THE RAIN WAS POURING DOWN AT Pristina airport in Kosovo on 12 June 1999, when General Sir Mike Jackson, the British commander of K-For,* ducked into one of the few buildings still left standing after weeks of allied bombardment. His Russian counterpart, Viktor Zavarzin, joined him. Jackson reached into his map pocket, pulled out a bottle of whisky and offered him a swig. Zavarzin, a burly man, willingly accepted. ‘Relations warmed up after that,’ Jackson recalls in his memoirs.1
This impromptu display of East–West camaraderie came at the end of a day that could have had a very different conclusion. The Kosovo war was ending with the defeat of President Slobodan Milošević. After more than two months of the relentless NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, Russia had grudgingly accepted the demise of its Orthodox Slav ally. But now it wanted to ensure it would be allowed to play its part in patrolling the peace. Insisting that its forces would be answerable only to Russian commanders, the Kremlin had sent two hundred of its troops that were stationed in Bosnia to occupy the airport.
Wesley Clark, NATO’s supreme commander, feared the Russian move might mean the partition of Kosovo into an Albanian south and a Serbian north, and ordered five hundred British and French paratroopers to stop them before they could reach the airport. Jackson defied him: ‘I’m not going to start the Third World War for you,’ he reportedly told Clark during a heated exchange. It was eventually agreed that Russian peacekeepers would deploy throughout Kosovo, but independently of NATO.
The bloody, slow-motion disintegration of Yugoslavia during the 1990s had been a matter of contention between Russia and the West, showing the ability of the two sides to see the same events from very different perspectives. Their dispute centred largely on the role of the Serbs and their leader, Milošević. For the West, he was the villain of the piece. Russian attitudes, however, were coloured by their historical, cultural and religious links with the Serbs. While often exasperated by Milošević himself, they were not so ready to give up on his country. Yeltsin repeatedly warned Clinton that any support he gave to the Alliance against the Serbs was at great domestic cost to his position and could be used against him by his political enemies.
America had worked hard to keep Russia on board during the Bosnian crisis of the early 1990s. Richard Holbrooke, the architect of the Dayton Accords, which had put an end to the three-and-a-half-year war, understood that for Moscow it was a matter of respect and a desire to be seen as one of the ‘big boys’. What Russia wanted most, Holbrooke said, ‘was to restore a sense, however symbolic, that they still mattered in the world. Behind our efforts to include Russia in the Bosnian negotiating process lay a fundamental belief that it was essential to find the proper place for Russia in Europe’s security structure, something it had not been part of since 1914.’2 America largely succeeded in its aim, even if Kozyrev, while foreign minister, complained during a private meeting with Talbott: ‘It’s bad enough having you people telling us what to do whether we like it or not. Don’t add insult to injury by also telling us that it’s in our interests to obey your orders.’3
After the Bosnian conflict ended, Russian forces served under an American commander in IFOR, the NATO-led multinational implementation force. But by early 1998, international attention began to turn again to Serbia, or more specifically to Kosovo, a province in its south that is home to two million people. It is a region rich in historical enmities and ethnic conflict dating back to 1389 when Serb forces were defeated by the Ottomans near Pristina. During the communist years after the Second World War, Kosovo had the status of an autonomous province within Serbia, but much of that autonomy had been swept away by Serb nationalists in 1990. Kosovo Albanians began to resist, peacefully at first. By the middle of the decade, however, their resistance had turned violent with the emergence of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an armed pro-independence group that carried out attacks on police, security forces and government officers, as well as on ethnic Serb villages. The Serbs retaliated, plunging the province into chaos.
Reports in late February and early March 1998 that Serb paramilitaries had massacred scores of ethnic Albanians in Prekaz convinced Madeleine Albright of the need to ‘lay down a marker’. ‘We are not going to stand by and watch the Serbian authorities do in Kosovo what they can no longer get away with in Bosnia,’ she declared.4 Earlier in the decade, the international community had ignored the first signs of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans before finally acting. America, Albright hoped, had learnt from its mistake. ‘The violence in Kosovo was recent, but the problem created by Milošević’s ruthless ambition was not,’ she believed.5
In a series of meetings over the months that followed, Albright – backed by Robin Cook, the British foreign secretary – tried to step up pressure on the Serbs to back down. It proved a struggle: both France and Italy were suspicious of the KLA. Russia was even more of a problem: Yeltsin insisted that attempts be made to find a negotiated solution rather than merely respond to violence with more violence. He also questioned the outside world’s right to intervene in the internal matter of a sovereign state.
