EPILOGUE FOR THE PAPERBACK EDITION Alternatives are returning. GLEB PAVLOVSKY, 2010 In Moscow and in Washington, people have been known to lose opportunities… We have to hope that this time we won’t lose the opportunity. MEMBER OF THE RUSSIAN PARLIAMENT, 2010

ANYONE who writes with the purpose of changing established thinking about fateful turning points in political history, as I have done in this book, must be patient. Orthodoxies never yield quickly to facts or logic. This is even more the case with American thinking about the former Soviet Union—and, it turns out, about post-Soviet Russia. As Will Rogers aptly quipped many years ago, “No matter what you say about it, it’s true.”

It is too soon, therefore, to know the impact of Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives , which first appeared in hardcover only in mid-2009. Several reviewers have welcomed my reconsideration of missed opportunities in Soviet and post-Soviet history and in U.S.-Russian relations, but others, one observer concluded, have shunned the book because of its “realistic, but scarcely diplomatic, indictment of a… broad swath of academics, journalists, and intellectuals.”¹ If so, we should not be surprised. “You can’t expect people,” as a Moscow columnist I quoted earlier remarked, “to jump out of their biographies.”²

I did not intend this book, with the exception of chapter 7, to be an “indictment,” but a revisionist endeavor of this kind always risks offending political correctness. To give a recent example, a distinguished historian was accused of “nostalgia” for the Soviet Union and of yearning for “a restoration of the old repressive norms” because he focused on Soviet-era intellectuals who believed in reforming the system, not abolishing it.³ Considering that such derisive attitudes are still widespread among reviewers and other commentators, a full rethinking of roads that might have been taken during and after the Soviet experience may require a new generation of Americans unaffected by the legacies of the Cold War.

Certainly, nothing has changed in American (or, more generally, Western) mainstream thinking to diminish the purpose of this book. Except for a very few writers, all of the views contested in the preceding pages are still presented as axiomatic. To reiterate them briefly:

• There were no viable alternatives for the better in Soviet history—not those represented by Bukharin, Khrushchev, Gorbachev, or any other leader treated in the book—only predetermined outcomes.

• The Soviet Union was not merely unreformable; “even incremental reform was too much for the system to bear.”

• The end of the Soviet Union was “a deliverance of biblical proportions” resulting in “a golden age of the most profound peace and prosperity.”

• “How America won the cold war” is an essential leadership lesson for all subsequent American presidents.

•  It was Putin, not the U.S.-backed Yeltsin, who “began dismantling Russian democracy.”

• The “U.S.-Russian relationship soured” after 1991 largely because of policies made in Moscow, not in Washington.⁴

All of these false, or at least questionable, axioms have become mythic aspects of a post-1991 American narrative. And myths are even harder to dispel than historical orthodoxies.

In Russia, on the other hand, despite continuing elements of state censorship, there is no longer an orthodox position, no “general line” or “single viewpoint,” regarding any of the historical or political developments examined in Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives. (Four of the chapters have been published in translation in Moscow.)⁵ Each of those fateful turning points and their outcomes continues to be the subject of conflicting views and intense debate. Twenty years later, the end of the Soviet Union—whether it was predetermined or avoidable, whether or not it was “legitimate”—remains the most fiercely disputed issue,⁶ but not the only one that is still politically consequential.

Various reasons explain why there is so little historical closure in Russia today. One is that two leaders reexamined in this book remain active in political life. Gorbachev, who turned eighty in 2011, and Ligachev, ninety in 2010, continue to defend the conflicting “missed opportunities” they represented, as do their supporters. Even Bukharin, more than seventy years after his execution, hovers over contemporary discussions of Russia’s present and future, his NEP alternative still cited as a market system suited to the country’s long tradition of mixed state and private economies. As for Stalin, both his admirers and harshest critics say he is “more alive than ever.”⁷

But the primary reason remote events are “living history” in Russia is that roads taken in the past have so often led to catastrophic destinations. As a young journalist wrote in 2010, “All of Russia’s suffering has roots in its history, although we cannot agree on which period is most to blame.” (Fifty years before, Mikoyan, Khrushchev’s anti-Stalinist ally, put it more colloquially: “History can drive you crazy.”)⁸ These disputes over when, what, and whom to blame range over several centuries but concentrate, of course, on the nearly one hundred years from the 1917 revolution to the present, thereby perpetuating all of the interpretive questions raised in Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives.

Indeed, by 2011, the book’s overarching theme was again central to Russian politics. With the country at yet another crossroads, one side in the struggle defended the nation’s historical “culture of non-alternatives” as consistent with its traditions while another rejected “history without alternatives” and hoped that “alternatives are returning.” (That these opposing perspectives were formulated by a political intellectual close to the Kremlin, Gleb Pavlovsky, indicated the high-level nature of the recurring conflict.)⁹ Leading to the new crossroads was a divisive issue that had afflicted the nation repeatedly before and after 1917—the belief that Russia was in urgent need of “modernization.”

