CHAPTER 17

Celebrating a Collapse

The glimmerings of a new civil order finally came to the fountainhead of Communism in December 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. Boris Yeltsin, using his power base as Russia’s president, had seized control of the Soviet empire with the aim of dismantling it. It was a great historic event that greatly reduced the threat of nuclear war, diminished Cold War tensions, made the United States and Europe more secure and gave the millions of people under Soviet rule a measure of freedom.

My column and Journal editorials gave a lot of attention to the events leading up to the collapse. In May 1991, I wrote a column noting that Soviet paratroops were attacking Armenian villages and rounding up Armenians suspected of nationalist military activities.

I commented that this use of troops against ethnic nationalist movements in the U.S.S.R. could be seen as “the last resort of a beleaguered Communist Party trying to save itself from extinction.” I noted that KGB chieftain Vladimir Kryuchkov had appeared on TV to demand law and order, an unprecedented act by the leader of the KGB, which throughout Soviet history had preferred to exercise its powerful influence from behind the scenes. What I was seeing at that time were the warning signs of what would come later, a coup by party hard-liners to force Gorbachev out and return the empire to Stalinist-style police control.

Before that happened, Gorbachev would go to Oslo to collect a Nobel Peace Prize, in yet another case of the Nobel jury being clueless about what a so-called peacemaker was really up to. I wrote that it was surely unprecedented for a Peace Prize winner to “land-mine his acceptance speech with threats against, among others, his kindly hosts.” But that is what Gorby did in Oslo, threatening that if the industrial nations did not bail the Soviet Union out of its deep financial crisis, “the prospect of a new, peaceful period in history will vanish, at least for the foreseeable future.”

And it would be “futile and dangerous” for the West to set conditions on this aid, which the Soviets had demanded to the tune of $250 billion over five years. I wrote that this “is not the language of peace, but the language of extortion.” And if the aid was supposed to finance perestroika, or restructuring, what kind of a bet would it be to pour money into a project that had been under way for six years and had clearly failed? I wrote that no matter how many Harvard economists Gorby employed, he would not be able to restructure the economy and still preserve the Communist Party. “You can’t have a free-market economy and an economy run by and for a Communist Party elite.”

Of course, Gorby was desperate. Soviet GNP was in a nosedive because of strikes and crumbling factories. Its supply of foreign exchange was running out because of flagging exports of the only thing the U.S.S.R. could sell in international markets—raw materials. No doubt Gorby knew that he was in imminent danger of being overthrown, as the coup attempt only two months later proved. But the coup masters had failed to reckon with the opportunism of Boris Yeltsin, the president of the Russian Federation and perhaps the only Russian leader who was popular with the Russian people.

When he stood atop a tank in Moscow to defy the coup masters, I commented in a Journal article that, much to everyone’s surprise, President Yeltsin had strong military backing, which no doubt had to do with what had become a powerful belief among the Russian people, and the officers of several key military units in the Moscow vicinity, that only he could save Russia. With several elite divisions behind him, including the Tamanskaya Guards division responsible for protecting Moscow, Yeltsin faced down the coup leaders and began the process of disassembling the Soviet empire, forming a new Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) out of the 12 republics that were still willing to be affiliated with Russia.

The three Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, had dark memories of being seized by Stalin just before World War II and wanted no part of any official connection with Russia and chose not to join the CIS.

After the Yeltsin countercoup, I observed that “few of history’s cataclysmic events have occurred with more dramatic swiftness.” I wrote that “a great drama has just transpired in Russia. It will shake the world, as did the ultimately tragic drama of 1917. But the two events are opposite, the first a naked seizure of power and this one a product of democracy. If democracy’s tide keeps rolling, the outcome will be different too.”

Unfortunately, when I wrote those hopeful lines, I didn’t reckon with the fact that the most important power center of the old Soviet Union had not been destroyed by the demise of Communism. The KGB, since its founding by the Bolsheviks, had always attracted the empire’s brightest and most ambitious young people, who recognized its formidable behind-the-scenes power. After the Yeltsin takeover, these clever people quietly adapted, many taking advantage of the fall of Communism to appropriate state assets to form private ventures.

