Compare and contrast:
The Russian Hack By John Dolan ( dolan at exile.ru )
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.
http://www.exile.ru/149/book_review.html
Strobe Talbott, _The Russia Hand_ Strobe Talbott (2002), The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (New York: Random House: 0375507140). --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(C)onsider the U.S. government's reaction to the infamous 1996 loans-for-shares scheme. Summers and Lipton were horrified. Talbott writes (p. 208) of their "...deep qualms... sure to make instant billionaires... cast discredit on the very idea of market democracy... bad economics, bad civics, and bad politics." The Yeltsin administration responded that the favor that loans-for shares did "the oligarchs was nowhere near as bad as the communist victory it helpd them avert." In retrospect Talbott appears to regret the White House's failure to back Summers and Lipton: "The Russians... calculation... was debatable, and we, as the reformers' constant backers and occasional advisors, should have debated it more with them. We would have done so if we'd had more time, more foresight, and more influence..." Or consider Al Gore's belief that "...Larry's arguments were right on the merits... but... needed to be balanced against the imperatives of Russian democracy, since they, too, exerted 'a force as powerful as gravity or thermodynamics.' Our policy, said Gore, ought to be a 'synthesis between the iron laws of economics and the hard realities of Russian politics'."
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000010.html