After forty-five years of struggle, the decline and fall of the Soviet Union seemed like the triumph of American political warfare. The United States now felt free to export the twin pillars of its principles, American capitalism and American democracy, across the domain of the vanishing empire and everywhere on earth. Two American presidents saw the chance to make liberated Soviet satellites and states part of the West, and they took it. By 1999, the United States, still triumphant in its role as the world’s sole superpower, had incorporated Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary into NATO, making them military allies; nine more nations once under Soviet domination were preparing to join them. Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, once capitals of communism, were now in America’s sphere of influence, which would reach from the Baltics to the Black Sea. And Moscow itself was still up for grabs.
That projection of power was seen as the American foreign policy masterstroke of the decade, embraced by a broad political consensus in Washington, by hawks and doves alike. But not by all. Bob Gates, the CIA director under President George H. W. Bush, thought the United States was playing with fire. “At a time of a special humiliation and difficulty for Russia, pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward, when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen, at least in no time soon, I think probably has not only aggravated the relationship between the United States and Russia but made it much more difficult to do constructive business with them,” he said in 2000, shortly after Putin took power. “We have really antagonized the Russians in a major way.” And George Kennan, at the age of ninety-three, warned that “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.” He feared it could be the beginning of a new cold war, and in this he was prophetic. Kennan knew that empires do not vanish into thin air.
Every Russian leader from Gorbachev onward, each with escalating degrees of anger, believed that the United States had achieved the expansion of NATO into the old Soviet domain more by deception than diplomacy. Boris Yeltsin directly addressed Bill Clinton shortly after the American strategy came to light. “Why are you sowing the seeds of mistrust?” he thundered. “History demonstrates that it is a dangerous illusion to suppose that the destinies of continents and of the world community can somehow be managed from one single capital.” Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s junior partner in power, said: “We were assured … that NATO would not expand endlessly eastwards [as] a military bloc whose missiles are pointed towards Russian territory.” Putin thought the Americans “wanted a complete victory over the Soviet Union. They wanted to sit on the throne in Europe alone.”
He saw the American push as a cold war stratagem disguised in new-age camouflage—“a serious provocation,” as he said at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007. “And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made?” He has sought revenge ever since. He believed that the United States had moved the Berlin Wall east to Russia’s borders. And he began to push back. Only in the past few years have some of the key American records of the 1990s been declassified, and now that we can read them, we can begin to understand the origins of Putin’s assault on America.
The cold war had started after America and Russia could not reach a peace that satisfied Stalin in July 1945; three years later, he had cemented his control of Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, along with the rest of Eastern Europe and the Baltics. In response came containment, the inauguration of American political warfare, the Marshall Plan, and the creation of NATO. Four decades thereafter, the rebels of the Solidarity movement took power in Poland, the Hungarian government dismantled the electric fence at its border with Austria, the poets and political theorists and students who created the Velvet Revolution forced the Communists from power in Czechoslovakia. After the Berlin Wall was breached on November 9, 1989, tens of thousands of East Germans voted with their feet to join the West. “The strength of NATO has made possible these changes in Eastern Europe,” President Bush told the West German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, in a telephone call shortly before the wall came down. The tide of history was sweeping a divided Germany to reunite. And Germany reunited within NATO was the great prize of the cold war.
It also was “the Soviet Union’s worst nightmare,” National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft told Bush on November 29. It would “rip the heart out of the Soviet security system.” Would the Red Army move to stop the tide? Could it start World War III? Bush’s national security team weighed that terrible threat as the German people tore down the wall with sledgehammers. But the team soon concluded that they could dictate their decision to Gorbachev and the Soviet Union. Germany once again would be one nation.
This prospect did not gladden hearts throughout the world. “We beat the Germans twice, and now they’re back,” British prime minister Margaret Thatcher told European heads of state with more than a touch of alarm. French president François Mitterrand said to Thatcher over lunch at the Élysée Palace that a reunited Germany would have more influence and power than Hitler had ever wielded. “Every other leader, East and West, was against it,” Gates said. “The French were against it, the British were against it, the Soviets were against it, the Poles were against it, the Czechs were against it, the Hungarians were against it, the Italians were against it. We were totally isolated.” At the start of December 1989, Bush met Gorbachev on a storm-tossed ship off the coast of Malta. A year had passed since the Soviet leader had made a momentous speech at the United Nations renouncing the rationale for the cold war. “Life is forcing us to abandon traditional stereotypes and outdated views, and free ourselves from illusions,” he said. “Today a new world is emerging, and we must look for a different road to the future.” But for the Bush White House, it had been in many ways a lost year. For months after he took office, Bush had dithered, mistrusting his counterpart in Moscow, failing to see clearly that a new world really was emerging from the collapse of Soviet communism, balking at a different path than the one he had trodden since 1945, embarking instead on a painstaking and painfully slow review of each facet of American foreign policy. He had been looking in the rearview mirror while, out the windshield, the world was changing forever.
Now, finally, he engaged directly with Gorbachev. “Talking eye to eye, we discussed the problem of the reunification of Germany,” Bush told the Soviet delegation aboard the rocking boat. “We are aware how much of a delicate, sensitive problem this is.” After all, when unified, Germany had killed upward of twenty million Soviets. “We do not at all want the reunification of Germany done on the model of 1937–1945 which, obviously, concerns you,” Secretary of State James Baker said, treading less lightly than his president. “The Germany of that time had nothing in common with Western values.” Gorbachev bristled at this. Why, he asked pointedly, were democracy and openness Western values? Weren’t those precisely his highest goals, too? He cut to the chase: what were the two sides to call their common ground? Bush fumbled for the right words. Baker stepped in: “Could we possibly say as a compromise that this positive process is proceeding on the basis of ‘democratic values’?” And there the transcript tantalizingly ends.
In February 1990, Baker went to Moscow to appease Gorbachev. “We fought alongside with you; together we brought peace to Europe. Regrettably, we then managed this peace poorly, which led to the Cold War,” Baker told the increasingly embattled Soviet leader. “Now, when rapid and fundamental changes are taking place in Europe, we have a propitious opportunity to cooperate in the interests of preserving the peace. I very much want you to know: neither the president nor I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place.” And he said explicitly: “We understand that not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.”
Not an inch eastward. The United States gave “categorical assurances” on that point, said Jack Matlock, the American ambassador in Moscow under Reagan and Bush. Gorbachev heard them clearly, and he heard them repeatedly. He responded: “Any extension of the zone of NATO is unacceptable.” He trusted but did not verify: he never got America’s assurances in writing.