Ultimately, after the KGB had mutated into something called the FSB, a new leader, Vladimir Putin, would force Boris Yeltsin to abdicate in return for a guarantee that his family would not be prosecuted for corruption. Putin would begin rebuilding the old system, at least within the surviving Russian republic, of absolute political control from the Kremlin. The only difference would be that there would no longer be any pretense that the “people” owned the means of production. The means of production would be owned by supporters of Vladimir Putin, and it would afford them great wealth. Moscow became a city of billionaires.

Russia now had at least an approximation of a market economy and, up until the 2014 break in oil prices, the government’s coffers had been swollen by the oil revenues that Putin gained partly by expropriating the giant Yukos Oil Co., from Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who had acquired it in the public auction of state properties in the 1990s. Khodorkovsky, regarded by Putin as a political rival, was sent to the new gulag, one of the first indications of how Putin would revert back to the old Soviet ways.

The Russians are better off than they were in 1990, but not as well off as they could be if freed from a kleptocracy that steals private property and thereby discourages private investment. As to free expression and the rule of law, the government has reverted to policies that, while not as harsh as in the Stalinist days, are nonetheless more attuned to the views and practices of the secret police than was the case in the Yeltsin years. Broadcasting, for all practical purposes, is under state control, and the state exercises powerful influence over court decisions when they affect the interests of the ruling party. The electoral process is so structured that Vladimir Putin has been able so far to get whatever result he has sought. Opposition parties are often harassed by agents of the state.

In 2007 and early 2008, Russian leaders, well heeled with oil money, adopted a more assertive foreign policy that centered on a renewed rivalry with the United States. After all, that’s the only foreign policy KGB men ever knew. The collapse of crude oil prices has since tempered that hubris, but one should not underestimate the capacity for troublemaking by an authoritarian regime that is suffering economic adversity.

After the reunification of East and West Germany in October 1990, Jody and I decided to drive from Brussels to East Germany to see if we could look up her German ancestors. A friend specializing in genealogy had on Jody’s behalf found a record at the New York Public Library showing that Ernst and Frederika Minner had arrived at the port of Philadelphia from Königsee, Thuringia, in 1851. Jody had written to the town’s burgomeister and had learned that an English teacher, Eva Steinhoefel, would be happy to help us. We sought out Eva and her husband, Akim, in the village of Hirschdorf, in the hills above Königsee.

Eva had taught English in the Königsee schools, and Akim had been a Lutheran minister in Hirschdorf throughout the Communist era. When we sat down with them that evening, we found that we were the first “outsiders” they had met in 40 years. During the German retreat from the eastern front in 1945, their families had fled from the state of Silesia to escape the wrath of the Red Army and found their way to the safety of the American occupation zone. But one morning they had awakened to find that, under terms of the Yalta agreement signed by FDR, Churchill and Stalin, the Americans had withdrawn, and they were in the Russian zone. The Iron Curtain soon sealed them off from the outside world.

Eva and Akim had endured 40 years of harassment from the Communists. Akim had refused demands from the East German secret police (Stasi) that he inform on members of his congregation. Eva’s dislike for Communism and her interest in America did not endear her to the Communist principal at her school. Once, when she and a few other teachers were deliberately slow in rising when the principal walked into a faculty meeting, she received a summons to report to a school in the neighboring town of Rudolstadt on a Saturday morning. The other teachers who had not shown the proper respect were there as well, all wondering what was afoot. They had worn their best clothes, assuming they were being called to a regional faculty gathering. An East German army major showed up and addressed the group with the words, “I understand you ladies need some discipline.” With that, he conducted them down to the school yard and proceeded to give them close-order drill. Bystanders were treated to the spectacle of seven high school teachers in high heels marching around a school yard to the sound of “ein! zwei! drei! fier!”

Such humiliations were common. Because of their passive resistance to Communist regimentation, their three sons were denied admission to any East German university. They went to music conservatories instead, which in fact was a triumph because all three became successful professional musicians, one playing a leading role in managing the beautifully historic conservatory in Weimar.