The revived imperative is understandable. As I emphasized in chapter 7, Russia’s basic infrastructures have perilously disintegrated because of the precipitous fall in investment since the 1980s, the economic depression of the 1990s, a decade of unprecedented demodernization, and the state’s budgetary overreliance on energy exports. Not only alarmists now warn that Russia has already lost decades of the modernity it achieved at great costs during its Soviet twentieth century and is in danger of losing essential elements of its future as a great nation—the development of its people, technical and scientific progress, economic competitiveness, military power, and even its oil and natural gas sectors. Few in the political class disagree that “Russia again faces its age-old problem: Modernize or be crushed.”¹⁰

Apart from agreeing that the country must develop a diversified economy less dependent on natural resources, there is, however, no consensus, only fundamental disagreement, about the meaning of “modernization” and “the sacramental question—how to do this.”¹¹ Proposals range from implanting technical innovations in the existing order, such as a Russian Silicon Valley, to transforming the entire post-Soviet political and economic system. By 2011, the dispute dominated domestic- and even foreign-policy discussions and had spread to the highest levels, with Prime Minister Putin, still the preeminent leader, and President Medvedev, his protégé, taking noticeably different positions. But the underlying divide remains as it has been throughout the nation’s long history of modernizing controversies and campaigns, and as I spelled out in chapter 6 in contrasting Gorbachev’s gradualist perestroika to Yeltsin’s shock therapy.

Once again, one side in the struggle over “the alternatives of modernization” insists that Russia’s dire condition, the recalcitrance of its bureaucrats and people, and mounting dangers abroad mean that the state, armed with power “to eliminate all obstacles,” must impose the transformation on society. And once again, the opposing side warns against another “modernization through catastrophe” that will result in more dictatorship and political “slaves,” arguing instead for a “democratic” or “soft” modernization promoted by the state but carried out “from below” by free citizens. The Kremlin might follow a centrist course for several years, but eventually, as has happened in the past, it is likely to choose one or the other. The alternatives therefore again pose “fateful choices.”¹²

For Russia’s dwindling prodemocracy forces, the new modernization debate has had one unexpected benefit: it has reopened discussion of the country’s aborted democratization. Some commentators, referring to Gorbachev’s reforms, call this approach “Perestroika II.”¹³ But despite high-level proponents, a fledgling (though weak and conformist) middle class, and opinion surveys indicating that many Russians still want free elections and uncensored media, there is little that favors a democratic outcome. Nor are the reasons for this primarily the nation’s authoritarian traditions or Putin’s KGB background, as is usually said.

The main obstacles to “democratic modernization,” or any other resumption of democratization, lie elsewhere. One is the fate of the first perestroika. Though I argue otherwise in chapters 4 – 6, most officials and ordinary citizens believe that Gorbachev’s democratizing reforms were directly responsible for the “collapse” of the Soviet state and thus the ensuing chaos, economic looting, and social misery of the 1990s.¹⁴ That perspective, inspired by the two breakdowns of Russian statehood in the twentieth century, in 1917 and 1991, has revived an older belief, stretching back to tsarist times, that Russia is too big geographically and too diverse ethnically to be governed democratically.

In this fearfully conservative and widespread view, the country’s stability and security depend on a concentration of executive power in the capital, the “vertical of authority,” as Putin’s administration termed it. Such an outlook rules out, of course, the kind of empowered legislature and real federalism that Gorbachev tried to create. Even Medvedev, sometimes identified with a democratic alternative at the top, declared that “parliamentary democracy here in Russia… would be a disaster.”¹⁵ Considering the nation’s history of overweening executive power based in the Kremlin, tsarist and Communist, it is impossible to imagine any kind of democratic system without those representative institutions.

Readers may be surprised, remembering the enormous crimes and millions of victims described in chapter 2, that Russia’s statist modernizers boast of having Stalin on their side. Their economists draw an analogy between the crisis of post-Soviet Russia, which has almost exhausted the infrastructure and other capital inherited from the Soviet Union in 1991, and the crisis of the new Soviet state in the late 1920s, which had reached the limits of the tsarist economic heritage. Looking back, they argue that just as Bukharin’s gradualist NEP alternative was not the “way out” then, the “optimal program” for Russian modernization today “should consist of a kind of neo-Stalinism.”¹⁶

Indeed, the modernization imperative has both revived discussion of democracy and made the antithetical Stalinist experience, sometimes referred to as “modernization without Westernization,” seem more relevant. Appealing not only to distant history but to widespread popular beliefs that the post-Soviet state abandoned the people—to oligarchs, impoverishment, crime, and corruption—authoritarian modernizers trumpet the Stalinist state’s “salvation of the country” in the 1930s and 1940s in order to maintain, “We can be saved only by civilized Stalinism,” even by “Stalinist modernization.”¹⁷

The result has been a third nationwide controversy over the Stalinist past, after those under Khrushchev and Gorbachev. It, too, has exacerbated already deep policy divisions in the political class. For example, while pro-Stalin historians with patrons in high circles seem to “justify any number of victims and crimes for the sake of rebuilding the country,” President Medvedev endorsed a campaign, led by Gorbachev and others, to build a national memorial to Stalin’s victims. Medvedev went on to reject the reemerging idea that modernization “can be achieved at the price of human grief and loss.”¹⁸ Neither elite nor rank-and-file neo-Stalinists actually want a return to terroristic despotism, but even “civilized Stalinism” would destroy any remaining prospects for democracy.