Kohl came to Camp David to brainstorm with Bush two weeks later and they had a meeting of the minds. They agreed to impose the terms of reunification on Moscow. The West Germans had no military power. But they had immense economic leverage; they were the largest sources of capital investment and joint ventures in the Soviet Union. The two men agreed that Kohl could in essence purchase East Germany, infusing it with capital, paying the Soviets to leave the country, and bringing a unified Germany into NATO. Baker gleefully saw this grand gambit as the greatest leveraged buyout in history. Gates later called it a plan to bribe the Soviets out.
“We are going to win the game,” Bush told Chancellor Kohl at Camp David, “but we must be clever while we are doing it.” Their conversation was suffused with Bush’s sense that he was in the saddle and riding history.
“The Soviets are not in a position to dictate Germany’s relationship with NATO,” Bush said. “To hell with that. We prevailed and they didn’t. We can’t let the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat.”
“Of course,” Kohl said, “they will want to get something in return.”
“You’ve got deep pockets,” said the president of the United States.
Kohl would shoulder the lion’s share of the costs for extracting 546,000 Red Army troops from Germany—an exodus requiring fifty troop trains a day, fifty-five cars each, for more than three years—and building bases to house them once they were home. The immediate cost of the buyout, or the bribe, was measured in tens of billions, then hundreds, a spectacular use of economic power in political warfare. Its immensity matched the importance of the moment. Over time, the bill for unification would come to more than two trillion dollars.
The withdrawal of the Red Army from the center of Europe would change the way American leaders viewed their mission in the world. They looked out over the horizon and saw a new dawn, in which the authority and influence of the Kremlin retreated all the way back to Russia’s frontiers, to be replaced by American power and principles. “Beyond containment lies democracy,” Baker proclaimed in a speech on March 30. “The time of sweeping away the old dictators is passing fast; the time of building up the new democracies has arrived. That is why President Bush has defined our new mission to be the promotion and consolidation of democracy. It is a task that fulfills both American ideals and American interests.” The promotion of democracy would be a defining force of American political warfare for the rest of the century.
While the earth moved under their feet, Bush and Baker continued to reassure Gorbachev that the great tectonic shift was not an earthquake. “I wanted to emphasize that our policies are not aimed at separating Eastern Europe from the Soviet Union. We had that policy before. But today we are interested in building a stable Europe, and doing it together with you,” Baker told the Soviet leader in Moscow on May 18. But Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze had a very different view: he warned that “if united Germany becomes a member of NATO, it will blow up perestroika. Our people will not forgive us. People will say that we ended up the losers, not the winners.”
At a Washington summit on May 31, Bush insisted to Gorbachev that “we are not pushing Germany towards unification. And of course, we have no intention, even in our thoughts, to harm the Soviet Union.” Though that was a half-truth, Gorbachev felt he had to believe in the good faith Bush professed. With his will and ability to preserve the crumbling architecture of Soviet power almost exhausted, he gave in a few days later. (He later told Kohl that after he fully realized the consequences, he felt like he had fallen into a trap, albeit one well baited with cash and credits.) The settlement reached in principle at the summit cemented the entrance of a unified Germany into NATO—and let the military alliance expand not by an inch but by forty-two thousand square miles, eastward to the borders of Poland and Czechoslovakia. It was the glorious culmination of a half century of political warfare against Soviet communism, and the greatest thrust of one nation against another in Europe since Eisenhower’s troops and Stalin’s soldiers crushed the fascist forces of Nazi Germany. It happened without a shot being fired, and it brought an epoch to an end.
“For months, the President’s speechwriters had included a phrase in speeches saying ‘The Cold War is over,’” Scowcroft said years later. “And routinely I crossed it out and crossed it out and crossed it out. After this meeting, I came to the conclusion that this time I could leave it in.”
Bush was more than just the last president to preside over the grinding tensions of the cold war. He was the last president to have served in World War II, the last to have seen combat in any theater of war, the last whose views of the world and America’s role in it were formed in the 1940s and 1950s—the last Eisenhower Republican, the last whose strategic mind-set was shaped by Kennan and his concept of political warfare. And he was the last to lead the United States into battle backed by an international alliance.
After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, the planning and execution of the war to drive him out was more than a display of America’s military might. Thirty-eight countries combined to face the Iraqi Army in combat, and they all fought and flew on NATO signals when the war was launched in January 1991. Six kinds of warplanes with pilots from eight nations flying up to four thousand sorties a day were woven together on NATO wavelengths. Nothing like it had happened before, and nothing like it has happened since. The war was a striking demonstration of the power the alliance possessed when harnessed by the United States. The lesson was not lost within the high councils of the Soviets.
The Kremlin was disintegrating into warring fiefs by the time the genial alcoholic Boris Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian republic of the Soviet Union in June 1991. Yeltsin led a delegation to visit NATO headquarters in Brussels at the end of that month. He met with the secretary general of NATO, the former West German defense minister Manfred Wörner, who told Yeltsin in no uncertain terms that he and the great majority of his member states were dead set against including Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia in their ranks. They did not want to isolate Russia from Europe. Yeltsin, sorely in need of international allies, had thought he had made a friend he could trust in Wörner. That hope became clear a few weeks later, in August, when the old guard of the Soviet Union, led by the KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov and the defense minister Dmitry Yazov, tried to mount a coup to topple Gorbachev and save Soviet communism from certain death. The Russian White House, the seat of the republic’s government in Moscow, came under armed attack.
“As the sun went down the first day, the outcome of the coup attempt against Gorbachev was an open question,” remembered Wayne Merry, the political officer at the American embassy in Moscow. “There were a number of very strange things about this putsch. First, there was nothing up in the sky. There were no helicopters. They didn’t have control of army aviation. The very fact they were conducting a coup in the middle of the massive metropolitan area that is Moscow and there were no helicopters in the sky was a fairly strong indication that not everything was under control. Second, the telephones were still working in the White House. Yeltsin had telephones. What the hell kind of a coup is it when you can’t control who’s got a telephone land line?”
An urgent call from Moscow got through to NATO headquarters in Brussels, where Wörner and his assistant secretary general, the American philanthropist Philip Merrill, were running an all-hands meeting of the sixteen member nations, several hundred people all told. “The one phone at the head of the table rings,” Merrill recounted. “It is for Wörner.”
