The Russian Hack
By John Dolan (John.Dolan at stonebow.otago.ac.nz )
The Russia Hand by Strobe Talbott Random House 2002 Imagine that a particularly annoying comedy duo was performing in downtown Manhattan while the WTC towers burned and fell. Now imagine that the only cameras available kept focusing on the two clowns’ tedious antics, only occasionally showing out-of-focus shots of fleeing people, falling bodies and plumes of smoke.
That’s roughly what Strobe Talbott has done by choosing to focus, in The Russia Hand, on the one-to-one relationship between Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin through the nineties. The collapse of basic services and standard of living, which led to the deaths of millions of people, is the unfocused background in this story of what happened When Bill Met Boris. This sort of “Great Man” story might make sense if the leaders involved really were directing their nations. But the essential fact about Yeltsin is that he was a front man, a prop, a decoy. Yeltsin’s job was was to distract people while his oligarch colleagues stole everything in Russia and killed anyone who got in the way. By spending virtually all of this book’s 421 pages on meetings between Clinton and Yeltsin, by describing in numbing detail what Clinton said to Yeltsin and what Yeltsin said back, Talbott keeps the spotlight firmly focused on those two hams, Boozy Boris and Hillbilly Bill, ensuring that none of his American readers ask any awkward questions about the horrors which befell Russia in the terrible years of Yeltsin’s regime.
Talbott’s basic premise (which is never stated, let alone questioned) is that Yeltsin represents Russia (and that Clinton represented America, for that matter); and that the meetings between Clinton and Yeltsin determined the course Russia would take after the fall of the Soviet Union. Talbott’s book, is thus essentially a 400-page account of the antics of a decoy. There isn’t even much variation in these antics: every chapter leads up to a meeting between Clinton and Yeltsin at which Yeltsin is either drunk or sober, sick or healthy, cooperative or truculent. There is always a climactic encounter between Bill and Boris, but no matter how well or badly it goes, there must always be another meeting a few weeks or months later.
This is the style of writing Talbott learned at Time Magazine. A weekly news magazine must invent new crises for each issue, but would prefer that these crises involve minimal departure from reliable formula. The Bill’n’Boris Show is perfect for this sort of hackwork: the same two guys talking about the same few things but in different fun cities all over the world. International Relations with a great per diem.
Best of all, it’s so much easier to describe the two guys than their countries. Thus Yeltsin is more interesting and real for Talbott than the nation he ostensibly represents. Talbott pays far more attention to the variation in Yeltsin’s complexion than he does to the suffering of ordinary Russians throughout the 90s. There’s something repellent about Talbott’s many groupie-like descriptions of Yeltsin:
“I was watching Yeltsin’s face for some sign of his mood. In the past, he had tended to fidget and interrupt when Clinton did an overture [sic] like this one. This time he listened with passive gratitude, letting Clinton’s warm words wash over him.”
There’s something way too porn-like about that passage, and the hundreds of others like it in this book. I don’t want to think too much about Clinton “doing overtures” to Yeltsin, let alone anything “washing warmly” over Yeltsin’s corpse-like body. The descriptions of Yeltsin aren’t just porn, though—they’re portentous porn:
“...[Yeltsin] looked like a battered statue that might topple over at any moment. There was something artificial and willful about his immobility. His expression was frozen in what I had come to think of as his power mask—lips pursed in a half scowl, eyebrows knit in a look of Olympian severity—and his skin was the color of plaster.”
In other words: he looked like a fat old guy with a hangover, trying not to make his headache any worse by turning his head. That’s how a writer not so addicted to the Time Magazine style of writing might have described Yeltsin. But for Talbott, Yeltsin’s every belch, bead of sweat or varicose vein is fraught with significance. When Yeltsin looks bad, things look bad for Russia—for the whole world! And when, at another “summit,” Yeltsin is “in good form,” Talbott, vile courtier, is adoring:
“[Yeltsin’s] color was healthy, his gaze steady, his gestures firm and in synch with his speech....”
This sort of body-language obsession was, of course, standard practice for American “Russia hands” during the Cold War. I recall reading a proud account of the way a CIA agent managed to collect the urine container of a Soviet aircraft carrying an important Politburo official so that rumors of his diabetes could be confirmed or refuted.
Indeed, that urine-collecting mission still stands in my mind as the perfect example of America’s Russia-watching enterprise: a befouled and degrading attempt to read men whose whole career was devoted to being unreadable.
But it’s a bit odd to find Talbott engaging in the same Politburo-sniffing activities. Yeltsin’s regime was as porous as Stalin’s was hermetic; if you wanted to find out about Yeltsin’s health, all you had to do was bribe someone. You could very probably have bribed Yeltsin himself, for that matter. Why, then, these endless attempts to read Yeltsin’s horrible visage as if it were the key to Russia?
