A NEW AMERICAN PRESIDENT WAS ABOUT TO enter the White House. Bill Clinton won the November 1992 election by capitalising on George Bush’s poor economic record. ‘Read my lips: no new taxes’, the phrase spoken by Bush as he accepted the Republican nomination four years earlier, became his political obituary. Foreign policy, an area in which Clinton, a former governor of Arkansas, lacked experience, had not been an issue, with the exception of the brief flurry of interest in Russia prompted by Nixon’s memo. In the weeks after his victory, however, Clinton became increasingly preoccupied with the world beyond America and with Russia in particular.
Bush, the pragmatist, had not proposed any grand re-evaluation of the United States’ relations with Russia and the other former Soviet republics. His priorities had instead been preventing the proliferation of the Soviet Union’s vast nuclear arsenal and encouraging economic reform. Clinton was more of an idealist – and he did not like what he saw. As he pondered his role as president, he was struck by the extent to which the optimism that had accompanied the break-up of the Soviet Union a year earlier had been replaced by pessimism and fear. As Clinton put it in his memoirs: ‘The “new world order” President Bush had proclaimed after the fall of the Berlin Wall was rife with chaos and big, unresolved questions.’1
Developments within Russia gave further cause for concern: Yeltsin’s relationship with the Congress of People’s Deputies, the parliament, was deteriorating rapidly. The main battle was over economic reform, which many deputies thought was being pushed too fast and without sufficient consideration for the living standards of ordinary people. But the disagreement had also turned into a broader power struggle between the two branches of government. The new independent Russia was still governed by the constitution drawn up when it was a Soviet republic, with a relatively limited role for the president. Yeltsin wanted more executive powers, but the Congress, elected during the days of the USSR, was unwilling to see its influence curbed.
During a stormy two-week session that December, its members agreed to hold a referendum the following April on enhancing the powers of the presidency, but Yeltsin was forced to pay a heavy price in return: he agreed to abandon Gaidar, the young reformer, whose appointment in June still hadn’t been approved by parliament. On 14 December, Yeltsin replaced him with Viktor Chernomyrdin, a fifty-four-year-old former Communist Party apparatchik, who made clear his intention to slow the pace of economic change. Many of Yeltsin’s reform-minded supporters in the Congress spoke of betrayal.
That same day, in Stockholm, Andrei Kozyrev, the Russian foreign minister, rose to address representatives of the fifty-one-member Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). Aged forty-one, Kozyrev was an urbane character with a reputation as one of the more liberal-minded members of Boris Yeltsin’s team – in short, the representative of a new Russia with which the West could do business. A product of the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations, he had joined the Soviet ministry of foreign affairs in 1974. It was during a visit to New York as a junior member of his country’s delegation to the United Nations General Assembly, his first trip abroad, that Kozyrev’s beliefs in Soviet ideology were challenged. Visiting a supermarket, he was struck not just by the vast array of produce on offer but by the fact that the customers were all ordinary people – the kind who, according to communist propaganda, were exploited by the country’s elite. Equally formative was his encounter with Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, still banned in his homeland. The young Kozyrev spent an entire day reading it on a bench in Central Park, too worried to take it back to the Soviet compound where he was staying.
In October 1990, at the age of thirty-nine, he became foreign minister of the Russian Federation and had kept the job in the new independent Russia. At his confirmation hearing, he set out his vision: ‘Democratic Russia should and will be just as natural an ally of the democratic nations of the West as the totalitarian Soviet Union was a natural opponent of the West,’ he said.2 His positive attitude was to earn him the nickname ‘Mr Yes’ – a play on the old ‘Mr Nyet’ tag applied to Andrei Gromyko, the grim-faced Soviet foreign minister in office for almost three decades during the Cold War.
Kozyrev’s background made the speech he proceeded to give in Stockholm all the more surprising. Announcing ‘some changes in the concept of Russian foreign policy’, he declared that Russia’s rapprochement with Europe and the norms of the CSCE could not be applied fully to the territory of the former Soviet Union. He also accused NATO and the European Community of ‘interfering in Bosnia and the internal affairs of Yugoslavia’ and demanded the lifting of sanctions that had been imposed against it. If this did not happen, he warned, ‘we will reserve the right to take all necessary unilateral measures to protect our interests’.