“Boris? Boris who?”
“Boris Yeltsin, you idiot.”
“Boris. Nice to hear your voice. What can I do to be helpful?”
“I’ve got kind of a problem.”
“What’s the problem?”
“I’m here in the White House in my office, surrounded by a bunch of army troops. I’m not sure which way they are going to go. I need some help from NATO.”
Wörner put the phone down and said: “What are we going to do?”
The coup collapsed quickly, and that was the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. The next evening, Merry went out walking to Lubyanka Square, in front of the KGB headquarters. A jubilant crowd had gathered there. “They were taking down the huge statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the creator of the Soviet secret police,” he said. “There were fireworks in the sky. We went down to the Communist Party headquarters building on Old Square, where a number of Yeltsin’s associates had taken possession of the building, so the files couldn’t be taken away or destroyed. There is a street that looks past the Communist Party headquarters and into Red Square, along which you can see the flagpole on top of what’s called the Senate building inside the Kremlin. Instead of the red flag with the hammer and sickle on it, there flew the white, blue and red Russian tricolor.”
Bush and his national security team, almost to a man, and almost to the last, thought that Gorbachev would ride out the storm. They all were overtaken by the flood of events sweeping the Soviet Union away. A small example of how quickly the experts had to rethink the unthinkable: in late October 1991, George Kolt, the preeminent Soviet specialist at the CIA, told the White House that Ukraine—a Soviet republic with fifty million people and the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal—might become an independent country within five years. His counterpart at the National Security Council, Ed Hewett, thought that impossible. A fierce argument ensued. Five years or never? It happened in five weeks.
The last American ambassador to the Soviet Union was a smart, and smart-mouthed, former Democratic National Committee chairman named Robert Strauss; he told Bush and his national security aides that he soon would be the first American ambassador to Russia. No one believed him. But the hammer and sickle went down over the Kremlin for the last time on Christmas Day, marking the end for Gorbachev and the Soviet Union—and Bush would be out of power a year later. Ambassador Strauss had “a great metaphor,” Merry said, “which was that we—including Russia’s leaders—were all like a pissant riding on a log in a river going downstream imagining it determines the direction the log is going and its destination.” The fall of the Soviet Union undermined some of the certitudes of American national security. How could America be a great nation without a great enemy? Why did we need an immense military establishment built to fight the Third World War against a nation that no longer existed? And what was NATO supposed to do? As Yugoslavia imploded and the bloodiest conflict in Europe since 1945 began to ravage the Balkans, NATO and the rest of the West stayed out of the fray.
Into this swirl of uncertainty stepped the next president of the United States, the governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton. “The Cold War is over,” Clinton had proclaimed at the Democratic National Convention in July 1992. “And our values—freedom, democracy, individual rights, and free enterprise—they have triumphed all over the world.” His speech ran to 4,000 words, 141 of which dealt with America’s role abroad. He had by all accounts thought little about foreign policy, perhaps less than any commander in chief of the twentieth century. As president, he believed he could deal with the immense problem of Russia by the force of his good nature, befriending and cajoling Yeltsin, calling him a democrat though he ruled by decree, and doing everything he could to support him. At the same time, he became the singular force for expanding NATO, and that push eastward was certain to subvert Yeltsin. These were profoundly contradictory positions, but Clinton was a supremely gifted politician, charming and seductive, at times a silver-tongued liar, and so he was sure he could do both things at once.
He began to advocate enlarging the alliance at the urging of his national security adviser, Tony Lake, whose job required the resolution of contradictions. Lake was a rare bird in Washington, a moralist, or at least far less amoral than most of his peers and his new boss. He had been a highly regarded Foreign Service officer in Vietnam in the early 1960s, before the arrival of American combat troops. Among the lessons Vietnam taught him was that good intentions can lead to “a war of murderous naivete.” He had joined Henry Kissinger’s National Security Council staff in 1969; he had resigned on principle after Nixon invaded Cambodia in 1970; Kissinger had wiretapped him when President Nixon set out on a futile search for leakers. Under President Carter, he had held Kennan’s post as director of policy planning at the State Department. Under Presidents Reagan and Bush, he taught college students and raised cattle in western Massachusetts, a cerebral professor and a gentleman farmer, just like Kennan after his days at State were done. Now he held Kissinger’s old job. And it was up to him, more than anyone else in Washington, to determine how to project American power after the end of the cold war; Clinton for all his talents lacked the experience and intellectual capacity to do it. Lake thought the foreign policy of the United States could be both realistic and idealistic, thoughtful and muscular, perhaps even virtuous. “I think Mother Teresa and Ronald Reagan were both trying to do the same thing—one helping the helpless, one fighting the Evil Empire,” he once said. “One of the nice things about this job is you can do both at the same time and not see them as contradictory.” He served his president well in that regard, holding two opposing ideas in his head and trying to make them one. His intentions were excellent.
But no one, particularly the president, knew what the foreign policy of the United States was supposed to be after the cold war. This created what one of Lake’s aides called the “Kennan sweepstakes”—a contest to find a guiding principle that could replace Kennan’s strategy of containment, preferably one that could fit on a bumper sticker. Lake won by default with a speech in September 1993 espousing the principle of “democratic enlargement.” He said America would expand the map of the world’s market democracies, and the best way to do that was to add new nations to NATO. “During the Cold War, even children understood America’s security mission; as they looked at those maps on their schoolroom walls, they knew we were trying to contain the creeping expansion of that big, red blob,” Lake said. Now, he said, America’s mission was to enlarge the blue blob of market democracies by expanding NATO:
For half a century NATO has proved itself the most effective military alliance in human history.… [But] unless NATO is willing over time to assume a broader role, then it will lose public support, and all our nations will lose a vital bond of transatlantic and European security. That is why, at the NATO summit that the President has called for this January, we will seek to update NATO so that there continues behind the enlargement of market democracies an essential collective security.
In advance of that summit, the State Department’s top international security and policy planning officials had proposed admitting Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to NATO in 1998; then the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia in 2000. They had a more ambitious agenda for the twenty-first century that included Ukraine. And they were clear-eyed about the underlying rationale. It had less to do with expanding democracy and more to do with confronting the Kremlin. “The challenge for NATO over the next generation,” they wrote, was “containing and coopting Russian power.” But how to convince the Russians to cooperate with their own containment? No one knew. “Obviously, this is tricky,” they wrote, “but we do need to coopt the Russians.”
