected of engineering Vladimir Putin's rise to power, in exchange for a guarantee of their own safety. Do you think that was true? If so, does it not somewhat sully the picture of Yeltsin-the-idealistic-democrat?
In its way, the Gore-Chernomyrdin relationship, which you do indeed make much of in the book, was even harder to fathom than the Clinton-Yeltsin relationship. Viktor Chernomyrdin was not merely a Russian prime minister: He was also a leading light of Gazprom, the company that controls one quarter of the world's natural gas reserves. Was that connection of absolutely no relevance at all? Would it not have been prudent to prevent the American vice president from becoming too closely aligned with a man whose image, in Russia, was very far from that of the neutral bureaucrat you describe? I question, simply whether the "other less noble or downright stupid stuff" that took place during Yeltsin's presidency was really a sideshow. To my mind, it was the main story.
A few points to counter some of yours. Don't put me in the box with the critics who think the reforms in Russian took place too quickly. Put me in the box with the critics who think that for a long time, their reforms, both economic and political, didn't take place at all. In your previous e-mail, for example, you spoke of the Russian independent media "surviving the current Putin crackdown." In 1996, at the time of Yeltsin's re-election campaign—a campaign that we backed, financially and politically—the media were hardly independent, in our understanding of the word: They were owned and manipulated by powerful business and political clans who had decided that the re-election of Yeltsin lay in their own interests. The media's near-unanimous support for Yeltsin was applauded in the West—but it hardly set a wonderful example, and it hardly took a "crackdown" to persuade Russia's media to shift gears and grant near-unanimous support to Vladimir Putin a few years later. Putin is more openly nasty to the press than Yeltsin ever was, but the difference is between red apples and green apples, not apples and oranges.
By describing Putin as an "ally," I meant that Russia is an ally in the war on terrorism, not that Russia is a member of NATO. That aside, there are many interesting ironies in the current U.S.-Russia relationship. You and President Clinton spent an awful lot of time pumping and cajoling Boris Yeltsin to get him to comply with various U.S. demands, internal and external. Yet without any pumping or cajoling, or indeed hardly any diplomacy at all, Vladimir Putin happily invited American troops into Central Asia, doesn't seem bothered by U.S. plans to build a missile-defense system, and is apparently going to acquiesce to a further expansion of NATO—all in defiance of his own security establishment. My guess is his behavior partly derives from his estimation of the threat that radical Islam poses to Russia and is partly generational: Perhaps these things just don't seem like such big taboos to someone who never held high office during the Cold War. What do you think?
One final question, simply to satisfy my own curiosity. Although you do say, in your book, that you wish Clinton had condemned the Chechen war louder and earlier, you don't, understandably, really discuss the details of the war—with one intriguing exception. Apropos of nothing, you mention the death of the Chechen leader Dzhokar Dudayev, who was killed by a Russian missile while talking on his satellite telephone. Did we give the Russians the technology that enabled them to find that telephone?
As I've asked you a lot of other questions this time around, a simple yes or no will suffice.
Yours, Anne
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From: Strobe Talbott To: Anne Applebaum Subject: "Hmmm ..." Posted: Wednesday, June 12, 2002, at 8:40 AM PT Dear Anne,
As I head into the bottom of the third inning with you, a couple of general thoughts come to mind (and, yes, before heading to the showers, I'll answer your last specific question with a single word of one syllable).
Part of the explanation for your unease with—and, on quite a few points, disapproval of—Clinton administration policy toward Russia seems to be what sounds like a bottom-line judgment that the guys we were dealing with were, when all is said and done, scoundrels. More specifically, they were greedy, grasping, venal, cynical scoundrels, whose principal project in life was to rob their country blind (or, in Yeltsin's case, to help others do so in exchange for political support and raw power). Whatever their good qualities, human and political, those were far outweighed by their bad ones, which were most manifest in the economic ruination of the country.
I can tell you exactly when this thought popped into my mind: It was when you said you found the Gore-Chernomyrdin connection "unfathomable." You go on to say that Cherno (as we called him behind his back) was not just the prime minister of Russia—he was also the big shot of Gazprom and, as such, the ultimate oligarch, with all the opprobrium that that word connotes.
You feel, as you put it, that our policy (and hence my book) miss the "main story," which was (and continues to be, perhaps) the story of personal and systemic corruption as the latest chapter in the ongoing tragedy of Russia.
I think that's the fault line between your view and mine. I believe that the main story of what's happened in Russia over the past 15 years or so (I'm taking it back to late Gorbachev) is that country's abandonment of Soviet communism and its transformation (painful to experience and unpretty to behold) toward (I repeat toward, as opposed to into) a "normal, modern country"—the phrase that Russians keep using to express their aspiration.
As for the individual leaders, Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin were part of the whole process in all its aspects—the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Clinton (and Gore) saw the full package they were dealing with pretty clearly. But theirs was a more generous view. A lot of critics translate "generous" as "naive." I think that, in context, generosity was analytically defensible, tactically useful, and strategically wise. By treating their counterparts as political partners and personal friends, with whom they had human affinity and strategic goals and interests in common, Clinton and Gore were able to instill trust, lay the ground for more successful suasion, and thus, generally, develop leverage on the policies of the Russian government.
Where this paid off was more in the area where Russian and American foreign policies intersected than in that of Russia's internal development. We haven't spent much time in our correspondence on subjects like nonproliferation and arms control, Russian troop withdrawals from the Baltics, war and peace in the Balkans, NATO enlargement, and NATO-Russia cooperation.
