CHAPTER 1

The Bill and Boris Show

Shortly before taking the oath of office in January 1993, Bill Clintondeclared that what was happening in Russia was "the biggest andtoughest thing out there. It's not just the end of communism, the end ofthe cold war. That's what's over and done with. There's also stuff starting–stuffthat's new. Figuring out what it is, how we work with it, how wekeep it moving in the right direction: that's what we've got to do."Indeed, the challenge of supporting Russia's postcommunist transitionand defining its new international role consumed much of the Clintonadministration's foreign policy energy during its eight years in office.Along the way, the intense and often turbulent personal ties betweenthe American and Russian presidents came to define U.S.-Russian ties.

The Clinton administration initially raised high expectations aboutre-creating the U.S.-Russian relationship in what became the second—andmore ambitious—reset since the Soviet collapse. By the end of Clinton'stwo terms, however, these expectations had not been met. Theyprobably could never have been. It became clear that the relationshipwas, at best, a selective partnership, where cooperation and competitioncoexisted, albeit in fluctuating proportions. Whatever happened,Russia would not evolve as a Western-style democracy, and Americaninfluence on Russia's internal evolution would be circumscribed.

The bilateral framework that was established in these years has inmany ways defined how Washington and Moscow have dealt with eachother ever since then, in both process and substance. Many of the issuesover which Clinton and Yeltsin sparred remain problematic today.Indeed, there has been far more continuity in U.S.-Russian relationsover the past two decades than either Democrats or Republicans mightadmit. That is because, as an official who served in the administrationsof Bush 41 and 43 noted, "You can't choose your inbox."

Nevertheless, the outcome of Clinton's policies is still hotly debated.Did the Clinton administration play a major role in bringing democracyand the market to Russia? Or did it, as the Republicans (supportedby some on the left) claimed in 2000, "fail the Russian people" andturn a blind eye as the system became increasingly corrupt? ShouldWashington have promoted less "shock" and more "therapy" for theeconomy, as Clinton's chief Russia advisor and former deputy secretaryof state Strobe Talbott himself at one point suggested? Was it right toenlarge NATO to include Russia's former Warsaw Pact allies and theBaltic states? Should the United States have focused instead on designinga post– Cold War Euro-Atlantic security system that included Russia?Could that have even been done?

"THE RUSSIA HAND"

Bill Clinton seized the unique opportunity to reshape the landscape ofU.S.-Russian relations when he entered the White House. It became oneof the defining themes of his eight years in office, a relationship besetby constant challenges, yet one in which, despite all the controversy,there were notable achievements. As Strobe Talbott writes, the presidentquickly became "the U.S. government's principal Russia hand"and remained so for the rest of his presidency. Clinton appointed ateam of expert advisors on Russia led by his Rhodes Scholar roommateTalbott, whose knowledge of Russia and its culture was extensive—andto whom Clinton had served tea in their Oxford digs while Talbott wastranslating the memoirs of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Talbottpersuaded the secretary of state–designate, Warren Christopher, tocreate a special office that dealt with the post-Soviet states (minus theBaltics) in order to ensure that they received the attention they needed,and he became the first ambassador-at-large for the Newly IndependentStates (S/NIS). Previously, the Soviet Union had been part of theState Department's European Bureau.

Moreover, the new administration came into office promoting aliberal-internationalist view of foreign policy, one that held that themore democracies there were, the safer the world would be. This requiredan active U.S. commitment to influencing Russia's domestictransformation. The Clinton administration adopted a far more interventionistpolicy than did the preceding Bush administration because itbelieved that Russia's domestic democratic evolution was a prerequisitefor a more benign foreign policy. In a 1993 speech on Russia at theNaval Academy in Annapolis, Clinton set out the basic premise. Hecalled for a "strategic alliance with Russian reform," warning that "thedanger is clear if Russia's reforms turn sour—if it reverts to authoritarianismor disintegrates into chaos. The world cannot afford the strife ofthe former Yugoslavia replicated in a nation as big as Russia, spanningeleven time zones with an armed arsenal of nuclear weapons."

The defining idea behind the Clinton policy was that democracies donot go to war with each other. Hence it was imperative for the UnitedStates to do as much as it could to nurture the growth of Russian democracy.Moreover, economic and political liberties are inextricablylinked, and a market society based on private property would ultimatelyproduce a more democratic polity. The third premise was that the Westshould promote an American market-oriented economic model, as opposedto a European social democratic one (a view shared by economicliberals in Yeltsin's government). That meant that Russia should moverapidly toward privatization of the economy, greatly reducing the government'srole. The Clinton administration believed that the return topower of the communists was the major danger threatening Russia'ssuccessful transformation—hence the unquestioning support for BorisYeltsin, irrespective of his idiosyncrasies.