‘We clearly recognise that our traditions in many respects, if not fundamentally, lie in Asia, and this sets limits to our rapprochement with Western Europe,’ Kozyrev added, accusing NATO and the nine-nation Western European Union Defence Organisation of drawing up plans to strengthen their military presence in the Baltic and other regions ‘on the territory of the former Soviet Union’.
When Kozyrev had finished his tirade, there were stunned expressions across the hall – including on the faces of members of his own delegation, who had been kept in the dark about what their boss was planning to say. Lawrence Eagleburger, the US secretary of state, hustled his Russian counterpart into a side room and demanded an explanation.
What Kozyrev said next was every bit as surprising: the speech, he told Eagleburger, had been a charade, a wake-up call for the world of what would happen if Yeltsin lost to the conservative forces ranged against him in the Russian parliament. The speech, he said, was ‘a fairly accurate compilation of the demands of what is by no means the most extreme opposition in Russia’. He added: ‘I did it for the most serious reasons, so that you should all be aware of the real threats on our road to a post-Communist Europe.’
Three-quarters of an hour later, Kozyrev returned to the stage and made another speech explaining his trick. His statement, he told delegates, had been merely a ‘rhetorical device’ to warn them what things would be like if conservative forces returned to power in Russia. ‘Neither President Yeltsin, who remains the leader and the guarantor of Russian domestic and foreign policy, nor I as minister of foreign affairs will ever agree to what I read in my previous speech,’ he declared.
The audience was not impressed. ‘An international forum is not the place for such behaviour,’ complained Klaus Kinkel, the German foreign minister. Anatoliy Zlenko, the Ukrainian foreign minister, said: ‘Maybe Mr Kozyrev has a sense of humour, but it is dangerous to use such tactics.’
WHEN IT CAME TO RUSSIA, PRESIDENT CLINTON placed a lot of faith in Strobe Talbott, a journalist at Time, who had been his housemate at Oxford University a quarter of a century earlier. Talbott, a fluent Russian speaker who had translated and edited Khrushchev’s memoirs, had ‘known and cared about Russia and the Russian people’ more than anyone else Clinton knew. Clinton also valued his fine analytical mind and fertile imagination, and trusted both his judgement and his willingness to tell him the unvarnished truth. Talbott was initially named as ambassador-at-large and special adviser to the secretary of state on the new independent states of the former Soviet Union. He was later appointed deputy secretary of state. Whatever his title, he was the administration’s go-to man on Russia.3
During the transition period, Clinton spoke to Talbott often about the deteriorating situation in Russia. On 17 December, three days after Chernomyrdin’s appointment and Kozyrev’s Stockholm speech, Clinton called Talbott from Little Rock to say he was worried about ‘this whole unbelievable mess in Russia’. If the situation in the country got completely out of hand, Clinton said, there was a danger of hundreds of thousands or even millions of refugees streaming westward. He could imagine Yeltsin being swept aside and Russia ‘going bad on us’, returning to a policy of confrontation with the West. During his presidency he said he wanted to do ‘good stuff with Russia and really take advantage of what’s new in a positive sense over there’. The first job, though, was ‘averting disaster’.4
A few weeks later, Clinton reiterated his concerns. What was happening in Russia, he told Talbott, was ‘the biggest and toughest thing out there. It’s not just the end of communism, the end of the cold war. That’s what’s over and done with. There’s also stuff starting – stuff that’s new. Figuring out what it is, how we work with it, how we keep it moving in the right direction: that’s what we’ve got to do.’5
Clinton did not hold this against him, and when Yeltsin called him a couple of days after his electoral triumph to invite him to meet and reaffirm America’s support, Clinton was inclined to agree. There was a lot at stake for the Russian leader: on 25 April, the country would vote on whether it had confidence in him as president and agreed with his reforms. ‘Yeltsin was up to his ears in alligators,’ Clinton wrote in his memoirs. ‘And I wanted to help him.’6 Their meeting was set for 3–4 April in Vancouver. On 8 March, Nixon had called Clinton at the White House urging him to support Yeltsin. Nixon told him he would be remembered more for what he did for Russia than for his economic policy. Clinton concurred. During conversations with his foreign policy team in the weeks that followed, he ‘pushed them to think bigger and do more’.7