Talks continued through 1998 – but so too did the violence. Kosovo was degenerating into civil war and the Serbs, thanks to their superior forces, were winning. Albright, meanwhile, was pushing for forces. On 23 September, the UN Security Council adopted a resolution declaring the situation in Kosovo a threat to peace and security and listing a series of actions that Milošević had to take. Crucially the resolution fell far short of authorising military action. Nor could the Americans hope to get such a resolution through the United Nations: Igor Ivanov, who had just taken over from Primakov as Russian foreign minister, made clear that Moscow would veto it. If NATO was going to act, it had to do so on its own and without a UN mandate.
As the Western media filled with fresh reports of Serb atrocities, Albright kept up the pressure for action. Washington was increasingly coming to believe that the only solution was regime change and the toppling of Milošević. On 13 October, NATO formally authorised the use of force against the rump Yugoslavian state, allowing it just four days to come into line. The threat worked: a few hours later, Holbrooke announced that he and Milošević had a deal that would give back the province its autonomy. Yet over the winter the agreement began to unravel as both Milošević and the KLA hardened their stance. Convinced that NATO’s relevance and effectiveness was at stake, Albright decided to tighten the screws on the Serbs. News of another massacre, this time of forty-five people in Račak on 16 January, proved the final straw. After some extensive lobbying of Washington, of America’s European allies and of Russia, Albright secured approval for the convening of peace talks at Rambouillet in France starting on 6 February. Both sides would be asked to accept a plan that would give autonomy to the people of Kosovo. But in what looked certain to be rejected by the Serbs, the proposed deal, it was stipulated, would be implemented by a 28,000-member NATO peacekeeping force.
The talks proved complicated, not least because of divisions within the Kosovo Albanians, some of whom were unwilling to back any deal that promised autonomy rather than independence. On 18 March, together with the Americans and the British, they finally signed the accords. Milošević, however, continued to baulk at the idea of having NATO peacekeepers on his territory and refused to sign; the Russians backed him.
During a last meeting with Milošević in Belgrade on 22 March, Holbrooke warned the Yugoslav leader that failure to go along with the Rambouillet agreement would mean his country would face ‘swift, severe, and sustained bombing’. Milošević appeared resigned to his fate; Holbrooke found him ‘cool and almost contemptuous’.
‘You’re a great country, a powerful country,’ Milošević said. ‘You can do anything you want. We can’t stop you.’ Defiant to the end, the Yugoslav leader added: ‘Go ahead and bomb us, but you will never get Kosovo.’6
On the evening of 23 March, just over a week after the foreign ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary signed the NATO accession document, Holbrooke returned to Brussels. He announced that peace talks had failed and that he was formally handing the matter over to NATO for military action. The next day Primakov, now prime minister, boarded a flight to Washington to meet Gore. When he was told by Gore that a NATO attack on Yugoslavia was imminent, Primakov ordered his plane to turn around, mid-Atlantic, and take him back to Moscow.
That same evening the bombing started. In a statement published the next day, Yeltsin denounced the action. ‘This is essentially an attempt by NATO to enter the twenty-first century in the uniform of the world policeman,’ he declared. ‘Russia will never agree to this.’7 As Russian television showed a steady diet of pictures of suffering Serbs, crowds gathered outside the US embassy in Moscow. Demonstrators hurled paint, stones and eggs. They burnt American flags, broke windows and urinated. Then, on 28 March, at the culmination of several days of protests, a masked gunman jumped out of a four-by-four and tried to fire a grenade launcher at the building. When it failed to work, he raked the walls with sub-machine-gun fire. It was the most serious attack of its sort ever to have been carried out against the American embassy in Russia.