One issue stood out ahead of all the others. The White House understoodthat the greatest security danger remained Russia's large arsenalof nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) materialsnot under the full control of the central authorities and vulnerable totheft and sale to rogue nations. Hence Washington had to focus on enhancingthe Bush administration's nuclear nonproliferation programsand the Nunn-Lugar initiatives. The Clinton administration was committedto supporting continuing sovereignty and independence of thepost-Soviet states and encouraging Moscow to move toward a post-imperialforeign policy. Finally, it recognized that it had to offer Russiaincentives to accept its diminished international role. The United Statesled the West in offering Russia some of the trappings of a major power,including association with the G-7—the group of major industrializednations—along with membership in what became the G-8, and later apartnership with NATO.

Yet Washington may well have overestimated how much influencethe United States could have on Russia's economic development. TheClinton economic team supported a prescription for Russia macroeconomicstabilization based on shock therapy, a policy favored byYelstin's chief economic advisor Yegor Gaidar and his small group ofliberal reformers, who believed that a gradual road to capitalism wasimpossible in Russia's unique circumstances of total state ownership."We had no money, no gold, and no grain to last through the nextharvest," said Gaidar, "It was a time when you do everything you cando, and as rapidly as you can. There was no time for reflection." YetRussian-style capitalism turned out to be very different from what theAmerican team envisaged. It became apparent as the decade wore onthat Russia was developing a form of "Wild East" capitalism that wassui generis, opaque, and involved levels of corruption and patronageunanticipated by Washington. Some American critics have accused theClinton administration of knowingly aiding and abetting the rise of aform of capitalism that left most Russians impoverished, while a fewcorrupt oligarchs became stunningly wealthy. However, these chargesvastly overestimate the impact of outside agents in determining theunique way in which the Russian economy developed.

Underpinning the Clinton administration's philosophy was a beliefin the possibility of a large-scale transformation of Russian society. Itwas a belief that contradicted much of the Russian and Soviet historicalrecord. For a millennium, Russia had been ruled by men, not laws.Individuals were always more important than institutions, and informalmechanisms were more important than official structures. Historians ofRussia—be they Russian or Western—pointed to centuries of authoritarianrule by competing clans who paid obeisance to an all-powerful tsaror Soviet general secretary, even if at some periods the ruler's powerswere more virtual than real and groups around the ruler wielded considerableinfluence. The tsarist patrimonial state, where the aristocracywas dependent on the ruler's goodwill to maintain its status and property,was replaced by a Soviet patrimonial state, where the CommunistParty was in charge of patronage. In neither system were propertyrights or the rule of law much respected—or even recognized.

The Russia experts in the Clinton administration understood wellthese persistent factors in Russian history. But they thought that theSoviet collapse offered an opportunity to break with these traditionsand to modernize Russia in a democratic way--for the first time in itshistory. Given the cycles of the American political system, their timehorizon was short—particularly when viewed through the prism of Russianhistory. They had, at best, eight years to help encourage the beginningof a radical transformation in Russia. Even if they recognized thatthis was a major challenge, without a bold vision and dogged persistence,they might have accomplished much less.

NEW VISTAS FROM WASHINGTON AND MOSCOW

The greatest successes of the Clinton reset, from an American pointof view, were in foreign policy: denuclearizing Ukraine, Belarus, andKazakh stan, securing Russia's cooperation in the Balkans(albeit at considerablecost in Kosovo), neutralizing Russian opposition to NATOenlargement, and bringing Russia into the G-7 as a stakeholder. Iranremained a significant area of disagreement. But all of the successeswere on issues where Washington had persuaded Moscow to take actionsit initially resisted.

One of the Clinton administration's first challenges was to tackle thestakeholder problem. The number of American stakeholders in the U.S.-Russianrelationship has always been limited—unlike the situation withChina—in part because the bilateral economic relationship was verymodest. In the more than two decades since the collapse of communism,there have rarely been substantial groups on either side who have consistentlypressed for improved relations. This contrasts sharply with theEuropean relationship with Russia, where the number of stakeholdersin Western Europe and Russia rapidly grew during the 1990s because oftheir burgeoning economic relations. Early in its tenure, the Clinton administrationcame up with an idea about how to build a group of stakeholders.In 1993 it established a binational commission cochaired bythe U.S. vice president Al Gore and the Russian prime minister ViktorChernomyrdin. The idea initially came from Russian foreign ministerAndrei Kozyrev, who saw it as a way to create a more organized interagencyprocess on the Russian side. This binational commission, whichlasted until George W. Bush came into office and was subsequently reincarnatedunder Barack Obama, set up working groups that dealt witha range of issues—including space, energy, and economics—and was designedto create networks of officials that ensured a continuing dialogueand had a vested interest in the success of the relationship.

