TALBOTT: I don’t accept the premise of your question. Russia has gone through a lot of trauma, several near disasters. But Russia has also undergone a transformation of a fundamentally positive kind. Fifteen, 10 years ago, it was a system based on dictatorial principles with a hostile ideology towards the rest of the world. Russia today is a democracy. Not a pure democracy, not a pretty democracy. Nonetheless, there has been significant movement in the right direction. A lot has gone wrong, a lot has gone right, a lot is very ambiguous.
Yeltsin dismantled the Soviet command economy, defanged the Communist Party, adopted a posture towards the other states of the former Soviet Union of basically letting them go their own way. He also developed a relationship with the United States that allowed us to work some extremely tough issues together. There are no nuclear weapons outside of Russia in the former Soviet Union today, no Russian troops in the Baltic states. There’s an institutionalized cooperative relationship between NATO and Russia. Russian troops are working on peacekeeping in the Balkans with American and NATO troops.
I don’t think he or his leadership ever came up with the right answer to the problem of what ratio of shock to therapy to have. I don’t think that the United States and the international financial institutions ever came up with the perfect recipe for them either. He never came to grips with the problem of the oligarchs. There was a kind of Faustian pact between Yeltsin and the oligarchs on the eve of his re-election in 1996 that put much too much power and wealth in the hands of too few people. I don’t think he ever came to grips with the security services and their role in Russian life. And finally, he led Russia into two wars in Chechnya.
Sure, we could have done things sooner, better, differently. [But] when we saw evidence of criminalization of the economy, we used what influence we had to try to convince the Russians that this was going to hurt them over the long run. The word “kleptocracy” was coined to describe the old Soviet system. There was a lot of crime in that system before, and it went from what had been the government sector into what became a very messy private sector.
Whether those positive accomplishments of Yeltsin are legacies depends on whether or not they turn out to be reversible. It’s one thing for them to survive his tenure; it’s another whether they survive some troublesome trends we see under President Putin. I’d put particular emphasis on civil society and the free press, because there’s unquestionably a crackdown taking place now on the free media.
Very much. Not to say that Gusinsky would pass every litmus test on sound business practices. That’s not the point. There are a lot of oligarchs out there, and Putin has zeroed in on one, who just happens to be the proprietor of a lot of media outlets, many of which have been critical of Putin. The other issue is Russia’s treatment of its neighbors. Georgia has been subject to a definite escalation of pressure from Russia in recent months.
First of all, engage. No pauses. No benign neglect. This is not just another bilateral relationship. For good or ill, it continues to be in a class by itself. Russia matters big time. Clinton had about as many meetings with his counterpart in the Kremlin as all nine of his predecessors had with Soviet leaders going back to Stalin.
We don’t know the answer to that. In McLuhan terms, Yeltsin was hot and Putin is cool. And cool is fine. In the final analysis, though, it’s not about temperature and chemistry, it’s about the substance of policy. Clinton and Yeltsin were able to do a lot together. Clinton only had a year to establish the basis for some positive developments [with Putin]–particularly in the area of arms control and NMD [national missile defense]. Now it’s a question whether President Bush, through a combination of personal diplomacy and hard-headed policy, can build on that basis.