An immediate objection to this thinking came from General John Shalikashvili, NATO’s supreme allied commander in Europe, who became the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in October 1993. Born to a Polish mother in Warsaw, the son of a military officer from the Soviet republic of Georgia and the grandson of a czarist general, he and his family had fled to Germany from Poland, running for their lives before the westward advance of the Red Army half a century before. He argued that the Russians would see an expanding NATO as an existential threat.
The question of where the Russians might fit into the new map of the world remained enormous and unanswered, as was the equally thorny question of how to co-opt them. Yeltsin’s conduct did not inspire confidence in the idea of Russian democracy. His vision was often blurred. He had seen Clinton for the first time at a summit in Vancouver back in April 1993 (the first of their eighteen meetings, nearly as many as all their cold war predecessors combined). One pleasant afternoon, they went on a boat ride. “We were barely away from the dock before Yeltsin had downed three scotches,” wrote Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s close friend and his administration’s top Russia hand. He drank his dinner, too. “Yeltsin’s speech grew sloppy, his message sappy (‘Beeell, we’re not rivals—we’re friends!’).” Clinton, raised by an alcoholic stepfather, looked on the bright side: Sure, ol’ Boris was a drunk, he said, but he wasn’t a mean drunk, and in any case Yeltsin intoxicated was better than most of the alternatives sober.
Lech Wałęsa, Poland’s leader, turned Yeltsin’s weakness to his advantage. Wałęsa had leapt at the thought of joining NATO as a bulwark against Russia, though the offer had not been made yet. He had invited Yeltsin for dinner in August, and a river of vodka flowed. In his cups, Yeltsin agreed in principle that Poland was a sovereign nation and could join the alliance if it chose—and then, sobering up after sleeping it off, he tried to take it all back. Under the influence of his advisers, he wrote to Clinton that he was deeply uneasy at the prospect that nations once within the Warsaw Pact might become part of NATO. He argued that “the spirit” of the German unification treaty “precludes the option of expanding the NATO zone into the east.” In Russia, he warned, expansion would be seen by hard-liners and moderates alike as a continuation of the cold war, with all the dangers that implied.
Tony Lake, unlike Clinton, had calculated this risk carefully. He had reasoned: “If Russia went south, as it were, and did not become democratic, then at that point, if it was five years, ten years, twenty years down the road, certainly Poland, the Czechs, the Balts—who I’ve always argued passionately should be involved in this—are going to clamor for Western protection,” as he recounted a decade later. “So it’s better to do it now.” He had downplayed the effect expansion might have on the Kremlin, though an encounter with his Russian counterpart had given him pause. “It was a reception in Moscow at the time of an anniversary of the end of World War II. He’d had something to drink. I’d had something to drink. We had been talking about the 25 million Russians who had died in World War II, and he said, ‘You know, we made that sacrifice in World War II and we’re prepared to make that sacrifice now against NATO enlargement.’ I remember thinking: This is really good vodka.”
On September 21, 1993, the same day Lake made his speech about the burgeoning blue blob of democracy, anarchy struck Moscow. Yeltsin, his hold on power slipping in the face of rising political opposition from nationalists and neofascists, resolved to dissolve the Russian legislature. This violated the constitution, so the legislators moved to impeach and replace him. Street protests erupted, with hordes of demonstrators carrying Soviet flags and portraits of Stalin. Violent clashes followed; 187 people died in the streets of Moscow over the course of the next ten days. On October 3, Yeltsin ordered the shelling of the parliament to break the back of the resistance, blowing a hole in the Russian White House. And on the same day, Somali rebels brought down a Black Hawk helicopter over Mogadishu, killing eighteen Americans whose humanitarian mission had morphed into counterinsurgency, and dragging the charred corpses of the fallen soldiers through the streets. The split-screen disasters struck a blow at the hope that American democracy would shape the world. On October 6, Clinton told Talbott: “Boy, do I ever miss the cold war!”
Less than a year after his election, Clinton was reeling, his popularity plummeting, his administration faltering. He faced a world that would not easily be remade in America’s image. He keenly wanted a foreign policy victory in the name of American democracy, something looking to a new era, beyond the cold war. His calendar for the start of the new year included the NATO summit in Brussels, a meeting in Moscow with Yeltsin, and a conference in Prague with the leaders of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. He wanted to offer the three leaders membership in NATO—though by now he was well aware that saying so could blow up relations with Russia. Was it worth that risk? The Pentagon and a good part of the State Department thought not. They promoted an alternative: the Partnership for Peace. First conceived in 1990, after the deal sealing reunification of Germany, the partnership would establish military-to-military contacts with Russia and the seven former Warsaw Pact states, inviting them to sit in on NATO councils without being allowed to join the alliance, sharing information but not power, and requiring their armies to have civilian control, a transparent budget, and a doctrine based on defense, not offense. Clinton would try to have it both ways, as was his wont. It would require a measure of duplicity to sweet talk Yeltsin into the partnership while making a pact with Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest behind his back.
Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Talbott flew to Russia after reading a sobering memo from the American chargé d’affaires in Moscow, James Collins, warning that the NATO issue was “neuralgic to the Russians. They expect to end up on the wrong side of a new division of Europe if any decision is made quickly. No matter how nuanced, if NATO adopts a policy which envisions expansion into Central and Eastern Europe without holding the door open to Russia, it would be universally interpreted in Moscow as directed against Russia and Russia alone.” On October 22, they took a helicopter to a dacha in the forest, once Stalin’s hunting lodge. They walked into an overheated sunroom filled with stuffed trophy animals. Yeltsin, who had beaten back a coup by blunt force barely three weeks before, was in bad shape. He reeked of booze.
Christopher told him that Russia would have “full participation in the future security of Europe.” The Partnership for Peace would include all the former Soviet and Warsaw Pact states, and “there would be no effort to exclude anyone.” Yeltsin wanted to make sure that he understood: was it partnership for all, not NATO membership for some? “That is the case,” said Christopher. “A brilliant idea,” Yeltsin responded, “a stroke of genius! This serves to dissipate all of the tension which we now have in Russia regarding East European states and their aspirations with respect to NATO. It would have been an issue for Russia, particularly if it left us in a second-class status. Now, under your new idea we are all equal.” Yeltsin was delighted. “Really great,” he exclaimed. “Tell Bill I am thrilled.”