The Vancouver summit provided a foretaste of the rapport that would develop between this unlikeliest of couples. At a first meeting, accompanied by only their closest advisers, Clinton tried to win over Yeltsin by expressing admiration for his attempts to transform Russia and asked what America could do to help. The proud leader of a once-mighty country, Yeltsin objected to the implication that the United States was coming to Russia’s rescue. He needed outside assistance, but not too much, he said, since ‘a dramatic increase’ would allow the opposition back in Moscow to say Russia was ‘under the US’s thumb’.8 Once Yeltsin had that off his chest, he was happy to accept Clinton’s offer of $6 million to help house Russian army officers being withdrawn from the Baltic states – though he said he would prefer more, even if he could not be seen asking for it in public. Clinton agreed. Having banked the American offer, Yeltsin then went on the attack, demanding the removal of various pieces of Cold War-era legislation from the statute book – among them the Jackson–Vanik amendment passed in 1974 that had denied free trade with countries that restricted emigration. Such rules were offensive to him as a democrat, Yeltsin said.
Talbott, who took part in the meeting, was struck by Yeltsin’s ‘jabbing and wheedling’ tone and his attempts to push Clinton into approving public statements that would look like American concessions. But Clinton took it all in his stride. ‘He’s not so much trying to make me look bad as trying to make himself look good with his real enemies back home,’ he told Talbott.9
Yeltsin adopted a similar approach during the more formal parts of the summit, which concluded with little agreement on arms control and other security issues but a promise by Clinton of a $1.6 billion package – described as ‘cooperation’ rather than ‘assistance’ – which would be made available at that July’s G7 summit in Tokyo. For Yeltsin, facing a referendum in three weeks’ time, that was not soon enough: as Lloyd Bentsen, the treasury secretary, was speaking, Yeltsin passed him a scribbled note that said in capitals: ‘It would be good if we could receive $500 million before April 25’, the date of the vote. Clinton could not give him half a billion dollars on the spot, however, and Yeltsin had to make do with supportive words for his reform programme at their closing press conference.
The summit also gave Clinton an insight into Yeltsin’s alarming fondness for alcohol. When the US and Russian delegations set off for a boat ride around Vancouver Island, Yeltsin downed three scotches within a few minutes of leaving the dock. He followed up with four glasses of wine and barely a bite to eat at dinner, and his speech became increasingly slurred. Warren Christopher, the secretary of state, passed one of his colleagues a note: ‘No food, bad sign. Boat ride was liquid.’ Keeping count of Yeltsin’s alcohol intake was ‘to become a standard feature of summitry’, observed Talbott.10
When Talbott, Christopher and Anthony Lake, Clinton’s national security adviser, complained that evening in the presidential hotel suite about the prospect of having to conduct high-stakes diplomacy under such conditions, Clinton told them to relax. ‘I’ve seen a little of this problem in my time,’ the president said, noting his own experience growing up with an alcoholic stepfather. ‘At least Yeltsin’s not a mean drunk.’11
Clinton’s own memoirs reflected a similar sentiment. ‘Whenever anyone made a snide remark about Yeltsin’s drinking, I was reminded of what Lincoln allegedly said when Washington snobs made the same criticism of General Grant, by far his most aggressive and successful commander in the Civil War: “Find out what he drinks, and give it to the other generals”.’12
Yeltsin did not receive the same understanding at home. Although he won the April referendum handily, his opponents in the Congress of People’s Deputies refused to back down and the political crisis worsened. The months that followed were the most fraught of his presidency; on 21 September, Yeltsin tried to dissolve the parliament, even though the constitution did not give him the power to do so. The Congress responded by declaring Yeltsin’s decision null and void, impeached him and named Aleksandr Rutskoi, the vice president, who had sided with his opponents, as acting president.
