SOVIET UNION/RUSSIA

US Diplomacy with the Russian "Adversary"

Robert D. English

THE ISSUES THAT THIS CHAPTER ADDRESSES—THE historical lessons of US diplomacy with Russia—are surely more complex than those of other adversarial states. This is because there is no self-evident single adversary in these relations, nor are we even dealing with a single state. Russia is not North Korea, a unitary, uniform regime that for some six decades has maintained a deeply hostile posture toward the West and its political norms. The revolutionary-era Leninist state differed significantly from that of the 1920s, including in opportunities for diplomatic engagement with the West, just as the possibilities of such interchange varied considerably from the Stalinist 1930s through the years of the World War II alliance and up to the early Cold War. Arguably even more significant were political and social changes—and improved diplomatic prospects—from the "thaw" era through the late Cold War, and from the epoch of perestroika through communism's collapse and aftermath. We are dealing with at least three qualitatively different political regimes, and sweeping socioeconomic transformation over nearly a century of tumultuous international change in which any presumption of consistent US probity or diplomatic "correctness—and Russian hostility or adversariness—simply does not hold.

This chapter will examine the practice and prospects of US diplomacy with Russia, beginning with the period before and during the 1917 Revolution; through several distinct phases of relations with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from the revolution until 1991; and subsequent relations with Russia after the demise of the USSR. One key lesson can be stressed at the outset, which is to endorse the general proposition or "norm" that this book advances: the importance of active, multifaceted diplomatic engagement even in periods, and with regimes, of greatest hostility. A lack of such engagement has led to stereotypes and ignorance—and consequent lost opportunities—while its presence contributed much to the most momentous diplomatic breakthrough of the twentieth century, namely the Cold War's end. One underappreciated facet of that engagement has been public diplomacy, which I see as outreach—partly though not exclusively orchestrated during the Cold War by the US State Department, and implemented by the US embassy in Moscow—to elites and citizens beyond the rarified diplomatic corps in Moscow. This view is essentially but by no means exclusively consistent with the traditional "State Department" approach to public diplomacy outlined in the book's Introduction. As will be seen, such outreach even in times of hostility has borne vital fruit in subsequent periods of relative openness. Sadly, at a time of greatest receptivity at the outset of relations with post–Soviet Russia, it fared poorly, in part due to clumsy "salesmanship," but even more because the "product" proved disappointing.

I will use a "Princeton lens" to analyze the various phases of Soviet-Russian diplomatic history by focusing on the epoch-spanning experience of three distinguished Princeton scholar-diplomats: the venerable George Kennan, longtime dean of American Russian experts, who died in 2005; his onetime diplomatic protégé and later renowned Sovietologist Robert Tucker, who passed away in 2010; and Jack Matlock, the "US ambassador to perestroika," who is still active as a scholar and analyst of Russian affairs. Kennan specialized in Russia from the outset of his diplomatic career in the 1920s. He was posted to Moscow when relations were established with the USSR in 1933, serving through World War II and the early Cold War years, then returning as ambassador in 1952. He was also a member of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study for nearly fifty years. Tucker, who served in Moscow from 1942 to 1953, was later a professor at Princeton University for more than forty years. Matlock, who retired from the Foreign Service after his remarkable 1987–1991 Moscow ambassadorship, was from 1996 to 2001 the Kennan Professor of Diplomatic History at the Institute for Advanced Study as well as a visiting professor at Princeton University. Given the rare experience of these three individuals—and the necessity of employing some narrowing lens if this is not to be a multivolume chronicle—the insights of these three Princetonians offers a splendid perspective for our limited purposes.

US-Russian Relations during the Bolshevik Revolution

Historians have long debated whether the Bolsheviks triumphed as the result of popular revolution or merely a well-executed putsch, and whether their victory reflected the will of a majority of Russians or the opportunism and ruthlessness of a determined minority. They agree, however, on the crucial point that it was Russia's disastrous involvement in World War I that strained the old order beyond its breaking point and thus was a proximate cause of both the February and October 1917 revolutions (the first ended tsarist rule; the second brought the Bolsheviks to power). And it was, in turn, the World War I allies' single-minded and shortsighted insistence on Russia's continued involvement in the disastrous war against Germany that contributed mightily to the revolutions in the first place. Here we turn to Kennan, highly singular as a US diplomat for both the broad historical context of his views and his intimate understanding of Russian and German societies:

Had they [Western statesmen] looked carefully at the Russian scene at that moment, they could have discerned in it the dilemma that was to be basic to their problem of policy toward Russia throughout the following two years ... that not only had Russia become involved in a great internal political crisis, but she had lost in the process her real ability to make war. The internal crisis was of such gravity that there was no chance for a healthy and constructive solution to it unless the war effort could be terminated at once and the attention and resources of the country concentrated on domestic issues. The army was tired. The country was tired. People had no further stomach for war. To try to drive them to it was to provide grist to the...