There is, however, an even larger barrier to both democratization and modernization—the immense state property “privatized” in the 1990s. Though examined in chapters 5 and 6, that obstacle needs to be reemphasized because it continues to be ignored in most Western commentary, as are the opinions of informed Russian thinkers. Those scholars and other intellectuals tell us, as readers will recall, “Almost everything that happened in Russia after 1991 was determined to a significant extent by the divvying up of the property of the former USSR,” which is still haunted by a “‘dual illegitimacy’—in the eyes of the law… and in the eyes of the population.”¹⁹

That “historic divvying up” by the Soviet high-level nomenklatura and its collaborators continues to thwart Russian democracy and modernity in two critical ways. Knowing the traditional social-justice beliefs of the people, of whom 80 percent or more have no savings, and fearing popular retribution, the small financial elite—or oligarchs—who still control much of that enormous wealth and exercise considerable political influence, remain determined to prevent free elections and representative institutions. Meanwhile, their profits from natural resources and other vital assets, much of it transferred to off-shore havens, is needed to rebuild the country’s infrastructures. For Russia’s oligarchs, fundamental change is an existential threat.

Nor is the political obstacle merely the business elite. An entire oligarchical system, based on the merger of privatized property and privatized state policy making, emerged during the Yeltsin 1990s. Shaped by mass and prolonged redistribution of existing property, asset stripping, capital flight abroad, and fearful uncertainty about the duration of the new wealth-seizing possibilities, it grew into a demodernizing system antithetical to economic development. As Gorbachev, who had pursued a differing kind of economic change, complained, the system “divided up more than was produced, built, or developed.”²⁰ During the following decade, Putin made significant alterations in the system, separating Yeltsin-era oligarchs from Kremlin power, and a few from their property, while creating new oligarchs of his own, but he did not change its underlying nature.

A characteristic and poorly interpreted feature of the system is Russia’s endemic corruption, both official and private, and the violence accompanying it. The shadowy, illicit procedures and contract murders that fostered the birth of the oligarchy spread with the new system. As a result, corruption also now deprives Russia of billions of dollars and the efficiency needed for modernization. Meanwhile, most of the frequent assassinations of journalists and related crimes, usually attributed to the Kremlin, are actually commissioned by corrupt “businessmen” and officials against reporters and other investigators who have gotten too close to their commercial secrets.

It is widely believed in Russia today, virtually across the ideological spectrum, that the existing political system is incapable of modernization.²¹ Major policy change in Russia has almost always originated among reform-minded people in the ruling class, as happened under Khrushchev and Gorbachev, but today’s elites have little interest in any kind of transformation. Even if a Kremlin leader initiates change, as many observers think President Medvedev was attempting, implementing such initiatives through the “vertical of authority,” which sometimes thwarted even Putin’s decrees, would be exceedingly difficult. They would be vulnerable, in Russia’s long bureaucratic tradition, to fierce resistance and outright sabotage.

Still more, the post-Soviet state bureaucracy, now larger than its predecessor, has been widely infected by the malignancies of “divvying up.” At every level of the “vertical,” from Moscow to the vast provinces, “commercial partners” and “friends of oligarchs” (oligofrendy) have proliferated, forming a “caste of immune officials.” Hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats have grown accustomed to multiplying their salaries by lucrative bribes and other “percentages” on transactions and enterprises requiring official permits, as well as the still ongoing redistribution of assets. Their way of life, whether grand or modest, depends on the existing system. (Thus, while surveyed Russians continue to rate today’s bureaucrats significantly below their Soviet counterparts in honesty, efficiency, and “patriotism,” a third of young people aspire to such a position because of the monetary possibilities.)²²

Here, too, proposals for “exiting the oligarchical system” range from liberal to authoritarian. Some call for a onetime supertax on privatized property designed both to supplement the government’s modernizing funds and to legitimize the “divvying up” in the eyes of the law and the people. Others propose rigorous antimonopoly, promarket measures. Still others, in an older Russian tradition, demand expropriation and punishment of oligarchs, corrupt officials, and their political enablers.²³ With moderate anti-corruption campaigns having failed or never been implemented, the enormous discrepancies between rich and poor still growing, terrorists striking repeatedly even in Moscow, and indignant nationalist moods spreading in officialdom and breaking out in political assassinations and in street violence, demands for harsh approaches have become more clamorous. Increasingly desperate, even Russia’s self-professed democrats seem able to hope only that “progressive” oligarchs and their representatives will lead the modernization effort.²⁴

Whatever the outcome of this fateful struggle, and whatever the alternatives lost since 1991, Russia’s present and future scarcely resemble those once imagined by Western commentators. As I pointed out in preceding chapters, those expectations, especially American ones, were shaped by ideological assumptions, not Russian realities. The same has been true of assumptions about post-Soviet Russia’s role abroad.

THE concluding chapter of Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives, “Who Lost the Post-Soviet Peace?,” has been the most controversial. I anticipated this reaction because the chapter recounts the only historic opportunity discussed in the book that was missed because of decisions taken in Washington, initially by the Clinton administration in the 1990s, not in Moscow. A few reviewers applauded my analysis, comparing it favorably with George Kennan’s validated criticism of U.S. policy, but most thought it “goes too far” in blaming Washington and found it “an exaggeration” and “less compelling” than other chapters.²⁵

The best way to evaluate my treatment of U.S.-Russian relations during the Clinton and Bush administrations is to extend it to developments since I completed the book in January 2009, the month President Obama took office. As I wrote then, his call for a “reset” in relations with Moscow suggested an awareness that a necessary partnership with post-Soviet Russia had been missed and might still be retrieved. Moreover, the real meaning of Obama’s “reset” was, of course, detente.²⁶ And since detente had always meant replacing Cold War conflicts with cooperation, the president’s initiative also suggested an understanding that he had inherited something akin to a new cold war, as I argued in chapter 7.