The answer is quite simple, and shameful. Though he claims to have studied Russian history, Talbott (and his master Clinton) glibly imposes on Russia the “presidential” pattern basic to American politics, in which two (supposedly) antagonistic factions within the oligarchy focus all their aspirations in two rival candidates. There can only be two men in the picture, whether it’s imposed on a domestic struggle between Bush and Clinton, or one in the endless series of “summits” between Clinton and Yeltsin.
Thus Clinton easily begins to consider Yeltsin his opposite number, with the same instincts and goals. And, as Talbott confesses in one of his better moments, parallels between Clinton and Yeltsin were not difficult to find:
“I suspected there was more to [Clinton’s] affinity with Yeltsin than being approximately the same height and shape and shoe size....Yeltsin combined prodigious determination and fortitude with grotesque indiscipline and a kind of genius for self-abasement. He was both a very big man and a very bad boy, a natural leader and an incurable screw-up. All this Clinton recognized, found easy to forgive and wanted others to join him in forgiving.”
Clinton sees Yeltsin as an older, weaker version of himself and enjoys manipulating his moribund double. There was no reason to expect that Clinton would do otherwise; it was probably in the US’s interests to let a weak and corrupt figurehead occupy power in Russia while America went about destroying its former rival. The anomaly is that Talbott, the supposed “Russia hand” and Russophile, apparently endorses Clinton’s facile translation of “Ol’ Boris”’s actions and motives into American context. “Yeltsin’s a good politician,” says Clinton again and again (and again.)
Talbott quotes Clinton’s commentaries on Yeltsin at tremendous length. They are distinguished by patronizing, faux-homespun slang which becomes more irksome each time it is repeated:
“I guess we’ve got to pull up our socks and back Ol’ Boris again.”
“This Guy [Yeltsin]’s in the fight of his life, and he thinks he’s going to win!”
“‘That’s why I want to stay close to [Yeltsin],’ said Clinton, pounding his palm on the steering wheel of the golf cart. He wanted to use his upcoming summit ‘to really bond with the guy. When he’s got hard calls to make, he’s more likely to make the right ones with the knowledge that I’m there for him.’”
And my personal favorite, in which Clinton explains:
“This business of helping Yeltsin overcome the worst of the past—including his own past—isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s going to be a two-steps-forward, one-step-backward deal.”
I guess that’s what happens when you apply a little Arkansas positive thinking to Leninist ratios.
Talbott’s own account of Yeltsin is equally false in its depiction of Yeltsin as regular guy and loyal pal. “Yeltsin kept saying in a low, choked voice, “Moi drug, moi drug...” Very touching, except that that’s what drunken thugs traditionally say in Russia, just before sticking a knife into the friend’s liver.
Perhaps the most sickening scene is Talbott’s account of the Yeltsins at home:
“Then, clasping Clinton’s hand, [Yeltsin] led the way [to] a picture window that looked out on a manicured lawn and a stand of birches. [Clinton and Yeltsin] sat...while Naina bustled about, serving tea and generous helpings of a rich multi-layered cake that she proudly said she’d been up half the night baking.”
Ah, the Yeltsins at home! Even Leon Aron didn’t go quite this far in attempting to portray Yeltsin as Ivan Q. Public. Appalling to reflect that Talbott’s more naive readers will actually think that, in reading Talbott’s account of Yeltsin’s complexion changes, hospitality and mood shifts, they are actually learning something about what happened in Russia in the 1990s. The irony is dizzying: if Talbott had chosen virtually any other family in Russia—if he’d just picked the 17th Ivanov in the Moscow phone book—he could have used their domestic life to portray what was happening in Russia. The only family which could not be used as metonymy is the one he chooses: the Yeltsins—because that family’s whole purpose was to distract both the Russian people and the foreigners away from what was happening to the Ivanovs.
It’s maddening, the way Talbott details Yeltsin’s jester antics while ignoring what was happening to tens of millions of ordinary Russians who were foolish enough to trust in The West. At least Aron was consistent; his Yeltsin biography simply omits any mention of what Yeltsin’s robber-baron backers were doing while “Ol’ Boris” cavorted onstage. For example, Aron never so much as mentions the Loans for Shares scheme, probably the most outrageous of all the state-sponsored scams of the Yeltsin era.
Talbott is not the simple liar Aron is. He’s more the squeamish moderate, the ideologue who wrings his hands while signing death certificates. (As he says when reporting a disastrous speech by his master, Clinton: “I coldn’t bring myself to applaud, but I didn’t have the heart, or the guts, to criticize him either.”)
And like the squeamish moderate he is, Talbott admits—briefly—that there was some nasty stuff going on while Bill and Boris chatted:
“Yeltsin signed a decree implementing a scheme called loans for shares. Assets owned by the state were sold off...through an auction rigged in favor of large banks that then made massive loans to the government. As a result, a handful of financial-industrial groups ended up with some of the largest energy and metals companies in the world at liquidation-style prices.”
