Episode 2: How Democracy Failed in Russia
Economic crisis, internal pressures, and US policy set the stage for Vladimir Putin’s rise to power
America was on top of the world in the 1990s as its erstwhile rival, Russia, was struggling to find its footing. President Boris Yelstin's liberal reforms were soon dashed by economic crises and infighting among Russian elites. US policymakers also contributed to this tragedy, which would lead to Vladimir Putin's rise by the end of the decade. In their zeal to promote democracy and capitalism, they failed to anticipate how Russians would see the West as meddling from within and, with NATO enlargement, encroaching from without.
In this episode of None Of The Above’s ‘90s Rewind miniseries, the Institute for Global Affairs’ Mark Hannah explores where the 1990s went wrong for post-Soviet Russia, from shock therapy to NATO enlargement. He is joined by former diplomat Thomas Graham and historian Susan Colbourn. NPR’s Deborah Amos and retired ambassador Thomas Pickering also return to provide insights and commentary.
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Thomas Graham is a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was a Foreign Service officer for fourteen years, including at the US embassy in Moscow during the 1990s. He also worked on Soviet and Russian affairs in the State Department during that time. From 2002 to 2007, he worked on Russian affairs within the National Security Council.
Susan Colbourn is a historian and associate research professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. She is also the associate diretor of Duke’s Program in American Grand Strategy. She focuses on European security, the politics of nuclear weapons, and the history of NATO.
Deborah Amos is a Ferris Professor of Journalism in Residence at Princeton University. Over the course of her award-winning career, she served as an international correspondent for NPR, ABC, and PBS. Her reporting has largely focused on the Middle East and refugees. She was awarded the Edward R. Murrow Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010.
Thomas Pickering is a retired diplomat who served as US ambassador to the United Nations, India, and Russia throughout the 1990s. He also served as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs under President Clinton from 1997 to 2000. He achieved the rank of Career Ambassador, the highest in American diplomacy.
Transcript:
THOMAS GRAHAM: We wound up supporting a side that actually lost the political struggle, and now we see that in the 2000s. But that also creates an atmosphere inside Russia where the United States gets blamed for many of the problems of the 1990s.
MARK HANNAH: Welcome back to None of the Above. I'm Mark Hannah. In our last episode, we told the story of how the United States found itself as the world's lone superpower once the Cold War ended. The 1990s were somewhat of a victory lap for the United States. The same cannot be said about America's biggest rival, the Soviet Union.
Archival: Mingling with the rush hour traffic, Red Army armored personnel carriers on the streets of Moscow this morning, heading to the Kremlin. The first sign of the coup d'etat that removed Mikhail Gorbachev from power.
The Russian people have turned their back on tyranny. They are turning the corner toward freedom. They and their leaders have cleared another important hurdle in building a new and enduring democracy.
The Kremlin just defaulted on its domestic debt and people plunged into poverty by a threefold devaluation of the ruble are scrambling to withdraw their savings.
HANNAH: While the United States was flexing its military might and enjoying a thriving economy under President Bill Clinton, the Soviet Union faced an existential crisis. This episode, we'll be talking about post-Soviet Russia and the dashed hopes for democratization there. This eventually contributed to Vladimir Putin's rise to power at the turn of the century. But first, we rewind to a fateful address given by Mikhail Gorbachev to the United Nations in 1988.
Mikhail Gorbachev: Today, further world progress is only possible through a search for universal human consensus as we move forward to a new world order. We have come to a point when the disorderly play of elemental forces leads us into an impasse. The international community must learn how it can shape and guide developments in such a way as to preserve our civilization, to make it safe for all, and more conducive to normal life.
HANNAH: Gorbachev assumed leadership of the Soviet Union in 1985 and set off to transform the country. He introduced the policies of perestroika, or a set of political and economic reforms, as well as glasnost, which meant a kind of openness.
Then on November 9th, 1989, everything changed. East and West Germans began tearing down the Berlin Wall, which had divided the city since 1961, and which was an enduring symbol of the Cold War. Just like that, ordinary people did an extraordinary thing and pierced a hole in the Iron Curtain.