The long, episodic history of detente, or previous resets, which began in 1933 when President Roosevelt established diplomatic relations with Soviet Russia after fifteen years of nonrecognition, may tell us some-thing important about Obama’s reset. Each episode was opposed by powerful ideological, elite, and institutional forces in Washington and Moscow; each required strong leadership to sustain the process of co-operation; and each, after a period of success, dissipated or collapsed in a resurgence of Cold War–like conflicts, as did even the historic detente initiated by Gorbachev and Reagan that promised to abolish cold wars altogether.

When the Soviet Union ended, it was widely assumed that the cycle of unabated cold war temporarily moderated by detente was over because there would be few, if any, serious conflicts with a noncommunist Russia. The cessation of profound ideological differences and worldwide superpower competition did create a historic opportunity for a more fully cooperative, less conflictual American-Russian relationship, even a strategic partnership. But as I made clear in chapter 7, much depended on the nature of U.S. policy, which failed disastrously in the 1990s. Unless the lessons of that period were heeded, Obama’s detente would almost certainly share the fate of its predecessors.

In 2009 and 2010, many commentators believed that the reset, a term also adopted by the Kremlin, was “remarkably successful” and had already achieved a “new partnership” and led to a “new era in relations.”²⁷ Discourse between Washington and Moscow became more conciliatory. Both Obama and President Medvedev, who met frequently, declared the revamped relationship a success, citing their personal friendship as evidence. There were also tangible signs. Moscow began cooperating on two top U.S. priorities: the war in Afghanistan and curbing Iran’s nuclear-weapons aspirations. In addition, in 2010, a treaty named New START was negotiated that would reduce U.S. and Russian long-range nuclear arsenals by almost a third.

Nonetheless, at the beginning of 2011, Obama’s reset remained limited and inherently unstable. This was caused in part by political circumstances over which he had little control. Opposition in both capitals was fierce and unrelenting. Drawing on a traditional Russophobia that attributes sinister motives to every Moscow initiative, in this case from arms control to Iran, Afghanistan, and Europe, American cold warriors assailed Obama’s reset as “capitulation” and “betrayal,” a “retreat,” a “dangerous bargain,” and a policy of “seeing no evil.” One even likened it to the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact.²⁸ Without a countervailing pro-Russia lobby or a significant U.S.-Russian economic relationship to buffer the reset, it was highly vulnerable to such attacks.

In Moscow, equally harsh attacks were leveled against Obama’s designated partner, Medvedev. According to a leading Russian nationalist, “The West stands behind Medvedev. The president relies on ultra-liberals… who speak for a pro-American, traitorous policy oriented on surrendering positions and helping the Americans maintain a mono-polar world…. No one stands behind Medvedev except enemies of Russia.” More ominously, a prominent general also accused Medvedev of “treason.”²⁹ A number of Russia’s “democratic” oppositionists were also adamantly against Obama’s reset, denouncing it as “facilitating the autocracy’s self-preservation” and as “another Munich…. A full, absolute, and unconditional surrender to the regime.” Nor did Russian public opinion favor the new policy. In 2009, a majority surveyed stated a “positive dislike of the West in general, and particularly of America.”³⁰

Still worse, both Obama and Medvedev were relatively weak leaders. Obama’s authority at home was diminished by his declining popularity and by Democratic Patty losses in the 2010 congressional elections. (By then, he had already yielded to demands for a “reset of the reset,” restoring democracy promotion to his agenda and embracing the Georgian leader, Mikheil Saakashvili, who had brought America and Russia close to war in August 2008.)³¹ Medvedev’s own authority remained limited by Putin’s preeminence and the possibility he might reclaim the Russian presidency in 2012. Increasingly perceived as a possible one-term president, neither Obama nor Medvedev was able or willing to aggressively defend their reset or even prevent apparent attempts to disrupt it by members of their own administrations.³²

Obama’s decision to base his Russia policy on the presumed “liberal” Medvedev, with the intention of promoting his political fortunes over Putin’s, further limited support for the reset in Moscow. (Along with the U.S. media, Obama and his advisers continued to denigrate Putin as an “outdated” cold warrior, even a man who “doesn’t have a soul.”)³³ The political wager on Medvedev, which became part of the media narrative of the reset in both countries, repeated the longstanding White House practice of mistaking a personal friend in the Kremlin—“my friend Dmitri,” as Obama soon called Medvedev—for broad support in the Russian policy class. It also revived Moscow’s resentment of American interference in its internal affairs since the 1990s.³⁴

These political failings of the reset may have been transitory, but a number of underlying fallacies of Obama’s Russia policy were fundamental and, it seemed, still congenital in Washington. All of them were in the spirit of the American winner-take-all triumphalism of the 1990s, which, as I showed in chapter 7, had destroyed the possibility of a strategic partnership with post-Soviet Russia and led instead to the renewed cold war Obama inherited.