But not for long: on January 12, 1994, Clinton conferred with the Poles, the Czechs, and the Hungarians at Prague Castle and emerged to announce that the game had changed. He said: “Now the question is no longer whether NATO will take on new members but when and how.” Not whether but when was the near-opposite of not an inch eastward.
Wayne Merry was handling the political reporting at the American embassy in Moscow. In one hand he held a State Department readout of what Clinton and Christopher had told Yeltsin. In the other he held the Warsaw embassy report of what the president had told the Poles. “The contrast was quite stark, as was our duplicity,” he said. “The Poles and others publicly trumpeted their achievement of quick entry into NATO, so the Russians knew we had, more or less, lied to them. I never understood why we did this. It would have been much better to tell Yeltsin the truth and work with Moscow on how to manage the issue to improve ties between NATO and Russia. I think it was a characteristic of the Clinton Administration, especially in its relations with Russia, to believe it could have its cake and eat it too, that we could blatantly deceive the Russians about a matter of great importance to them without some loss of credence on their part in our word and in our intentions. Good diplomacy is not lying for your country, as is often said. Good diplomacy is being known as true to your word.”
The last man among half a million Russian soldiers, a huge proportion of them officers, and many thousands of them having been billeted in boxcars or in tents with their wives and their children for years, now had retreated eastward from Germany into Mother Russia. The Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, the Red Army rampaging toward Berlin half a century before, now ran like a movie in reverse. The culmination of this crucial phase of rolling back the Russians came in Berlin on August 31, 1994, at a formal ceremony led by Helmut Kohl. The chancellor made solemn remarks about the Soviets’ suffering in the war. Yeltsin, drunk again, wandered off to snatch a baton from the conductor of a military band serenading the troops, grabbed a microphone, and attempted to lead the audience in song. It was a mortification for the Russian nation. And the humiliation was about to deepen.
The Clinton administration had been deceiving the Russians, but it was also deceiving itself. “NATO expansion will, when it occurs, by definition be punishment, or ‘neo-containment,’ of the bad Bear,” Talbott wrote to Christopher. “Our current position is based on the proposition that an expanded NATO will not be directed at Russia,” he pointed out. But did “we really, or at least entirely, believe this? Certainly the Poles and Czechs don’t.” The historian Mary Elise Sarotte obtained the declassification of these and other secret documents from the twenty-five-year-old diplomatic record and published them in the journal International Security in July 2019. Among them were Talbott’s musings on the state of play with Russia. Talbott, who held the rank of deputy secretary of state for seven years under Clinton, was a journalist, not a diplomat, by trade; he had been Time magazine’s chief correspondent on Soviet-American relations in the Reagan and Bush years and had written four hefty books in that time. He deeply admired Kennan and, like him, he threw his weight around with words. “We and the Soviet Union didn’t meet each other halfway” at the end of the cold war, “and we and Russia aren’t going to do so either,” he now wrote. “Russia is either coming our way, or it’s not, in which case it’s going to founder, as the USSR did.” He rejected Vice President Al Gore’s statement to Yeltsin that relations between the United States and Russia would emulate the docking of the American space shuttle with the Mir space station, matching orbits as they moved to merge in synchrony: “It’s Russia that must move toward us, toward our way of doing things.” This might seem to be “an obnoxious confirmation of our doctrine of ‘exceptionalism.’” And if so? “Well, tough. That’s us; that’s the U.S. We are exceptional,” wrote the Russia hand.
The doctrine of exceptionalism was a deeply held faith that America was the last, best hope of earth, in the words of Abraham Lincoln. But another current of thought ran even deeper. Alexander Hamilton wrote in 1787 that America would not be an exception to the history of clashing empires, a chronicle of war as old as Christendom, centuries of folly marked by flashes of glory. “Have we not already seen enough of the fallacy and extravagance of those idle theories which have amused us with promises of an exemption from the imperfections, weaknesses and evils incident to society in every shape?” he asked. “Is it not time to awake from the deceitful dream of a golden age, and to adopt as a practical maxim for the direction of our political conduct that we, as well as the other inhabitants of the globe, are yet remote from the happy empire of perfect wisdom and perfect virtue?”
Blinking in the light of a false dawn, America’s leaders saw their nation as that wise and virtuous empire. The rest of the world had to become more like America, like it or not.
Talbott wrote to the secretary of state that he saw the United States as a lighthouse, illuminating the true course for the Russians toward “democratic elections, free press, pluralism, open markets, civil society, rule of law, independent judiciary, checks and balances, respect for minority rights.” And that light should guide “the rickety, leaky, oversized, cannon-laden Good Ship Russia, with its stinking bilge, its erratic, autocratic captain, and its semi-mutinous crew” to a harbor on the horizon. If the United States was to be the indispensable nation in the remaking of a new world, Clinton made Yeltsin an irreplaceable partner in that quest, though his personal conduct might be irredeemable and his political course indefensible.
The commodore of the Russian rust bucket had joined the Partnership for Peace, and he was set to arrive for his first formal meeting at the White House at the end of the summer of 1994. Clinton had been telling his aides that he was sick and tired of talking about the “post-cold war era,” defined by what had gone past and not what lay ahead. He wanted to look forward, but he didn’t see a clear blueprint for a bridge to the twenty-first century. He felt that his administration was on autopilot as it approached an uncertain future, and the greatest uncertainty, he told his foreign policy brain trust, was “the big mess in Russia, which has got everybody afraid that things are going to fall apart.” Yeltsin arrived in Washington on September 26, stumbling off his plane. He stayed at Blair House, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the executive mansion, and that night, by Talbott’s account, he was “roaring drunk, lurching from room to room in his undershorts,” and emerging on a landing, shouting “Pizza! Pizza!” Then, over lunch in the White House, Clinton told Yeltsin the unpleasant truth: NATO would head east. “We’re going to move forward on this,” he said. He insisted in the next breath that “NATO expansion is not anti-Russian.” And he promised that someday Russia could join, too—a false hope, since you had to be a democracy to get into the club, and Russia wasn’t one. Yeltsin had little to say of substance on the issue. But out of the blue, at day’s end, he asked Clinton to attend a fifty-two-nation conference in Budapest in December, where and when, as it turned out, he would give his reply.
A few days before the Budapest conclave, NATO ministers met in Brussels, and the alliance resolved to expand as America wished. Yeltsin responded with a frosty letter to Clinton warning that the move “will be interpreted, and not only in Russia, as the beginning of a new split of Europe.”