I asked Eva what was the most important thing to her since the wall came down. She looked at me as if I might be a dunce. “We’re free!” she said. But of course. Only people like us who have never been locked up would fail to understand what that means. Now free to travel, Eva and Akim later came to visit us in Brussels. They told us the story of their church bell. A fire in the belfry of the little Hirschdorf church had made the church bell unusable. They found a bell of the right tone at a foundry in Jena, but it cost 1,000 marks. Fearing that it was hopeless to raise that much in their poor village, Akim nonetheless drafted a circular asking for money, saying that “A village without a bell is a dead village.” Miraculously, the next morning people were lined up at the parsonage to donate money for the bell. Even former Communists came forward, which was fortunate because they were the wealthier villagers. They raised enough, installed the bell and had a dedication ceremony in which the village brass band marched around the church playing the only religious song they knew, “Thine Is the Glory.” The bell was ceremoniously rung, and Hirschdorf was not a dead village anymore.

Jody wrote this story for the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and they put it on the front page. Eva was on a bus tour of England with a group of teachers when one of her friends came up to her and said, “Eva, don’t get excited, but your name is in this newspaper.” In the old days in East Germany, that might have been bad news, a renunciation or some such threat. But it was Jody’s story in the Herald Trib about the miracle of the bell in the village of Hirschdorf. Eva was delighted.

In Brussels, we met David McColl, who had been a World War II Royal Air Force (RAF) pilot. An electronic countermeasures expert, he told us that, during the 1940 Battle of Britain, the Air Ministry had become concerned that the Germans would cripple Britain’s defense by jamming ground-to-air radio communications. He was assigned to take a squadron of Spitfires to Scotland and practice maneuvers that would defeat jamming. He succeeded, but the remedy was never needed. The Germans never thought of the idea of jamming the British radios.

I renewed acquaintance with Philip Merrill, a Maryland publisher who had attracted Bob’s and my attention in the early ’80s when, as the Pentagon’s point man, he scuttled the first U.N. Law of the Sea Treaty. The Pentagon was mainly worried about rights of passage through the world’s many narrow straits being subject to U.N. control. We were suspicious about what was obviously another U.N. effort—one of many—to get an independent source of financing to free itself from the guiding hand of the United States. The treaty would have awarded its secretariat control over deep-sea mining. Our suspicions of the U.N. secretariat’s ambitions and competence were later confirmed by the Iraq Oil-for-Food scandal.

Phil, a friend of Vice President Dick Cheney, had been appointed by the first Bush administration as deputy secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and was kind enough to look me up when he got to Brussels. We spent a lot of time discussing the events unfolding in Europe, the Soviet collapse in particular. Phil made it a point to invite Russian military officers to his Brussels residence as a token of NATO goodwill, and I renewed my acquaintance with Russian brass at his parties. One of them gave me a private lecture about “patriotism,” as if he were exhorting his troops, and I realized that he was not taking the Red Army’s embarrassed circumstances with good grace.

Phil said that we should turn Russia into a big management training school to teach Russian businessmen how to function in a market economy. He had put his finger on a central problem. Russia had never had a system of free-market capitalism, and so all that would-be businessmen knew was what they had been taught by Communist theoreticians, who had preached that capitalism was, in essence, licensed theft. Russian businessmen did avail themselves of western advice, but the learning curve was aborted by Vladimir Putin and his KGB cronies when they decided to put vital industries, such as oil, back where they thought they belonged—in their own hands and indeed practice licensed theft.

Our friendship with Phil had a sad ending. In 2006, only two months after he had kindly attended my retirement party in New York, he sailed out onto the Chesapeake Bay alone on his much-loved sloop, “Merrilly,” tied an anchor to his ankle, balanced on a gunwale and shot himself with a shotgun. His body sank into the water. The Merrilly sailed on until it was intercepted by the Coast Guard. It was a week before Phil’s body was found. His troubled mind was not at all evident when he stayed late after my party to regale the younger Journal editors with his stories. But I later learned that, during the time he was running the Export-Import Bank and we were out of touch, he had had open-heart surgery. Deep depression is sometimes an aftereffect of that kind of operation, so I was told.