One was the enduring conceit of “selective cooperation”: seeking Moscow’s support for America’s vital interests while disregarding Russia’s. After having been tried and seen to fail repeatedly since 1991 by Presidents Clinton and Bush, it was, wrote a Moscow specialist, “a case of déjà vu.” (Even an implacable Russian opponent of the Kremlin pointed out that in relations with President Bush, Putin had “constantly backed down.”) Nonetheless, the Obama White House sought more one-way concessions as the basis of the reset: “We’re going to see if there are ways we can have Russia cooperate on those things that we define as our national interests, but we don’t want to trade with them.”³⁵

Obama did gain Kremlin cooperation on Afghanistan and Iran without yielding on the two U.S. policies most resented by Moscow—locating missile defense sites close to Russia and expanding NATO in the same direction—but at a high and lasting political cost. The disparity further undermined Medvedev’s position as well as general support for the reset in Moscow, where it now bore his “brand,” to the extent that Putin, who usually left the U.S. relationship to his protégé, remarked publicly, “So, where is this reset?”³⁶

Indeed, missile defense was a time bomb embedded in the New START treaty and thus in the reset itself. During negotiations, Moscow believed the Obama administration had agreed to respect Russian objections to putting antimissile sites in Eastern Europe, an understanding reflected in the treaty’s preamble. But in December 2010, Obama, seeking ratification from the U.S. Senate, personally promised that the agreement “places no limitations on the development or deployment of our missile defense programs,” which he pledged to pursue fully “regardless of Russian actions.” In its resolution of ratification, the Senate went further, spelling out this intention in detail. Remembering previous violated agreements, Moscow reacted with such suspicion that Medvedev felt the need to personally vouch for Obama as a president who “keeps his word.”³⁷

More generally, the unresolved conflict over missile defense exemplified the futility of “selective cooperation.” Medvedev’s earlier announcement, in November 2010, that Russia might participate in a NATO version of the project was heralded as another success of the reset. But both he and Putin quickly emphasized that “Russia will participate only on an absolutely equal basis… or we will not participate at all.” No one on either side believed, of course, that the U.S.-led alliance would give the Kremlin “equal” control over its antimissile system.³⁸

In pursuing the one-way concessions implicit in “selective cooperation, “Obama, like Clinton and Bush before him, seemed unable or unwilling to connect the strategic dots of mutual security the way Reagan and Gorbachev had done in the late 1980s. In effect, Obama was asking Moscow to substantially reduce its long-range nuclear weapons while Russia was being surrounded by NATO bases with superior conventional forces and the potential to neutralize its reduced retaliatory capability. In that crucial respect, the new arms-reduction treaty was inherently unstable. If nothing else, Obama was undermining his hope of also negotiating a major reduction of Russia’s enormous advantage in short-range tactical nuclear weapons, which Moscow increasingly considered vital for its national defense. Instead, as Medvedev also warned, unless the missile-defense conflict was resolved, there would be “another escalation of the arms race.”³⁹

The notion that Moscow would make unreciprocated concessions for the sake of a partnership with the United States, which arose after 1991, derived from the same false assumption: that post-Soviet Russia, diminished and enfeebled by having “lost the Cold War,” could play the role of a great power only on American terms.⁴⁰ In reality, when Obama took office, Russia could obtain everything it supposedly needed from the United States, particularly in order to modernize, from other partners. Two of its bilateral relationships—with Beijing and Berlin, and increasingly with Paris—were already more fulsome and important to Moscow, politically, economically, and even militarily, than its barren relations, or “desert landscape,” with a Washington that for two decades had seemed chronically unreliable, even duplicitous.⁴¹

Behind that perception lay a more fundamental weakness of the reset: conflicting American and Russian understandings of why it had been needed. Each side continued to blame the other for the deterioration of relations after 1991. Neither Obama nor the Clinton-era officials advising him conceded there had been any mistakes in U.S. policy toward post-Soviet Russia, and its architects still defended it with “special satisfaction.”⁴² Instead, virtually the entire U.S. political class persisted in blaming Russia and, in particular, Putin’s “imperialist and anti-Western agenda,” even though he had come to power only in 2000. In effect, this exculpatory history deleted the historic opportunities lost in Washington in the 1990s and later. It also meant that the success or failure of the reset was “up to the Russians” and that “Moscow’s thinking must change,” not Washington’s.⁴³

American policymakers may care little about history, but it is no arcane matter for their Russian counterparts.⁴⁴ For them, a reset was necessary because Washington rejected Gorbachev’s proposals for “deideologizing inter-state relations” and a “new model of guaranteeing security” in favor of a “Pax Americana”; because there was a “new U.S. semi-cold war against Russia in 1991–2008”; because “the approach of the Clinton administration… was to wriggle all possible concessions from Moscow without giving Yeltsin anything in return”; because after September 11 “the Bush administration took Russia’s support in Afghanistan and Central Asia for granted”; and because Washington refused to “sacrifice its influence or policies in the post-Soviet space,” including in Georgia.⁴⁵

Putin and Medvedev personally were no less adamant about the pre-history of the reset and who was to blame. As I discuss in chapter 7, both Russian leaders earlier accused Washington of having “constantly deceived” Moscow. The acute sense of betrayal remained on their minds after the reset began. In 2010, Putin even admitted having been slow to understand the pattern of U.S. duplicity: “I was simply unable to comprehend its depth…. But in reality it is all very simple…. They told us one thing, and they did something completely different. They duped us, in the full sense of this word.”⁴⁶