Clinton hadn’t focused on this as he prepared to fly to Budapest. He was preoccupied: The Democratic Party had suffered a historic drubbing in the November elections, as voters punished Clinton for his failed domestic health care initiatives and his foreign policy fiascoes; the Republicans had won control of the House of Representatives for the first time since 1952, and won it overwhelmingly. With it, they sought to implement their conservative “Contract with America,” which notably included the integration of the former Warsaw Pact nations into NATO in its highly hawkish text. One of the first orders of business for the new Congress would be the NATO Expansion Act, explicitly inviting Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into the alliance. That reinforced Russia’s sense that American leaders wanted to cage the bear and poke it in the eye for good measure.
Clinton had told Yeltsin that together they could create “the first chance ever since the rise of the nation-state to have the entire continent of Europe live in peace.” The cold war was over, as Clinton had declared on a dozen occasions, and with that glorious achievement would come an end to the wars of the twentieth century; now war-fighting would become peacekeeping, carried out by the United Nations, NATO, and perhaps one day by the Partnership for Peace.
That vision—and the very idea of the prospective partnership—overlooked some cold hard facts.
The great wars of the twentieth century all had started in the center of Europe, each leading inexorably to the next, world war to world war to cold war, each igniting after the winners and losers had failed to make a lasting peace, and the peace at the end of the cold war had proved fleeting there as well. The breakup of the former Yugoslavia in 1991 had engendered the bloodiest battles in Europe since the death of Adolf Hitler. The Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević had so pitilessly attacked the predominantly Muslim cities and villages of Bosnia that two million out of four million people were driven into refuge, wounded, or killed. Yeltsin unswervingly supported his fellow Slav, Milošević; Russia unfailingly blocked and tackled for the Serbs in the United Nations Security Council.
America and NATO had fiddled while the Balkans burned and innocent civilians died. NATO airpower would have deterred the Serbs and saved countless lives. But to the enduring shame of the Americans and the Europeans, neither Bush nor Clinton nor the leader of any NATO nation had had the will to take action. Throughout 1993 and 1994, NATO had contributed a pittance—not much more than logistical support—to a UN peacekeeping mission whose robust military rules of engagement were routinely annulled at UN headquarters in New York. Now Clinton and his national security team rebuffed all pleas for action. “I wanted us to use air strikes, and they didn’t want to do that,” said Warren Zimmermann, the American ambassador to Yugoslavia under Bush, who resigned in protest as the director of the State Department’s refugee bureau under Clinton. “Not only did they not want to do it, but they used deception and subterfuge to pretend that we had a tough policy when we really didn’t.” He had calculated that bombing the Serbs could have protected one hundred thousand civilians from certain death. “And so it continued: week in and week out,” Talbott wrote, “the Serbs brutalized the Muslims in Bosnia while the West issued warnings and Russia did everything it could to make sure that nothing came of our threats.”
After flying all night to Budapest on December 5, 1994, a bleary Clinton fumbled his speech to the security conference. “As NATO expands,” he said, “so will security for all European states, for it is not an aggressive, but an offensive organization.” He must have meant to say defensive. Yeltsin then took to the stage. He said the Russians would not tolerate being isolated. They would not be excluded from a new world order in Europe. The expansion of NATO was a divisive force driven by a cold war logic. And then he let Russia’s old enemies have it: “Europe, even before it has managed to shrug off the legacy of the Cold War, is risking encumbering itself with a cold peace.” A few hours later, back aboard Air Force One, Clinton fumed as he flew home, saying he’d been blindsided, stabbed in the back. He now knew that cold peace was the bumper sticker that would adhere to his era.
But he kept up his courtship with Yeltsin at a May 1995 meeting in Moscow marking the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. Yeltsin warmed up to his wooing and cajoling. They were geopolitical codependents: Yeltsin needed America’s political and financial support to win reelection in 1996, and Clinton desperately wanted Yeltsin to win, to keep the communists and neofascists out of the Kremlin—and for his own political future. Talbott said: “We had to be careful not to let a Yeltsin defeat be seen as a Clinton defeat.” Clinton knew that if Yeltsin fell, he himself would face a who-lost-Russia hellfire on the campaign trail when he sought a second term. Bill sorely wanted his pal Boris to say yes to NATO, though Yeltsin and his ministers all said nyet with increasing intensity.
“For me to agree … would constitute a betrayal on my part of the Russian people,” Yelstin told him flatly. “I see nothing but humiliation for Russia if you proceed.” He proposed a way out: “You and I are heading for elections. The extremists and hardliners are exploiting this issue for their own purposes—on both sides. I am being attacked from both the right and the left on this.… So let’s postpone any change in NATO until 1999 or 2000.”
Clinton tried to reason with him: “The question is, does the U.S. at the end of the Cold War still need a security relationship with Europe along with a political and economic relationship?”
“I’m not so sure you do,” said Yeltsin.
“Let me be clear, Boris: I’m not bargaining with you,” Clinton said, while driving his bargain harder.
Clinton gave him unequivocal and unwavering personal and financial support, the first and only American president to campaign openly for his Russian counterpart. He depicted Yeltsin as the embodiment of Russian democracy, a declaration that fell outside diplomacy, lying somewhere in the realm of magical thinking. As Russia’s military slaughtered thousands of civilians in the secessionist republic of Chechnya, Clinton stood by Yeltsin’s side in Moscow and, incredibly, compared him to Abraham Lincoln in the American Civil War. He helped to arrange for the International Monetary Fund to pump billions into Russia—money intended to prop up his man in Moscow and reinforce the illusion that a free-market economy was working in Russia. It wasn’t. The Russian people felt like lab rats, living in an economic experiment cooked up by political scientists playing God. American leaders preached that capitalism brought democracy, and free markets begat freedom surely as dawn followed the dark of night. But this proved to be a fantasy. The American dream that a strong dose of unfettered capitalism would engender the rule of law helped guarantee that political racketeers emerged as the winners of the struggle for post-Soviet Russia.