In the Duma, nationalists and communists passed resolution after resolution condemning the bombing and negotiated with Milošević on creating a military strategic union of the two states. Even liberal young Muscovites brought up on a diet of American music and films were shocked by what seemed to be an unwarranted attack on fellow Slavs. Some declared themselves ready to go to Serbia to fight. Coupled with the economic crisis, which had shattered confidence in Western ideas, the backlash threatened to do serious damage to relations with America and its allies. Criticism came even from pro-Western liberals such as Nemtsov. ‘If America behaves like an elephant in a china shop in Europe and other parts of the world, then anti-American sentiment will not only dominate Russia but other countries as well,’ he warned.8
The strikes continued for eleven weeks and were extended to central Belgrade, hitting the interior ministry, the headquarters of Serbian state television, Milošević’s party headquarters and even his home. On 7 May, five guided bombs struck the Chinese embassy, killing three reporters and outraging the Chinese. When Bill Clinton telephoned Jiang Zemin to apologise, the Chinese leader declined to take the call.
The war presented Yeltsin with a serious problem: although he had little love for Milošević, he was worried that the nationalist backlash in Russia could undo his attempts to turn his country towards the West. Determined to find a peaceful solution to the crisis, he sent Chernomyrdin as an envoy to Belgrade to put pressure on Milošević, and lobbied Blair and Chirac to stop the bombing. He failed on both counts. Milošević was ‘a man from the past, the bad past’, the French leader told him.9
NATO forces, making more than a thousand flights a day, pummelled Yugoslavia’s power stations, bridges, factories and roads. The violence between the Serbs and the Kosovo Albanians was escalating, and the atrocities the bombing was meant to have prevented were multiplying. Finally, after seventy-nine days, Milošević capitulated and the bombing campaign ended.
Despite Russia’s opposition to the war, it had never come close to interfering on the Yugoslav side. Yeltsin was not going to risk a Third World War for the sake of Milošević. It is difficult, however, to overestimate the damage that Kosovo did to relations between Moscow and Washington, and the campaign negatively influenced broader Russian perceptions of America. ‘The bombing of Yugoslavia caused a big reaction against the West,’ said Oslon, the pollster. ‘Firstly, because this represented the use of military force not somewhere far away but here in Europe. And secondly because we had always had close relations with the Serbs.’
Almost two decades later, Igor Ivanov, the then foreign minister, remains convinced that, given time, it should have been possible to find a way of persuading the Serbs to grant wide autonomy to the Kosovo Albanians without going to war. NATO’s air campaign, coinciding with the eastward enlargement of the Alliance, he argued, was part of a broader American drive to take advantage of Russian weakness to rewrite the rules of international relations.
‘It was clear that NATO wanted to take military action, but it was a premeditated violation of the UN charter,’ Ivanov recalls.10 ‘I said to Madeleine [Albright]: “You are creating a very dangerous precedent for the future.”
‘But it was their decision to impose the new world order. They started this policy in the last years of the Clinton administration. Yugoslavia was the first practical demonstration of their intention to create a unipolar world led by the US and their allies and with a strong military presence of NATO.’
IN A SPEECH TO STANFORD UNIVERSITY in September 1997, Strobe Talbott insisted that America’s policy towards Russia should contain an indispensable feature: ‘strategic patience’. ‘That means a policy not just for coping with the issue or the crisis of the moment or the week or even of the season, or for getting through the next summit meeting,’ he said. ‘Rather it means a policy for the next century.’
Yet as the 1990s drew to a close, such patience was running out, and both Russians and Americans could look back and wonder what had become of the hopes that had been raised by the fall of the Berlin Wall. True, Germany had been reunited, while the former Soviet satellites, liberated by Gorbachev’s ‘Sinatra doctrine’, had largely lived up to their label of ‘new democracies’ and were well on their way to rejoining Western Europe. Just as importantly, the worst fears that had accompanied the break-up of the Soviet Union had not been realised. With the exception of some violence in the Caucasus and Central Asia, the fifteen republics of the former Soviet Union had gone their separate ways peacefully. Nor were there any ‘loose nukes’: the massive Soviet nuclear arsenal was now entirely in Russian hands.
Anyone visiting Moscow or St Petersburg from London or Washington at the end of the 1990s would have found themselves in what seemed to be a ‘normal’ city – unlike a decade earlier. The shops looked like they did back home, with lavish window displays and well-stocked shelves. Some of their names were familiar too. The cavernous old state restaurants with their surly staff and unappetising fare had been replaced by new eateries offering European food or sushi. (Everyone wanted sushi.) Billboards urging citizens to build socialism or extolling the virtues of the five-year plan had been replaced by advertisements for cars or shampoo. Most businesses were now in private hands rather than owned by the state. Elections offered a genuine choice of candidates. The press was vibrant, often iconoclastic and free. Foreign travel, once a privilege bestowed by the state, was now a right.