Medvedev agreed: “Relations soured because of the previous U.S. administrations’ plans.” He even said what was widely believed but rarely spoken publicly by top Russian leaders, that Washington had not just armed and trained the Georgian military but had known in advance, perhaps encouraged, Saakashvili’s surprise attack on South Ossetian civilians and Russian peacekeepers, which began the August 2008 war: “Personally,” Medvedev complained, “I found it very surprising that it all began after the U.S. secretary of state paid a visit to Georgia. Before that… Mr. Saakashvili was planning to come see me in Sochi, but he did not come.”⁴⁷

Longtime adversaries whose understandings of their past relations are so starkly different are unlikely to create a durable partnership. Their memories and perspectives will constantly collide. Thus, the Russian leadership entered into the reset with expectations diametrically opposed to the unilateral concessions expected by the Obama administration: “America owes Russia, and it owes a lot, and it has to pay its debt.” In 2010, the head of NATO was already assuring the international media that the reset would “bury the ghosts of the past.” It was another example of how little the U.S.-led alliance understood or cared about history.⁴⁸

The “ghost” barring a truly fundamental change in relations was, of course, the fifteen-year expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders—the first and most fateful broken American promise.⁴⁹ Despite assurances of a “NATO-Russian friendship,” the Obama administration did not disavow more NATO expansion and instead reaffirmed U.S. support for eventual membership for the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia, Moscow’s “red lines.”⁵⁰ Again, no state that feels encircled and threatened by an encroaching military alliance, still more one committed to antimissile weapons designed to thwart retaliation—anxieties repeatedly expressed by Moscow—will ever feel itself an equal or secure partner of that alliance.

Indeed, expanding NATO eastward institutionalized an even larger, more profound geopolitical conflict with Russia. Moscow’s protests and countersteps were indignantly denounced by American officials and commentators as “Russia’s determination to reestablish a sphere of influence in neighboring countries that were once a part of the Soviet Union.” Labeling this a “19th-century agenda,” they insisted, “We do not recognize… any sphere of influence.”⁵¹ U.S. indignation grew when Medvedev responded by claiming for Russia a “sphere of strategic interests,” or “privileged interests,” in the former Soviet republics.

But what was NATO’s eastward movement other than a vast expansion of America’s sphere of influence—military, political, and economic—into what had previously been Russia’s? No U.S. official or mainstream commentator would admit as much, but Saakashvili, the Georgian leader bent on joining the alliance, felt no such constraint. In 2010, he welcomed the growth of “NATO’s presence in the region” because it enabled the United States and its allies to “expand their sphere of influence.”⁵² Of all the several double standards in U.S. policy making—“hypocrisy,” Moscow charged—none did more to prevent an American-Russian partnership and to provoke a new cold war.

Nor will the “virtuous cycle of cooperation” called for by the U.S. official quoted in chapter 7 ever be possible while this profound geopolitical conflict exists. Is there any longer a way to resolve it, given that the new NATO states cannot now be deprived of membership? In chapter 7, I proposed that Washington end NATO expansion and the quest for military bases in the former Soviet republics, which Moscow considers its “near abroad,” while the Kremlin reaffirms their political sovereignty. The fallacies and instability of Obama’s attempted reset indicate the need for a more far-reaching solution.

The United States and its allies should honor retroactively their follow-up promise, also broken, that no military forces would be based in any new NATO country east of Germany—in effect, demilitarizing NATO’s post-1994 expansion.⁵³ Without violating or diminishing the alliance’s guarantee of collective security for all of its members, this grand accommodation would go far toward making possible an expansive partnership with post-Soviet Russia.

First, and crucially, it would redeem one of America’s broken promises to Russia, thereby paying part of its “debt.” Second, it would recognize that Moscow is entitled to at least one “privileged interest” in its former zone of Western security—the absence of a potential military threat. (Washington has long claimed this privilege for itself, defending it to the brink of nuclear war in Cuba in 1962.) Third, the demilitarization of NATO’s expansion would alleviate Russia’s historical fear of military encirclement while inspiring trust in Western partners. And fourth, this would reduce the Kremlin’s concerns about missile defense sites in Eastern Europe, making it more willing to contribute Russia’s considerable resources to the still unproven project.

Much else of essential importance both to America and Russia could then follow, from far greater reductions in all of their weapons of mass destruction to full cooperation against the looming dangers of nuclear proliferation and international terrorism. The result would be a second chance to regain the historic opportunity lost in the 1990s.

TWENTY years after the Soviet breakup, Russia is again at a cross-roads—and with it, inescapably, the United States. Moscow’s choice between alternatives for modernizing the nation—authoritarian and thus menacing or at least partially democratic—will be decided inside Russia, not, as U.S. policymakers once thought, in Washington. But it will not be determined apart from Russia’s relations with the outside world. Medvedev’s call for “modernizing alliances” with the West represents one alternative. His opponents’ retort that the West is neither worthy of emulation nor trustworthy expresses another.