But don't get me wrong: I'm not complaining about the focus of our back-and-forth or crying foul. I think you're absolutely justified to concentrate on the economy and the internal stuff. It is there, not in the Russian foreign ministry, that Russia's future is being shaped, for good or ill. Only if Russia does mature as a democracy—a "normal, modern country" with a genuinely free press and law-abiding elites and accountable politicians and a social safety net and empowered citizens who feel like winners in the revolution that started with Gorbachev and continued with Yeltsin—only then will Russia be a state that'll be easier for us and everyone else to share the planet with in the 21st century than it was in the 20th.
While my book acknowledges both the importance of the internal agenda with Russia and the difficulties we had in accomplishing what we hoped to there, there's no question it concentrates on the external one for the simple reason that there's more to report—i.e., we were able to get a whole lot more done.
We weren't able to get a handle on the problem of the Russian economy and the rule-of-law/civil-society issues in the same way that we were foreign policy and security issues. Reading your critique (and others' critiques), I keep asking myself, was there a better way that would have given us more traction on those internal issues? What would the Applebaum Doctrine have been—not as a thesis for analysis, but as the basis for policy? How would it have worked, and what would the results have been?
You won't be surprised that I'm skeptical about the alternative policies implied by your critique. They might have made us feel more righteous and perhaps, to some modest degree, made us more popular with some sectors in Russia (ones where we'd want to be more popular). But I'm not sure the policies I believe you'd have preferred would have given us more influence over events—and over the guys who made the decisions.
That said, I wish that there were a bit more of the Applebaum Doctrine laced into the Bush administration's policy toward Russia. One of my concerns about our successors in the executive branch is that,while they've come around to a lot of continuity with us on the external agenda, they seem to have downgraded the internal one considerably by comparison with us. They've let Chechnya (especially since 9/11) become largely a nonissue, while I think it should have remained front and center from Inauguration Day forward. Ditto the crackdown on the media. (You indicate that the press today is not much less independent than it was during the Yeltsin period. I see and hear from a lot of Russian editors and reporters, and believe me: They feel the difference is huge and ominous.)
You conclude your last message asking whether we provided the Russians with the gizmo they used to trick Dudayev, the Chechen warlord/president, into making a cell-phone call that gave a Russian air-launched missile a target so that it could home in on him and blow him to smithereens. And you ask for a one-word answer, preferably "yes" or "no." I'm afraid the best I can do is: "hmmmmmm …" That means: I just don't know. I doubt very much that our spooks provided their spooks with this technology with this objective in mind. Nor am I sure it would have been necessary. Vladimir Putin's alma mater is pretty well equipped and clever in these things ("wet affairs," in the jargon of the KGB). But your question is intriguing—and suggests the plot for what might be a helluva good detective novel.
Regards, Strobe
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From: Anne Applebaum To: Strobe Talbott Subject: Lesser of Two Semi-Capitalisms Posted: Wednesday, June 12, 2002, at 8:45 AM PT Dear Strobe,
I am going to cheat and try to get in one last word, even though I got the first one too, taking advantage of the fact that you are flying to Europe today and are therefore almost certainly too busy to respond.
Put simply, I think the difference between our points of view is not quite as you describe it. I don't dispute the world historical importance of Russia's abandonment of Soviet communism and its transformation toward whatever it is now. I dispute whether the choice, in the 1990s, was really between Yeltsin on the one hand and chaos/anarchy/back to the USSR on the other. I see it differently: The choice was between one sort of corrupt semi-capitalism—Yeltsin's oligarchic capitalism—and another sort of corrupt semi-capitalism, call it that of the "red managers" if you want to. Although the United States probably didn't have much control over Russia's choice, we acted as if we did, trying to dictate internal policy and throwing enormous amounts of money and political capital into the Yeltsin camp. In your extraordinary last paragraph, you concede that we might even have helped Yeltsin kill the Chechen leader, Dzhokar Dudayev, in the run-up to the 1996 election campaign. At the time, many thought it did indeed look like somebody was trying to give a boost to Yeltsin's presidential campaign—for as far as I know, the Russians did not have that sort of technology at the time.
This policy did not do much for Russian democracy. It may have helped shape Russian foreign policy—but maybe not. The concessions the Russians made in international matters might have been made anyway: Certainly Putin is making concessions left, right, and center, without nearly the same level of political backing. At the same time, the policy did have more drawbacks than you concede, creating resentment on the part of the Russians we bullied, cynicism on the part of the bureaucrats we dealt with, and anti-Americanism in the general populace. In only one, extremely cynical sense can the 1990s be perceived as a great "success" for U.S. policy: Russia has become so much weaker over the past decade that it no longer poses a conventional military threat to us or anyone else.
For that matter, they can't even pay to keep their nuclear arsenal in shape, which is part of why Putin is rushing to dismantle it. This is an extremely good thing—but let's agree that it isn't the same thing as "making progress toward democracy."
Yours, Anne
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From: Strobe Talbott To: Anne Applebaum Subject: Better Than the Alternative Posted: Wednesday, June 12, 2002, at 10:50 AM PT Dear Anne,
Closing out this exchange for now—but looking forward to continuing it at any time and in any format you want—I'd just say two things (in reverse order from the way you raised them).
First, as for my answer to your question about Dudayev's death, I conceded nothing of the kind. I told you I didn't know the answer to your question but that I strongly doubted there was any truth to that particular conspiracy theory. So don't be under the illusion that you've got a hot revelation there. Any that I felt like sharing are in the book.
Second, we do indeed have a disagreement on Russia's choice and not just in how to describe it. What you call "one sort of corrupt semi-capitalism—Yeltin's oligarchic capitalism" is, in my view, not only simplistically and invidiously described, it's also—by that or any other name—very different from, and better than, the communist/nationalist alternative that was a very real and dangerous possibility, in my view, for much of the '90s. Fortunately, we'll never know whether you're right, since I think the latter possibility—so very real a few years ago—is receding.
See you around, at least in cyberspace.
Strobe