The roots of the crisis lay in the incomplete nature of the ‘revolution’ of 1991. While the perpetrators of the failed August coup were put on trial, most of those people who had loyally served the former communist regime clung to political power or had reinvented themselves in the private sector, making good use of their connections. Many – especially the young – wanted Russia to evolve as a ‘normal’ country in which they could live peacefully, make money and get on with their lives, but others mourned the loss of its status as a great power.
Many of those who had been responsible for abuses in government were still alive and in some cases held the same posts. Yet no attempt had been made to bring them to justice, as had been the case with those implicated in the Nazi regime. Nor was there a Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the sort set up in South Africa. There were calls for such a process, but who in the ruling class would have wanted such a reckoning? Certainly not Yeltsin himself, who had made his career in the Soviet system and served for decades under Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko and Gorbachev. Nor any of the others in positions of political power – even his opponents.
Setting aside questions of historical justice, Yeltsin faced a more immediate and concrete problem. The new independent Russia was still governed according to the constitution of 1978. Although the document had been amended in April 1992 to reflect the demise of the Soviet Union, Yeltsin was still forced to share power with the Congress of People’s Deputies, eighty-six per cent of whose deputies had been members of the Communist Party.
In retrospect, it would have been more logical to have held new elections for parliament and president as soon as possible after January 1992 and Russia’s emergence as an independent state. A new constitution would also have helped. Instead, Yeltsin muddled on and, by autumn 1993, his stand-off with the parliament was beginning to spill over onto the streets, with mass demonstrations in Moscow and other cities. On 28 September came the first clashes between the special police and anti-Yeltsin protesters. Deputies barricaded themselves into the White House, the seat of the parliament on the Moscow river, and hundreds of fighters were reported to be joining them. The conflict finally erupted into open warfare on the morning of 4 October, when tanks fired on the White House in the deadliest street fighting Moscow had seen since the Bolshevik revolution. By that afternoon it was all over. The government put the death toll at 187; the opposition claimed it was several times higher.
By using tanks to blow his opponents out of the Moscow White House, Yeltsin had made clear that compromise and coalition building were not important elements of the political process. His right to continue to be considered a ‘Democrat’ seemed in doubt. However, political reform did follow. Yeltsin followed his bloody victory over parliament with elections and the adoption of a new constitution. Passed by referendum on 12 December 1993, the new document represented a break with Soviet practice by, among other things, abolishing the leading role of the Communist (or indeed, any other) Party and guaranteeing a pluralistic political system. In a nod to Russia’s imperial past, the new lower house was called the State Duma, the name given to the first Russian legislature set up by Tsar Nicholas II in 1906.
The authors of the constitution had been inspired, in part, by the American political system, but their creation lacked the same checks and balances. The result was instead the creation of a political system that concentrated considerable power in the hands of one man and his entourage. During the communist years, Stalin’s successors had to carry fellow members of the Politburo with them. The ousting of Khrushchev in 1964 and his replacement by Brezhnev showed the perils of failing to do so. Now all power was vested in the president.
It would have been difficult to imagine Yeltsin and his allies devising anything different, given the ferocity of the resistance they had faced from the parliament. The challenges involved in holding together such a large and ethnically diverse country – and preventing Russia from splintering as the Soviet Union had before it – made it easy to see the appeal of strong executive power. As long as Yeltsin was in power, the implications of such a concentration of power did not seem dangerous.
CLINTON’S POLICY WAS PREDICATED ON THE belief that it would be possible to create a partnership with the new and democratic Russia that he hoped would emerge from the wreck of the Soviet Union. Together, Washington and Moscow would hold a special global responsibility, now as allies rather than opponents – even though it was clear that America was the senior partner in the relationship. Ensure Russia’s transformation into a friendly, democratic and economically successful state, so the argument went, and the rest of the Soviet Union would take care of itself.
Like Bush before him, Clinton was concerned about the fate of the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal: its strategic weapons were divided between Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, while its tactical nuclear weapons were scattered even more widely.* America wanted Russia to be the only nuclear power, which meant working closely with Moscow to persuade Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan to give up their arms.