Another challenge for America and Russia in the 1990s was dealingwith their different visions of the post-Soviet space. The United Statesconsistently supported the independence and sovereignty of the countriesin the area that, for the first decade, it referred to as the Newly IndependentStates. It refused to recognize the Commonwealth of IndependentStates because it viewed the organization as a Russian attemptto continue to exercise undue influence in its neighborhood. Immediatelyafter the Soviet collapse, as already noted, it dispatched officialsto open embassies in every new state, which no other Western countryhad the resources to do. Because a number of these countries had hadindependence thrust upon them, they were eager for advice on how toset up their own constitutions and solicited American assistance. TheUnited States insisted that Russia had no right to a sphere of influencein the post-Soviet space. The Russian view, even during the early1990s, was that these countries were part of what they dubbed the "nearabroad," as opposed to real foreign countries that constituted the "farabroad," and that Russia had the right to a special relationship withthem. In January 1993 Vladimir Lukin, the first post-Soviet ambassadorto the United States, said that relations between Russia and the formerSoviet states "should be treated as identical to those between New Yorkand New Jersey."

But Washington also remained preoccupied by what would happeninside Russia, from nuclear weapons to a democratic transition, to therisk of violence or starvation. So Clinton focused on cultivating his relationshipwith Yeltsin. Personal ties between Russian and Americanleaders have always been disproportionately important, given the existentialchallenges that the two nuclear superpowers faced and becauseof the absence of strong institutional ties between the countries. Butthe Yeltsin-Clinton relationship acquired an intensity and significanceall its own, in part because of the outsize personalities of the two men.Yet what comes through in the pages of their autobiographies is thatClinton left office with a more positive view of his Russian counterpartthan vice versa—perhaps inevitably, given the disparity in the power andinfluence of the two countries. "Yeltsin had complicated feelings towardthe United States," says one senior Yeltsin-era official, "that were a productof the Soviet times." Clinton said he felt "more confidence in Yeltsin"after their first official meeting in Vancouver in April 1993. "I likedhim. He was a big bear of a man, full of contradictions—Compared withthe realistic alternatives, Russia was lucky to have him at the helm."

Individuals inevitably interpret other peoples' behavior and motivationsthrough the prism of their own experiences. Clinton often dealtwith Yeltsin—particularly in the most difficult moments—by interpretingYeltsin's actions through the prism of his own stepfather's alcoholism,comparing his relationship with Yeltsin favorably to the one he hadwith his stepfather. While his willingness to humor Yeltsin no doubtsucceeded in avoiding several major showdowns, he may also have underestimatedother factors that lay behind Yeltsin's often unpredictablebehavior, including the competing domestic political pressures that theRussian president faced. Clinton's concluding assessment of Yeltsin isgenerous: "For all his physical problems and occasional unpredictability,he had been a courageous and visionary leader. We trusted eachother and had accomplished a lot together."

Yeltsin's assessment of Clinton is less fulsome. "Bill Clinton is a notablefigure in U.S. history," he writes, admitting that when he first methim, "I was completely amazed by this young, eternally smiling manwho was powerful, energetic, and handsome." His chief bodyguardand drinking companion Alexander Korzhakov reports that Yeltsinsaw Clinton as a younger brother. He viewed Clinton's struggles withthe Congress over his relationship with Monica Lewinsky and his impeachmentthrough the prism of his own struggles with the Duma (theRussian parliament), which likewise tried to impeach him. Indeed, heclaims that his intelligence services reported as early as 1996 that theRepublicans planned to plant a beautiful young woman in the WhiteHouse to seduce Clinton and then create a scandal that would deposehim—a piece of information that Yeltsin says he decided not to sharewith Clinton. Nevertheless, as he became increasingly embattled domestically,Yeltsin became more estranged from the United States. Bythe end of his presidency, he felt betrayed by the Clinton administrationbecause of its bombing campaign against Serbia during the Kosovowar, its enlargement of NATO, and its treatment of Russia—in Moscow'seyes, as a defeated power rather than as an equal. Western observerstoday often attribute the Russian narrative about condescendingand unequal treatment by the United States to Vladimir Putin. Butthe complaints originated in the Yeltsin era, and indeed with Yeltsinhimself, and were widespread by the end of his tenure in office.