Another tragic story touched my life when I was running the editorial page in Brussels. Alexandra Tuttle was a freelance writer who based herself in Paris and offered us feature stories mainly about art and culture. A little woman with seemingly boundless energy and nerve, she also was remarkably sophisticated in assessing the politics of out-of-the-way places. One of her pieces gave a remarkable analysis of the fighting in Somalia, one of the hot spots in the 1990s. During the Bosnian War, she had gone behind the Serbian lines to interview a sniper in the hills above Sarajevo; he was firing on civilians braving the dangerous boulevards of the city. It was a chilling story of a young man who seemed totally dispassionate about his job of murdering innocent civilians. It told better than anything I had ever read how war dehumanizes ordinary individuals.

One day in September 1993, I received a phone call from Claudia Rosett, then manager of the Journal’s Moscow news bureau, asking if Alexandra was on assignment from us. She wasn’t. Claudia told me that a woman journalist had been killed in a plane crash in Sukhumi in the breakaway Georgian state of Abkhazia. A secessionist war was raging there, courtesy of the KGB’s efforts to punish the Georgians for leaving the Soviet Union, an effort that survives to this day.

We checked Alexandra’s friends in Paris, and none knew where she was. The Georgian military plane that had crashed had been brought down by a secessionist rocket as it was landing, and there was still fighting at the airport, so it was difficult to identify the victims. But with the aid of Fred Kempe, a Journal war correspondent, we finally were able to confirm that it was Alexandra. The soldiers on the plane had made a place up front for her, telling her it would be safer. But when the plane broke in two, the soldiers in the rear survived, and the front section was engulfed with flames.

Alexandra had gone off to the war on her own, ignoring my warning that I thought she was taking too many chances. That may be why she didn’t tell anyone where she was going. We had lost the contributions to our pages of a remarkably talented young woman. I wrote an editorial that concluded, “We will remember her spirit and courage and will miss her very much.”

As to foreign policy, my special interest in the early 1990s, the Clinton administration was accommodationist, with the result that it presided over a relatively peaceful period of history. But that had a negative side, as I observed in my columns. The failure to take a hard line toward dedicated enemies of the United States emboldened them to expand their aggressiveness. Saddam Hussein corrupted the U.N. Oil-for-Food program, crafted under the first Bush administration to allow Iraq to sell enough oil to buy food to feed the Iraqi population. He bribed oil buyers and food suppliers to provide him with kickbacks to finance his other goals, including rebuilding his military. The U.N. official in charge of Oil-for-Food was himself corrupted, a truth exposed by two hard-digging Journal editorial writers, Therese Raphael and Claudia Rosett.

Jody and I, living in Brussels were, of course, aware of all the politicking back home, but not so distracted that we couldn’t savor our life in Europe. We met Belgians who fondly remembered their liberation from the Nazis in World War II and expressed their gratitude with dinner invitations. One was Betty de Stryker, wife of a former governor of the Belgian Central Bank, who told me that she would be forever grateful to America for what it had done for the Belgian people, both when the United States relieved their famine in the aftermath of World War I and when Americans and the British liberated them from the German occupation in 1944.

Europeans our age had lived through perilous times in the 20th century. Jody and I heard many harrowing tales from our circle of European friends. One of the most poignant was that of Liliane Smith, a Belgian woman married to Dudley Smith, an American management consultant. Born Liliane Coucke, she was engaged in her youth to marry her longtime boyfriend, Jacques Leten, heir to a sizable fortune. They were both students at the University of Brussels when, in September 1941, the gestapo took over the university and expelled the Jewish faculty. The university closed its doors in protest.