Moscow quickly secured the return of all tactical nuclear warheads to Russia during the first half of 1992. It also soon reached bilateral understandings with Belarus and Kazakhstan on the removal or elimination of the strategic nuclear weapons systems on their territory. However, inducing Ukraine to give up the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world was to prove more complicated. The Ukrainians realised the value of their bargaining chip and tried to extract the highest price: when Talbott met Leonid Kravchuk, the Ukrainian president, in Kiev on 10 May 1993, he demanded billions of dollars in ‘compensation’ and an American promise that it would treat an attack on Ukraine as if it were an attack on the US – the kind of security guarantee Washington gave its closest allies.13
The dispute highlighted the dilemma that Washington faced in its relations with the former Soviet republics. The Bush administration had swiftly opened embassies in the ‘newly independent states’ as a sign of its determination to treat them as fully independent countries. Clinton reiterated this policy after coming to office, sending Talbott around their capitals to convince their leaders of America’s support for their sovereignty and its willingness to assist them in disputes with each other and with Moscow.
Yet Russia’s size and strategic importance led Washington to accept Russia’s claim to a ‘special role’ in the former Soviet republics. Long before Kozyrev made his Stockholm speech, Russia had begun to show its determination to assume such a role. Yeltsin made no attempt to challenge the borders of the newly independent Russia, but it was also clear that the Kremlin struggled to accept Ukraine, Belarus and the other former Soviet states as fully independent. Russian officials coined a term for them: blizhneye zarubezhye, ‘the near abroad’, which carried with it connotations of a right of influence over their affairs.
During a difficult stage in the negotiations over Ukraine’s nuclear arsenal, Vladimir Lukin, the Russian ambassador to the United States, told Talbott that Russia’s relations with Ukraine were ‘identical to those between New York and New Jersey’, and that America should treat what happened within the former USSR as the contents of a ‘black box’.14 Some of Russia’s neighbours, Talbott ruefully noted, wished they were ‘less near’ and ‘more abroad’.
Yeltsin had set out his attitude towards the ‘near abroad’ in a speech in February 1993, in which he pressed for more integration among the newly independent states and, more controversially, set out Russia’s right – and responsibility – to serve as a regional peacekeeper. ‘Stopping all armed conflicts on the territory of the former USSR is in Russia’s vital interest,’ Yeltsin said. ‘The world community sees more and more clearly Russia’s special responsibility in this difficult undertaking . . . I believe the time has come for distinguished international organisations, including the UN, to grant Russia special powers as a guarantor of peace and stability in the former regions of the USSR.’15
Seen in such a context, the views expressed by Kozyrev in his spoof Stockholm speech were not a world away from what was now actual Russian policy. Indeed, by autumn 1993, Kozyrev was beginning to express similar sentiments himself. In a speech to the United Nations that September, he not only demanded international recognition of Russia’s peacekeeping efforts in the ‘near abroad’ but asked the international community to support these efforts with financial and material help.16
Kozyrev fleshed out his thoughts in an interview with the newspaper Izvestia that October, in which he warned that if Russia did not intervene in conflicts on the territory of the former Soviet Union it would risk ‘losing geographical positions that took centuries to conquer’, and may have to accept ‘neighbours in Asia’ – presumably China – stepping in ‘to force Russia out of the region and restrict its influence’.17
Such views were codified in the new Russian Military Doctrine signed off by Yeltsin on 1 November, which set out, for the first time, the principles according to which its armed forces should operate in the post-Soviet world. The doctrine identified the former Soviet Union as the main arena for Russian military activity and said ‘the main source of military danger to Russia is no longer any single nation or alliance, but small regional conflicts’.18 Russia would act in local wars and armed conflicts near its borders and would also intervene in any suppression of the rights, freedoms and legitimate interests of Russian-speaking citizens in foreign states, it said.
In response to such perceived threats, the doctrine sanctioned the use of troops beyond Russia’s borders to protect national interests and to quell conflicts ‘in cooperation with other former republics’.19 It also abolished its ‘no first use’ policy on nuclear weapons. In its place was a pledge not to use them against non-nuclear states that had signed the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty – unless they were operating ‘in an alliance’ with nuclear states.