American policy will be a crucial factor in the eventual choice. In the centuries-long struggle between reform and reaction in Russia, antiauthoritarian forces have had a political chance only when relations with the West were improving. Certainly, this was true in the twentieth century, when “Cold War tensions invariably worked to the advantage of hardliners within the Soviet Union.”⁵⁴ In this regard, Washington still plays the leading Western role, for better or worse. Its decision to move NATO eastward, to take an especially lamentable example, continues to lend credence to neo-Stalinist assertions that the tyrant had been right in his iron-curtain vigilance against “hostile encirclement.”

Yet America’s national security depends on the outcome of the struggle in Moscow. All of the potential threats that unfolded in post-Soviet Russia after 1991, spelled out in chapter 7, continue to fester: the unprecedented “infrastructural nightmare” of a system laden with weapons of mass destruction; the inherent risks of nuclear proliferation and lethal accidents, even the launching of high-alert missiles because of misinformation; and the growth of ultranationalist and other extremist movements.

Russia’s pro-Western modernizers hoped that Obama’s proposed reset meant Washington finally understood these mutual perils and would at last pursue a policy of doing no harm. But they also remembered, as I pointed out, the reset’s prehistory. In late 2010, Medvedev still worried that “alternatives await us” in U.S.-Russian relations. A leading pro- Western member of the Russian parliament was more explicit: “In Moscow and in Washington, people have been known to lose opportunities…. We have to hope that this time we won’t lose the opportunity.”⁵⁵

That both Obama and Medvedev, who personified the reset, were under attack in their own countries for “traitorous” policies was an ominous sign. Nonetheless, the political prospects were better in Moscow in one important respect: a significant part of the Russian policy class clearly understood that the two countries had come not only to another turning point but possibly to the last chance for a post–Cold War relationship. Pro-Western Russians could no longer find comfort in their customary association of major policy alternatives with a successor generation of leaders; the youthful Obama and Medvedev were that generation.

No such urgency or even awareness was evident in the American establishment. Instead, the possibility of greater cooperation with Moscow accelerated the tendency to equate “the crimes and abuses of this Russian government” with those of Communist Russia. In the same vein, U.S. Cold War–era themes became more pronounced. Moscow’s initiatives were again presented as “brazen Russian provocations.” (Even Putin’s historic apology to Warsaw for the Stalinist regime’s massacre of Polish army officers at Katyn in 1940 was dismissed as a “trivial gesture” designed to “manipulate” foreign opinion.) Warnings that Moscow was trying “to play off… the European allies against the United States” reappeared along with demands that Washington deploy military power to “roll back the Kremlin’s growing regional influence.” A Defense Department agent whose deception of Moscow caused a major breakdown in supplies for U.S. troops in Afghanistan was unrepentant: “I’m an old cold warrior, I’m proud of it.”⁵⁶

Obama’s proposed reset also brought more extreme American views to the fore. Present-day Russia, a Washington expert warned, was even more dangerous than its Soviet predecessor: “This is not your father’s Russia…. Today’s Russian leadership is younger and tougher.” Adding to this startling revelation was a Wall Street Journal editor’s discovery that “Russia has become, in the precise sense of the word, a fascist state.” Previously a fringe notion, by 2010 it had been taken up by an established American scholar in the journal of a leading university center of Russian studies.⁵⁷ (Readers may wonder if proponents of these ideas had any actual knowledge of the historical realities of Soviet Communism or Nazi Germany.)

Lost in this reckless (and uninformed) commentary were the multiple threats to America’s national security lurking in Russia—as well as the flickering chance for cooperation with Moscow to avert them. Writing in influential American newspapers once valued for their informed analysis, veteran pundits assured readers that “nuclear war between Russia and America had become inconceivable”; that, indeed, despite the near miss in Georgia in August 2008, when the White House had considered American air strikes against Russian troops, the danger of any U.S.-Russian war was “minuscule”; and that “what was needed was not the chimera of arms control” but a “renewal of the arms race.”⁵⁸

Such myopia inspired an even more reckless view: the worse the situation inside Russia, the better for America. Thus, a Washington Post columnist, deriding the new nuclear-reductions treaty, reported with satisfaction on the “emaciated Russian bear.” And a former Bush official, writing in the same newspaper, urged the Obama administration to “refuse to help Russian leaders with economic modernization,” even though modernizing that country’s infrastructures is essential for securing its devices of mass destruction. A university professor went further, hoping for “a destabilized Russia,” deaf to warnings from Moscow that this would be “catastrophic.”⁵⁹

Political and media myopia, the familiar triumph of ideology over reality, abetted another unwise Washington decision. Despite the Kremlin’s uncertain grip on its nuclear materials, indeed, despite alarm that uncontrolled wildfires in August 2010 might reach fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl reactor explosion, or even nuclear weapons facilities, the U.S. Senate voted, in December 2010, to ship massive quantities of spent fuel from American-built reactors to Russia for safekeeping and disposal. While Russian environmentalists protested this would turn their country into “an international radioactive waste dump,” and a Moscow military expert warned that no Russian region was “truly safe,”⁶⁰ the Obama administration hailed the decision as a victory for its “reset.”

None of these negative developments under President Obama was surprising. As I emphasized in chapter 7, a fundamental transformation of U.S.-Russian relations, essentially from a state of cold war to a strategic partnership, required bold, resolute leadership based on a full rethinking of the entire post-Soviet relationship, especially Washington’s winner-take-all attitude. Given the citadels of vested institutional, professional, and personal interests in the failed policies since 1991, centered in Washington but with ample support throughout the nation’s media and educational system, nothing less would result in a full “reset.”