And all this was done, as Talbott, wringing his hands, confesses, on the advice of men like Chubais and (above all) Gaidar:
“Gaidar and Chubais believed that the oligarchs would, over time, like America’s own robber barons of the nineteenth century, evolve into respectable captains of industry....”
Of course, Gaidar and Chubais were particularly confident of this because their schemes placed the two of them in the first rank of the robber barons to whose moral amelioration they looked forward with such confidence. (I feel certain that I too would, “over time...evolve” into a really nice person if someone out there were to give me, oh, say Mobil Oil.)
Talbott confesses:
“...[W]e, as the reformers’ constant backers and occasional advisors, should have debated it more with [Gaidar and Chubais]. We would have done so if we’d had more time, more foresight, and more influence.... In the event, however, one consideration prevailed in our thinking: our agreement with the reformers on the importance of a Yeltsin victory outweighed our disagreement with them over some of the methods they were using to ensure that victory, principally the enrichment and empowerment of the oligarchs.”
You might want to read that passage again, just to make sure it said what you think it did. If you think I’m misquoting it, I direct you to page 208 of The Russia Hand. When you read it again, you will see that it did, indeed, say plainly that Talbott (and Larry Summers of the Treasury Department, possibly the most vile of all the Americans depicted in this book) simply decided that letting Gaidar and Chubais hand out the Russian government’s assets to a handful of thieves was a price worth paying to secure Yeltsin’s reelection.
What is most painfully clear in this book is that Gaidar was a genius, a genuine Dr. Evil. He played Clinton and Talbott like the suckers they were. Knowing that the Americans reduced every Russian political dispute to a simple Presidential model with only two sides, one of which is Democratic/good and the other necessarily Undemocratic/evil, Gaidar could terrify the Americans into accepting any sleazy deal with the threat of the “reds and browns” (communists and nationalists) who would take over if the kleptocracy fell.
It was a beautiful strategy, because the more horrors it imposed on ordinary Russians, the more urgent became the need to bolster Yeltsin’s regime—simply because everybody hated it so much. Gaidar was able to convince Talbott and Bill that complaints about starvation and corruption were not actual manifestations of suffering but ominous signs that Communism or Fascism were “on the rise” in Russia again.
When Yeltsin, frightened by growing rage at the looting of Russia, tries to fire Gaidar, and even Clinton begins to realize how much ordinary Russians hate Gaidar, Gaidar goes nuclear, dragging out the ol’ Fascist-coup threat: “Gaidar warned that his country faced the danger of a form of fascism ‘beside which everything Russia has experienced will pale in significance.’” (Gaidar stayed fired; the Fascist threat never materialized; but Talbott and his boss still considered Gaidar a hero. Some people just can’t learn.)
Sometimes the phantom menaces scripted for Yeltsin by Gaidar and Chubais are so laughable you have to wonder if Gaidar was having fun, seeing how much utter nonsense he could get away with:
“Yeltsin turned [to Clinton,] suddenly grim: ‘I’m warning you: if the Communists win, they’ll go after the Crimea and Alaska....’”
Alaska?! Yet Talbott reports this line in all seriousness. The fact that the Russian Army lacked the funds or logistical infrastructure to hitchhike home from Estonia at the time seems not to have occurred to him, or to his boss, Bill. Zhirinovsky must have felt like Rodney Dangerfield: “Tough crowd, tough crowd! Gaidar steals my best joke, the we’ll-retake-Alaska line, and the Americans don’t even think it’s funny!”
The saddest figure in the story is Georgi Arbatov, longtime Americaphile, who tries again and again to warn Talbott against Gaidar and Yeltsin:
“There...was Georgi Arbatov, spewing accusations about how the government was bankrupting the state and beggaring the people. Gaidar, he added, was ‘a stooge of the West.’ The scene saddened me. Arbatov had helped open the [Soviet] system....Yet here he was, personally embittered and siding with the forces of reaction.”
The thought that Arbatov might simply be telling the truth does not occur to Talbott, because it interferes with the ideological pattern he has imposed on Russia. But Arbatov keeps trying. At a state dinner, Talbott reports:
“Arbatov buttonholed me like the Ancient Mariner and told me..., ‘Stop thinking in stereotypes! Work with the communists!’ He said. ‘They’re more pragmatic and reasonable than the reformers. Abandon Yeltsin! He’s dragging us down. If you cling to him, we will all blame you for the disaster that is about to engulf us!’”
Talbott reports Arbatov’s words without the least sense that these terrible predictions have been proven right. As far as he’s concerned, Russia is right on course, and any collateral damage incurred along the way was minor and inevitable.
Lenin would be proud.
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