Yeltsin had been blunt about his need for cold cash and plenty of it. He asked Clinton to use his influence with the IMF “to perhaps add a little—from nine to thirteen billion dollars—to deal with social problems in this very important pre-election situation.” Clinton did that. In March 1996, the IMF approved $10.2 billion for the Russian government over three years, with $4 billion front-loaded in the first year, a last-minute increase of $1.2 billion over what had been contemplated a few weeks before. And then Yeltsin haggled for more in May: “Bill, for my election campaign, I urgently need for Russia a loan of $2.5 billion.” It’s hard to say whether Yeltsin got his hands on a great windfall in time to grease his political machine. More important was the perception among the populace that he could provide for Mother Russia in a time of continuous crisis. Most crucially, Clinton averted his gaze as Yeltsin embarked on his corrupt “loans-for-shares” program, in which Russia’s new oligarchs received ownership of state energy and mineral industries and, in turn, gave Yeltsin political and financial support. If this was free-market capitalism, it was a kind not seen in the United States since John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan and the rest of the robber barons built their empires in the late nineteenth century. The disastrous privatization scheme helped to spur the death of reform. Under Yeltsin, the nation’s economic wealth decreased by more than 40 percent; the collapse was twice as large and lasted three times longer than the Great Depression in the United States. Russia wasn’t on the road to democracy, but to a thieves’ paradise where the Kremlin’s favorite gangsters extracted the nation’s treasure, laundered it, and turned it into overseas luxuries.
When Yeltsin won in a runoff in July 1996, defeating the communist candidate, Clinton told the Russian deputy foreign minister that there was dancing in the White House. His support for Yeltsin at all costs had been a centerpiece of his foreign policy. But within days, Yeltsin was dancing with death; at his inauguration in August, he was barely able to walk or talk. His heart was failing. He disappeared from view before he underwent a seven-hour quintuple bypass in November, and he was out of the picture for months thereafter.
Clinton won a second term in November—the first Democrat reelected as president since FDR—with notably strong support from ethnic Catholic voters who had roots in Central Europe. The Polish diaspora in particular helped him win Wisconsin and Michigan. In Detroit, two weeks before election day, he had inhaled stuffed cabbage, pierogis, and sauerkraut for lunch at the Polish Village Cafe. And he proclaimed in public on that day, for the first time, that by 1999, on the occasion of NATO’s fiftieth anniversary and ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the alliance would embrace its old Warsaw Pact enemies.
In Moscow, Yevgeny Primakov steeled Russia for this reality. He was Yeltsin’s minister of foreign affairs and in time would be his prime minister. Primakov had worked as a KGB spy, undercover as a radio journalist and as a foreign correspondent for Pravda, from 1956 to 1970, executing espionage missions in the United States and the Middle East. He had run the Russian foreign intelligence service for five years under Yeltsin, the leader of a cadre of veteran KGB officers gaining political sway over the country. On January 31, 1997, Primakov told the speaker of the Duma, the Russian parliament, that “our position with regard to NATO expansion remains invariably negative … especially the possibility of moving NATO’s military infrastructure to the East.” He said the decision would “define the European configuration for decades in the future,” and “politicians who are in power today will bear historic responsibility” for its consequences.
The relationship between Clinton and Yeltsin was sustained in 1997 by American flattery. Clinton offered him entrée into glittering institutions of Western power like the Group of Seven, comprised of the world’s leading industrial nations, which commanded half of the world’s gross domestic product. It would now become the Group of Eight, and so it remained until it expelled Russia after Putin’s military seizure of the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014. Russia had no business belonging to the club; its economy was about one-fifth the size of California’s. Though the offer delighted Yeltsin, his warm feelings soon began to cool, and the issue was, inevitably, NATO.
At the start of 1998, the Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević was on the warpath once again, fighting the latest battle of a six-century war between the Serbs and the Kosovars. Kosovo was part of the Ottoman Empire until 1912; it was now incorporated into Serbia, and its 1.5 million people wanted out. They were ethnically Albanians and culturally Muslims, though irreligious ones: they drank wine and ate pork, and they did not pray five times a day, if at all. Milošević nonetheless painted them as Islamic terrorists, and Yeltsin went along with that libel. When the self-styled Kosovo Liberation Army attacked Milošević’s forces, he started a massacre; more than a million people were driven into exile as they ran from his campaign of ethnic cleansing, and more than ten thousand would die before it ended. NATO was trying to keep the peace in Kosovo during 1998, but it was not holding. Clinton called Yeltsin from the Oval Office on June 15 and tried to find a common ground. He couldn’t. The use of force by NATO was inadmissible, Yeltsin said. Clinton, taken aback, said maybe something could be worked out at the United Nations. That hope did not take hold.
The fortunes of both men plummeted in the fall of 1998. Russia was in the grip of a crippling financial crisis, and Yeltsin lacked the acumen to solve it. His political standing would never recover. The Russian people had become weary of his weakness, tired of failed flirtations with free markets, fed up with America’s efforts to impose democracy upon them. Clinton’s own trouble was self-inflicted. His unfaithful relationship with the truth had ensnared him; he had been caught lying under oath about his sexual liaisons with a White House intern. The House of Representatives opened hearings on October 8 and impeached Clinton on counts of obstruction of justice and perjury by a narrow partisan vote on December 19. (The hypocrisy of the Republican leadership was profound: House Speaker Newt Gingrich was engaged in adultery, as was his designated successor, Representative Robert Livingston; both men resigned in early 1999. The next Republican Speaker, Representative Dennis Hastert, became the highest-ranked American politician in history to go to prison after he was convicted of crimes stemming from his long history of molesting teenage boys.) The Senate acquitted Clinton on February 12, 1999, and by the time the political circus in Congress struck its tent, his popularity was headed to an all-time high.
One month later, on March 12, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and the foreign ministers of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic convened at the Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri, where the ministers signed the documents sealing their nations’ accession into NATO. Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia, all once part of the Soviet empire, were next in line, with Ukraine waiting in the wings. Albright, who was born in Prague and fled with her family after the Communist takeover in 1948, declared that the alliance now would do “for Europe’s east what NATO has already helped to do for Europe’s west: steadily and systematically, we will continue erasing—without replacing—the line drawn in Europe by Stalin’s bloody boot.” Erasing without replacing was a diplomatic way to encapsulate nine years of America’s efforts to enlarge its global influence and power.
The first mission of the newly expanded NATO would be launched in eleven days. It was an act of war in the name of peace: the bombing of a European capital, with the goal of stopping the continuing onslaught of Milošević and the Serbs. Three and a half hours before the first bombs struck Belgrade, Clinton called Yeltsin. One thousand NATO warplanes, most of them American, were at the ready; the German Air Force was about to launch its first combat operations since World War II.