Jacques became active in the Belgian underground. In May 1942, Liliane walked to the Café de Baudet, a student’s hangout just off the Rue de Namur, expecting to meet Jacques. He sent word that he was going to Ghent, and Liliane sighed with relief when five gestapo plainclothesmen showed up at the café looking for him. But a short while later, he walked into the café and told her his trip had been canceled. That cancellation sealed his doom. The gestapo agents arrested Jacques and a companion. He had been betrayed by a fellow student. Liliane never saw him again. He died in a Nazi concentration camp just north of Brussels. The cause of death, as Liliane later learned: “medical experiments.”

We met German survivors as well. Dorothy Gillette, also married to an American, told us of her youth in Kiel in the between-war years, the daughter of a respected university provost. When her mother heard that Hitler had ascended to the chancellorship, she uttered three prophetic words: “We are doomed.” We were less sympathetic to a former Prussian aristocrat who was angling to recover the family estate. His problem was that the land of his Junker ancestors was now part of Poland, and the authorities were not terribly friendly toward his overtures to buy back the land.

In late 1994, after nearly five years, we thought it time to come home. Bob agreed. For one thing, he needed more help in New York. So we moved back to our house in Westfield, New Jersey, where we had had three tenants in our absence. Bob gave me the added responsibility of overseeing the Americas column, which meant that I now had the whole world outside the United States to look after, at least so far as the Journal editorial page was concerned.

David Asman, editor of the column, had left us to become a newscaster at Fox News, so as a replacement, we hired a young woman named Mary Anastasia O’Grady, who was working at a think tank in Mexico City and contributing to an English-language newspaper there. She had worked as a lower-level manager at Merrill Lynch but had grown tired of the securities business and joined the think tank to gratify her interest in Latin American economics and politics. Her grasp of economics was impressive, and she seemed to be even more of a free marketer than we were. She has proved to be an excellent addition to the cast of editorial page writers, attracting a large following for her passionate support of reformers trying to move Latino governments toward a rule of law and free-market liberalism, a task that has been made difficult by the powerful Marxist forces in the region.

Part of the fun of my job in my years as the international deputy was finding and training young talent. I have already mentioned David Brooks, David Asman, Terri Raphael, Hugo Restall, and Claudia Rosett. Cait Murphy, who was our editor in Hong Kong, later worked for the Economist, Fortune and CBS. Richard Miniter, who wrote for the Journal editorial page in Europe, has authored several popular books. Pete Keresztes returned to his native Budapest to become editor of the Hungarian Readers Digest. Bret Stephens succeeded me as Global View columnist.

Back in New York, I continued to travel around my far-flung territory. I went to Indonesia to have a firsthand look at the economic “miracle” the Suharto family had supposedly conjured up. They had had the good sense to invite in foreign investors to develop an economic infrastructure, but the flip side was that the Suhartos had insisted that they be partners in these new foreign-financed ventures. I interviewed the energy minister and soon realized that he was giving me a carefully rehearsed argument related to the Suharto partnership issue even before I asked a question about it. He said the country was building more power-generating capacity than it needed, signing “take-or-pay” contracts with foreign investors that required the state to commit hard-currency reserves for power it didn’t need.

At one point, the minister’s secretary opened the door to remind him that he had another visitor. He apologized and brought the interview to a quick close. As we were leaving the building, my interpreter said, “You know who the other visitor was, don’t you?” I said no, and he said, “It was Titik, Suharto’s daughter.” Then it all became clear. Titik had the electric power concession in the family, which had divided up major industries to give each family member a cut of foreign investments. The minister had been rehearsing with me the argument he was planning to make to Titik—that it was unwise to invest in more power plants and increase the country’s dollar debts that had left it so vulnerable to a decline in the Indonesia currency.

He was so right, as the later collapse of the rupiah and the Indonesian financial sector during the Asian currency crisis of 1997–98 would prove. The minister was not happy that my column told an international audience of his troubles with the boss’s daughter but, of course, he was right to raise the issue. It was another case of the inherent dangers in even a relatively benign form of authoritarian rule that had at least had the benefit of fostering the nation’s economic development by inviting foreign investment. Indonesia, after the debt crisis, would move toward democratic governance and would become a model of sorts for political and economic development of poor nations.