The doctrine was, in a sense, confirmation of what was happening already. In the years after 1991, Russia exerted economic and political pressure on those countries that initially kept out of the Commonwealth of Independent States to persuade them to join. Azerbaijan, Georgia and Moldova eventually complied. Russia’s economic weakness and need to maintain good relations with the West meant the use of military force was not an option; nor did Yeltsin plan any foreign adventures. Yet despite the parlous state of its economy, Russia was still a giant compared to its neighbours, while its huge energy resources, on which many of them depended, gave it considerable bargaining power.
Further leverage came from the Russian soldiers that remained stationed in other republics for several years after the end of the Soviet Union. Although the Kremlin gradually withdrew them, it accelerated or slowed the pace according to the behaviour of the host country. In some cases, the military presence was cloaked in terms of peacekeeping. Yet there was little doubt about the real motivation.
Relations with Ukraine became especially fraught. As Serhii Plokhy wrote in his history of Ukraine: ‘Whatever Yeltsin’s intentions, Ukraine took its independence seriously and planned to use the forum to negotiate the terms of divorce, not remarriage.’20 Tensions came to a head in January 1993 when Ukraine refused to become a full member of the Commonwealth of Independent States that it had itself helped to set up at the Belavezha meeting at which the Soviet Union was dissolved. Although ready to take part in the organisation’s economic cooperation, it refused to sign up to any military commitments.
One of the biggest battles was over the 800,000 Soviet soldiers and officers left on Ukrainian territory. The Baltic states, like their counterparts in Central Europe, had simply asked the Soviet forces to leave. But the numbers there were far smaller. This was not an option for Ukraine, since there was nowhere for the 800,000 to go. The result was a compromise: officers were given a choice of swearing allegiance to the newly created Ukrainian army, retiring or being transferred. Soldiers and non-commissioned officers were sent home. The first group of officers swore allegiance to independent Ukraine on 3 January 1992; by spring, the overwhelming majority of their comrades had followed suit.
Determining ownership of the Black Sea Fleet – headquartered at Sevastopol on the Crimean peninsula – proved more complicated, especially when Admiral Igor Kasatanov, its commander, defied an attempted takeover by Ukraine and ordered his men to take to the sea instead. This prompted a crisis in Russo–Ukrainian relations that was defused only when Yeltsin and Kravchuk agreed at a summit that August to postpone any decision until the end of 1995, in the meantime putting the fleet under their joint personal control.
Resolving the fate of Ukraine’s nuclear missiles was more complicated, but by late 1993, after months of patient diplomacy punctuated by much brinkmanship on all sides, a deal emerged. Under its terms, Russia would get the warheads and American money to help dismantle them, while Ukraine would receive US financial assistance too, as well as relief on its debts to Russia and some international assurances on its sovereignty. The deal’s provisions were set out in a Trilateral Statement and accompanying annex, which was signed by Clinton, Yeltsin and Kravchuk in Moscow on 14 January 1994. The final act was played out that December when Ukraine formally acceded to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) as a non-nuclear weapons state.
THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION, MEANWHILE, was formulating its approach to the former Soviet territory. Talbott set out Washington’s broad policy goals in testimony to the House and Senate Foreign Relations Committee in September 1993. They were essentially fourfold: the attainment of democracy; the transition to a market economy; the non-proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons; and the resolution of regional conflicts. Clinton remained convinced that the only way to do this was in cooperation with Russia, or more specifically, with Yeltsin, whom he considered the only guarantor of reform and democracy. Speaking to a congressional committee two months later, Secretary of State Warren Christopher described the former Soviet republics as ‘a long, long ways from the United States’ and said he was happy to see Russia act to guarantee regional stability provided it respected ‘international norms’. Christopher also refrained from criticising the Kremlin’s new military doctrine, saying: ‘What we are seeing here is Russian military doctrine trying to catch up with the new reality in Russia.’21
For some critics, though, by turning a blind eye to Russia’s activities, Washington was acquiescing in the Kremlin’s attempts to use its economic and military muscle to pursue its imperial ambitions and reconstitute the Soviet Union. The future dangers of this policy were highlighted by Zbigniew Brzezinski in a withering critique of US policy in the March/April 1994 edition of the journal Foreign Affairs:
Implicit in these notions is the view that Russia’s major geostrategic concern is regional stability. That makes Russian and American goals basically compatible. Moreover, since Russia is the only power capable of generating stability within the former Soviet Union, and since the independence of some of the new states is precipitating regional conflicts, the pacifying role of Russia is thereby enhanced . . .