“We have to launch airstrikes against military targets in Serbia soon,” Clinton told him, without saying how soon, since the Russians had not been consulted. “It will be your decision if you decide to let this bully destroy the relationship we worked hard for six and a half years to build up.… I know this is a political problem for you at home, and I will do everything I can to put it right and restart the diplomacy at any point in this. I’d give anything not to have to make this telephone call today, but we have no choice. I hope between the two of us we will not let it destroy all the bigger issues before us and the world.”
Yeltsin was enraged. “In the name of our future, in the name of you and me, in the name of the future of our countries, in the name of security in Europe, I ask you to renounce that strike,” he said. “Our people will certainly from now have a bad attitude with regard to America and with NATO.… I remember how difficult it was for me to try and turn the heads of our people, the heads of the politicians towards the West, towards the United States, but I succeeded in doing that, and now to lose all that. Well, since I failed to convince the President, that means there is in store for us a very difficult, difficult road of contacts, if they prove to be possible. Goodbye.” He hung up on Clinton, something he had never done before.
The NATO bombing went on for eleven weeks, killing more than one thousand combatants, before Milošević raised a white flag. The attack was not without fatal errors. NATO jets struck a convoy of refugees, and fifty died. And an American B-2 stealth bomber, the most expensive warplane ever built, flying its first combat missions in the ten years since its creation, hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, using coordinates supplied by the CIA, which had identified the building as Milošević’s military procurement headquarters. Three innocents were killed, joining some five hundred unintended casualties of the war and outraging the Chinese. Milošević survived politically, but not for long; the United States openly worked to defeat him in the next election, with the State Department and American political consultants advising his opponents and providing millions of stickers with a clenched fist symbol and the slogan “He’s finished” in Serbian. He would be charged with war crimes by an international tribunal, and would die in prison.
All of this fiercely infuriated the Russians: Milošević was a murderous son of a bitch, but he was their son of a bitch. The military and political campaign to crush him confirmed every fear, and fueled many conspiracy theories, about what the expansion of NATO foretold for Russian influence and power in the world. And now America was once again bombing Iraq, Russia’s longtime ally in the Middle East, this time in an effort to knock out what it believed to be Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Throughout the 1990s, “it sometimes seemed to Russian generals and Duma committee chairmen that every time they turned on CNN there was another briefing from the Pentagon announcing that the U.S. had yet again dispatched its aircraft carriers and launched its cruise missiles,” Strobe Talbott observed. “And even when the U.S. wasn’t striking against targets in Russia’s neighborhood if not its front yard, it was expanding its capacity to do so through the enlargement of NATO.… Some of those generals and politicians believed that it was only a matter of time before Russia itself would be in the crosshairs of America’s unchecked military power.”
Among them was the next leader of Russia. In August 1999, Yeltsin fired his entire cabinet; it was the fourth time in eighteen months he had sacked his prime minister. The new man for that job was a mysterious figure, little known in Moscow and less so in Washington, who had risen from obscurity to become chief of the FSB, the main Russian intelligence service, in July 1998; then, in March 1999, the new head of the Russian national security council. “I would like to tell you about him so you will know what kind of man he is,” Yeltsin told Clinton in passing during a phone call on September 8. “It took me a lot of time to think who might be the next Russian president in the year 2000. Unfortunately, at that time, I could not find any sitting candidate. Finally, I came across him.… I explored his bio, his interests, his acquaintances, and so on and so forth. I found out he is a solid man.… I am sure you will find him to be a highly qualified partner.” A Russian presidential election was set for the coming March, but the outcome was a foregone conclusion; Russian democracy was now a contradiction in terms. Yeltsin had privately determined to step down on New Year’s Eve, six months before his term of office ended, and cede his power to his handpicked successor, who would then run as an incumbent president, with all the power that entailed.
Vladimir Putin’s very first act after taking office as president of Russia was guaranteeing his predecessor immunity from prosecution. As the intelligence czar, Putin had protected Yeltsin and his family from charges of corruption being investigated by Russia’s prosecutor general, Yuri Skuratov. Yeltsin’s chief of staff had summoned Skuratov to the Kremlin and showed him a videotape that purported to show him cavorting with two prostitutes. The prosecutor insisted that the tape was a fake, but he resigned nonetheless. The Russian parliament summoned him to testify, but hours before he was set to appear, the sex tape was broadcast on a Russian television station. Putin apparently delivered it in person. Then he went on TV himself to announce that the man on the grainy surveillance tape was definitely Skuratov. It was a classic case of kompromat, the use of compromising material for blackmail, a technique honed by Stalin’s secret police in the 1930s, perfected by the KGB, and by now a permanent part of Russia’s political culture.
Clinton asked Yeltsin who was going to win the election during their last tête-à-tête, at a security conference in Istanbul on November 19, 1999. “Putin, of course,” came the reply. “I will do everything possible for him to win—legally, of course. And he will win.” In the course of this conversation, Yeltsin made an extraordinary statement that in one stroke evoked the imperial ambitions of the nineteenth-century czars and foreshadowed how a new czar might rule in the twenty-first century. In retrospect, it could be inferred that Putin had become his patron’s Rasputin.
“I ask you one thing. Just give Europe to Russia,” he told Clinton. “Russia is half European and half Asian.”
“So you want Asia too?” an incredulous Clinton responded.
“Sure, sure, Bill. Eventually we will have to agree on all of this.”
“I don’t think the Europeans would like this very much.”
“Bill, I’m serious,” insisted Yeltsin, who for once was sober. “We have the power.… Russia has the power and intellect to know what to do with Europe.”
Their last conversation lasted ten minutes. It was New Year’s Eve. The American intelligence community was on high alert, both from forebodings of a terrorist attack and fears that computers everywhere would crash if their software reset to 1900 instead of 2000. Yeltsin was counting down to the end of his tumultuous reign. Clinton called him from the Oval Office.
“Boris, I believe that historians will say you were the father of Russian democracy,” Clinton said, praising him for his decision to cede power.
“Thank you, Bill,” said Yeltsin. “Of course, this was not an easy decision for me, and you, as no one else, can understand that. But I want to support Putin 100 percent and now I’ve given him three months, three months according to the constitution, to work as president, and people will get used to him for these three months. I am sure that he will be elected in the forthcoming elections; I am sure about that. I am also sure that he is a democrat, and that he is a person with a big soul.”
It was three hours to midnight and the dawn of a new millennium.