Several factors probably explain why Obama did not provide any of these essentials. One was his own irresolute nature, also displayed in his domestic policies. (To be fair, the first black U.S. president may have been reluctant to assault too many American citadels or orthodoxies, if any.) Nor did President Obama turn out to be a “thought leader.”⁶¹ Having surrounded himself with advisers tied to the failed Russia policies since 1991, there was no one in his inner circle to propose fundamentally different approaches, still less heretical ones, or even much rethinking.⁶² As a result, Obama’s reset was cast in the same fallacies that had made it necessary.

But the new president was not solely or even mainly to blame. The larger failure was that of the entire American policy establishment, including its legions of media opinion makers, think-tank experts, and academic intellectuals. Leaders who had previously enacted major improvements in U.S.-Russian relations, including Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, were influenced by unorthodox ideas advocated over time by dissenting thinkers inside or near the political establishment, however few in number and however much in disfavor they often were.⁶³

No such nonconformist American thinking about Russia was in circulation before or after Obama took office, nor had it been for nearly twenty years. Reinforced by a cult of conventional “tough-minded” policymaking, which marginalized and invariably “proved wrong” even “eloquent skeptics” like George Kennan, the triumphalist orthodoxy still monopolized the political spectrum, from “progressives” to America’s own ultranationalists, in effect unchallenged in the parties, media, policy institutes, and universities.⁶⁴ No revisionist lessons had been learned from, no alternative thinking inspired by, the failures of the past two decades.

In addition to the historical fallacies about the end of the Cold War and their policy implications, examined in chapters 6 and 7, three more recent tenets of neo-cold-war U.S. policy had become axiomatic. First, present-day Russia was as brutally antidemocratic as its Soviet predecessor. Evidence cited usually included the Kremlin’s alleged radioactive poisoning of a KGB defector in London in 2006 and its persecution of the imprisoned oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, on whom his U.S. advocates bestowed the mantle of the great Soviet-era dissenters Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov. Second, Russia’s nature made it a growing threat abroad, especially to former Soviet republics, as demonstrated by its alleged “invasion and occupation of Georgia” in August 2008. And third, more NATO expansion was therefore necessary to protect both Georgia and Ukraine.⁶⁵

All of these assertions were far from the full truth and in need of policy debate, though there was none. Moreover, one involved another Washington double standard. Moscow’s military defense of Georgia’s secessionist provinces, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and recognition of their independent statehood were more justifiable, historically and politically, than was the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Russia’s ally Serbia in 1999, which turned the Serbian province of Kosovo into an independent (and highly criminalized) state. If nothing else, Washington set the precedent for military intervention in conflicts in multiethnic states and for redrawing national boundaries.⁶⁶

The Obama administration did nothing to discourage these or other anti-Russian axioms and too much to sustain them. By revising the reset to include democracy promotion, it reverted to a policy that had offended Moscow for many years while undermining democratic prospects in Russia, or at least doing nothing that actually nurtured them. (A second conviction of Khodorkhovsky over the administration’s protests, in December 2010, was more evidence of that long-evident truth.) In addition, the intrusive policy again allied Washington with Yeltsin-era politicians who were closely associated with the creation of the hated oligarchical system and whose democratic credentials, based on their past record and contemptuous attitudes toward their own people, were highly suspect.⁶⁷

Obama’s re-endorsement of Saakashvili and the Georgian leader’s NATO aspirations, which had already led to the proxy American-Russian war in 2008, also challenged Moscow’s understanding of the reset.⁶⁸ And it was dangerous. The Kremlin had demonstrated that if provoked it would strike hard at a U.S.-client regime on the wrong side of its “red lines,” especially in the North Caucasus region, where Islamic terrorism and social turbulence were threatening the Russian state. (In February 2011, Georgian state radio began potentially inflammatory broadcasts to the neighboring region.) Visiting Tbilisi in late 2010, even a mainstream American analyst found Saakashvili’s “hotheaded” leadership “unpredictable and impulsive.”⁶⁹ Nonetheless, the Obama administration continued training Saakashvili’s military, which included joint NATO-Georgian exercises near the Russian border.

These recapitulations of failed U.S. policies, along with President Obama’s newly declared intention of pursuing missile defense without constraints, seemed likely to severely limit his detente with Moscow and possibly destroy it. Certainly, they emboldened American enemies of the reset without causing any concerns in the policy establishment.⁷⁰ Leading experts continued to assure elite audiences that the United States, despite being embroiled in an unwinnable war and a corrosive economic crisis, could still “dominate world affairs”; that Moscow, despite having already regained crucial positions in its own neighborhood, notably in Ukraine, and established flourishing partnerships from China to Western Europe, was still too weak to resist a new U.S. cold war; and that “the road where Russia needs to go leads through Washington.”⁷¹

Some readers may take heart from Hegel’s bleak but ultimately affirmative maxim, “The Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk,” even though night may be near. Of course, great turnabouts in international politics, as happened in the late 1980s, are always possible, and for this longtime observer of U.S.-Russian relations, hope still dies last. But other readers may find more compelling the instinctive response of Russians who, ever mindful of lost opportunities in their history, offer caution in such circumstances: “An optimist is an uninformed pessimist.”

February 2011