Yet the upheavals of the 1990s had created more losers than winners, and it took years before living standards drew level even with the last years of the Soviet era. Many people, especially members of the older generations, still felt a sense not so much of liberation but rather of disorientation after so much of what they had been brought up to believe in had been denounced as a lie. There was a feeling of wasted lives, of humiliation and wounded pride.
Attitudes to the West had changed too. Russians had become used to drinking Italian wine or German beer and eating French cheese or American hamburgers. Yet the East and West had not come together in any more profound way. The enlargement of NATO to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic had merely shifted the Iron Curtain several hundred miles to the east. Kosovo had been the last straw. Did Russia’s views count for nothing?
‘Russia is a humiliated country in search of a direction without a compass,’ wrote Charles Gati, a senior research professor of European and Eurasian Studies at Johns Hopkins University, in 1995.11 ‘It is smaller than it has been in three centuries. Both the outer empire in Central and Eastern Europe and the inner empire that was the Soviet Union are gone, and Moscow must now use force to keep even Russia itself together. As its pitiful (and shameful) performance in Chechnya has shown, the military has been reduced to a ragtag army, with presumably unusable nuclear weapons. Worse yet, Russia is deprived of pride and self-respect.’
Gati went on to invite Americans to imagine themselves in the place of the Russians. ‘To appreciate the present mood of letdown and frustration, imagine that our currency became all but worthless,’ Gati wrote. ‘That our stores identified some of their wares in the Cyrillic rather than the Roman alphabet, showing prices in roubles; that our political and economic life were guided by made-in-Moscow standards; and that our leaders were lectured by patronising foreign commissars about the need to stay the course in order to join their “progressive”, which is to say the communist, world.’
Gati’s commentary, published in the Washington Post, was entitled ‘Weimar Russia’. He was not the only one to liken the Soviet Union’s ‘loss’ of the Cold War with imperial Germany’s defeat in the First World War. Both countries had had to rebuild political institutions from scratch and had struggled to do so; both had suffered from hyperinflation and economic hardships. Both had found it difficult to come to terms with their lost territories and had begun to make threatening noises towards their neighbours. Both had blamed their woes on democrats who had stabbed them in the back and, perhaps most worryingly of all, their people were easy prey for demagogues promising to re-establish their lost imperial grandeur.
So what had gone wrong? There is little doubt that in the early 1990s America had genuinely wanted to welcome Russia into the West; yet not, as Gorbachev had proposed during his last summit with Bush in July 1991, as an equal partner. If Russia were to be a partner, it would have to be a junior one. Yet Russia, by virtue of its size, history and arsenal of doomsday weapons, was not prepared to be treated like a larger Poland. It had been granted the status of a superpower during the Cold War, and insisted this should continue.
It failed to appreciate, however, that this status had been tied to its ideological pull as the centre of an alternative socialist worldview, and by the sense of menace it exuded. Take these away and Russia was no longer able to claim to be an equal of the United States, whose economy was so many times larger. The sense of gloom was compounded by the ‘loss’ of the Soviet republics, which, to many Russians, now that the euphoria that accompanied the fall of communism had long since faded, seemed a senseless partition of the country in which they had grown up.
Could the West have acted differently during the 1990s? In the years that followed, a Russian narrative emerged, according to which America and its allies had not just deliberately destroyed the Soviet Union but contrived to keep the new independent Russia weak and divided thereafter – a view encouraged by triumphalist American claims to have ‘won’ the Cold War. According to such a view, the West did its utmost to turn the other former Soviet republics against Russia, thwarted every attempt by Moscow at economic and political reintegration in the post-Soviet space and failed to make good on its promises of financial aid.
The academic Sergei Karaganov summed up the sense of humiliation and encirclement felt by Russians during the 1990s in an article published in Izvestia in 2014. In it he berated the West for its refusal to end the Cold War either de facto or de jure after the end of the Soviet Union. ‘The West has consistently sought to expand its zone of military, economic and political influence through NATO and the EU,’ Karaganov wrote. ‘Russian interests and objections were flatly ignored. Russia was treated like a defeated power, though we did not see ourselves as defeated. A softer version of the Treaty of Versailles was imposed on the country. There was no outright annexation of territory or formal reparations like Germany faced after World War I, but Russia was told in no uncertain terms that it would play a modest role in the world. This policy was bound to engender a form of Weimar syndrome in a great nation whose dignity and interests had been trampled.’