It follows that concerns regarding the alleged Russian threat expressed by states like Ukraine or Georgia are not to be taken too seriously, and as much has been said by top administration figures. In any case, the Ukrainians should blame their own intransigence regarding nuclear weapons for their international isolation and their resulting sense of vulnerability.
The other non-Russian states would be well advised to eschew excessive nationalism and to make their own accommodations with Moscow, thereby relieving Washington of excessive burdens or awkward pangs of conscience.
IT WAS NOT JUST THE KREMLIN’S attitude to the ‘near abroad’ that caused concern. Yeltsin was also taking a tough line against those minorities within Russia’s borders who had been inspired by the break-up of the Soviet Union to try to secure their own independence. Chief among them was Chechnya in the North Caucasus. In September 1991, Chechen militants, led by Dzhokhar Dudayev, a former Soviet air force general, stormed a parliamentary session of the Chechen–Ingush autonomous republic, which lay within the Russian Federation, dissolving its government. A charismatic figure, Dudayev made himself president and declared independence. In the years that followed, the republic degenerated into chaos, turning into a centre of organised crime, and tens of thousands of non-Chechens fled.
Something had to be done. The Kremlin did not see independence for Chechnya as an option, not least because that would encourage other ethnic-based autonomous areas within Russia to follow its example. Yeltsin instead went for the military option, and in December 1994 Russian forces carried out heavy aerial bombardments of Chechnya. Ten days later, they entered the republic to ‘establish constitutional order in Chechnya and to preserve the territorial integrity of Russia’. General Pavel Grachev, the Russian defence minister, boasted of a blitzkrieg that would end in victory by 20 December.
But the Kremlin’s hope of a quick surgical strike followed by swift regime change proved illusory: it turned instead into a bloodbath. The capital, Grozny, was subject to the heaviest bombardment since the Allies’ Second World War attack on Dresden, but the Chechens refused to yield. Several senior military figures – among them the deputy minister of defence, General Boris Gromov, the hero of the Soviet Union’s equally ill-fated Afghan war – resigned in protest rather than be involved in a war against their own people. Morale among Russian troops was low and atrocities common on both sides. By the time an inconclusive agreement ending the conflict was signed on 31 August 1996, anything from 3,800 to 14,000 Russian soldiers had been killed and as many as 100,000 Chechens, most of them civilians.
The conflict presented the Clinton administration with a dilemma: it was shocked by reports of Russian brutality, but it also wanted to support Yeltsin and the territorial integrity of his country. Just as Bush had spoken out – albeit in vain – against the unravelling of the Soviet Union, so Clinton was alarmed at the prospect of Russia breaking up too. The arrival of Vice President Al Gore on a prearranged visit to Moscow four days after the start of the all-out invasion forced the administration to confront the issue. Gore set the tone with his reply: America hoped the conflict could be solved by negotiation but considered it ‘an internal matter’ for Russia.
Gore’s remarks sounded like an endorsement by Washington of what was rapidly becoming a savage military campaign. Matters were made worse when Mike McCurry, the state department spokesman, appeared to draw parallels between Yeltsin’s fight against the Chechens and the American Civil War, prompting one journalist to ask sarcastically whether the administration was calling Yeltsin ‘the Russian Abraham Lincoln’. As further details of Russian atrocities emerged, Talbott, one of the architects of the policy, began to realise how the Chechen war was bringing to the surface one of the worst characteristics of the former communist regime: ‘a reliance on raw force as the solution to all problems’.22
Russian society was divided by the conflict. While the nationalists lined up behind Yeltsin, liberal opinion was appalled by the carnage. Elena Bonner, the widow of the Nobel peace laureate Andrei Sakharov, who was continuing her husband’s human rights work, told Talbott she feared the war could lead to a return to totalitarianism in Russia. America risked finding itself on the wrong side of an increasingly bitter debate.
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* Strategic weapons are designed to target infrastructure and military installations, whereas tactical weapons are designed to be used in a direct military conflict.