Such a criticism has been compounded by claims that the West was at fault for not providing enough aid to Russia – and failing to share with it the ‘peace dividend’ brought by the end of the Cold War. While the US saved an estimated $1.3 trillion from reduced military spending by scaling back its armed forces, US aid to Russia between 1993 and 1999 was no more than $2.50 per person. This, Lila Shevtsova of the Brookings Institution has noted, was an amount equal to just one per cent of the US defence budget for a single year, 1996, or a quarter of the price of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier.12
Rodric Braithwaite, British ambassador to Russia from 1988 to 1992, believes this was a missed opportunity. ‘Determined Western leaders could have tapped into the general sympathies for Russia and put together a genuine stabilisation scheme which would have mitigated the pain of transition and relieved much of the distress which ordinary Russians were to suffer over the next few years,’ he wrote in his memoirs.13
Yet perhaps, on the contrary, the West’s mistake was not to have been tough enough. Garry Kasparov, the chess grand master who has become one of the most virulent critics of the present Russian regime, has argued that the West should have set tighter rather than looser conditions for its economic assistance. And he faults Western leaders, acting out of ‘a combination of apathy, ignorance and misplaced goodwill’, for showing Russia too much – rather than too little – respect, tolerating a continued role for its former communist leaders and thereby denying its people the clean start enjoyed by its former satellites.14
Such failures were exemplified by the reliance placed by Clinton on Yeltsin as the sole guarantor of democracy and bulwark against the return to communism. Even as Yeltsin unleashed a brutal war on Chechnya in 1995 and moved in an increasingly authoritarian direction, the administration continued to back him wholeheartedly. This short-sighted policy contributed very little to Yeltsin’s stature in Russia, and ensured that America and the West effectively acquiesced in Russia’s retreat from democratic principles.
To blame outsiders for the economic hardship and massive inequalities of the 1990s, as some Russians have, is absurd. The West may have provided the economic model, but it was Russia’s own leaders – either out of ignorance or self-interest – who contrived to implement such ideas in an unfair way. This was especially the case with the rules governing the sell-off of state industry, which seemed calculated to help insiders at the expense of the population as a whole. And while the army of Western consultants and businesspeople who descended on the country were well rewarded for their efforts, it was Russians who amassed obscene fortunes at the expense of their compatriots. After seventy years of communism, it was not just a matter of creating a whole new set of institutions; people’s moral values had been eroded by living in a system that was based on cheating and dishonesty.
Underlying the Russians’ disquiet was their inability to come to terms with the ‘loss’ of the former Soviet republics, and, to a lesser extent, the satellites beyond, which quickly became a cause for concern, not just in Kiev and Almaty but also in Warsaw, Budapest and Prague. The impression of Russia as a revanchist power was confirmed by the results of the December 1993 election when almost one in four voters backed Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who argued for the forceful reconstitution of the Soviet Union. Against this threatening backdrop, it made sense to satisfy the demands of the Central European states to join the EU and NATO while there was still a relatively benign regime in the Kremlin.
Yet Weimar Germany was not the only possible model that Russia could have adopted. As Gati argued in a follow-up to his ‘Weimar Russia’ article, published two decades later, it could instead have followed the path of West Germany after the Second World War.15 Under Konrad Adenauer and his successors, West Germany accepted its lost territories and made peace with its neighbours, transforming itself not just into an economic success story but also into a mature and responsible member of the international community.
As long as Russia remained weak and economically dependent on Western help, the simmering resentment felt by many of its people would remain just that. Yet as the veteran American commentator Walter Laqueur argued at the time, it was wishful thinking on the part of the West to assume that a country that had been a great power for centuries would meekly accept a lesser role – any more than Germany had seventy years earlier. ‘The belief among Russian nationalist ideologues that their country cannot exist except as a great empire is deeply rooted and goes back a long time,’ he wrote. ‘To many Russians, a number of regions that were lost (such as Ukraine) are still considered to be parts of Russia proper.’16
All that was needed now was a figure able to harness this sense of grievance and thirst for revenge; a leader who would promise to restore pride and impose order. Russia – and the world – would not have to wait for long.
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* The NATO-led international peacekeeping force for Kosovo.