DEBORAH AMOS: So, I arrived at 11. Everybody's still up. Berlin is on the street. All of them. 11 p.m. at night, and everybody is, it's the biggest party I have ever seen.
HANNAH: That's NPR's Deborah Amos, who was reporting on the ground in Berlin at the time.
AMOS: I can tell the difference between West Berlin people and East Berlin people, because the East Berlin people all have bananas. And they have bananas because they had seen them on television, from West Berlin, but they'd never actually tasted one. So, they all wanted to have bananas. It was kind of weird, but they did. And, you know, it was just chopping down the wall. Everybody had a piece of the wall in their hotel rooms.
HANNAH: Do you still have a piece of the wall?
AMOS: I certainly do.
HANNAH: Once the floodgates were open, the tide of democracy seemed unstoppable. The Cold War was ending, and the reunification of Germany became official in the fall of 1990.
George H. W. Bush: The long twilight struggle, that for 45 years has divided Europe, our two nations, and much of the world, has come to an end.
HANNAH: Despite the celebratory mood, this introduced a new problem for the United States and its allies. West Germany was a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, a military alliance formed in the aftermath of World War II. The Soviet Union and allied communist states formed the Warsaw Pact in response. Now there was a question of whether East Germany would join the Western alliance.
SUSAN COLBOURN: Jim Baker was George H. W. Bush's Secretary of State, and Baker is one of the central figures in the incredible whirlwind of diplomacy around German unification.
HANNAH: This is Susan Colbourn, a historian and professor at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy.
COLBOURN: Right, I think it's easy for us to forget that you go from the Berlin Wall falling in early November 1989 to a unified Germany less than a year later – that's October 1990 – that the two have become one again. That's after 45 years of being divided. And so that diplomacy moves quickly. There are plenty of twists and turns and plenty of actors involved because the old occupation structures were in place. So, you have the four occupying powers, the Soviet Union, the United States, France, and the United Kingdom, all involved in this diplomacy, as well as the two Germanys, one of which is collapsing very quickly, while this all takes place, and then a whole bunch of other countries interested in being involved.
So, one critical juncture in late January and early February 1990, it's clear that the possibility of a unified Germany being a member of NATO is coming to a head as an issue. And Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who is the West German foreign minister at the time, gives a speech at Tutzing in Bavaria, where he uses this pretty ambiguous language, but essentially suggests that NATO jurisdiction would not extend to the east in any way. It would not move closer to the Soviet Union. And Jim Baker meets with Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, not long after that and uses a sort of similar version of that language. And the famous, and now infamous, piece of that quotation is that it would move “not one inch” closer to the Soviet Union.
HANNAH: Not one inch closer. That assurance was never formally enshrined and would later be interpreted in vastly different ways. The question of NATO enlargement would persist as a thorn in the side of US-Russia relations. But at this point, the Soviet Union faced even greater pressure from the inside. Here is Thomas Pickering, who is one of the top people at the State Department and also served as US Ambassador to Russia in the early ‘90s.
THOMAS PICKERING: After Christmas in 1991, there was a meeting in Moscow presided over by Gorbachev, in which it was decided that Mr. Yeltsin would succeed him, and Mr. Yeltsin proposed that the Communist Party and the dominance of the Russian Federation in the Soviet Union be reviewed, if I could put it this way, and the members of the Soviet Union, all republics, the 16 republics of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, among others, be reviewed. All decided that they would become independent. And it was, in that sense, the end of communist domination of the Soviet Union and the breakup of the Soviet Union into several countries.
HANNAH: Seemingly without warning, one of the two existing global superpowers was dismantled. The formerly communist countries of Czechoslovakia, which would later break up into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, as well as Poland, Hungary, these countries all rapidly embraced democracy and capitalism. Many expected that Russia would do the same.
AMOS: I think that many Europeans assumed that Russia would go the way of Poland. Why wouldn't they? You know, they had just come out of a very long and dark period of authoritarianism. This was this moment of, you know, democracy and freedom and everything was changing in the world.
Of course, what we always find out is, not really. And so, I think there was an expectation with Yeltsin because that's how he spoke, that's what he talked about. There was a new constitution. There was a new setup of multi-party democracy, there were these western institutions that were coming to help the Russians build this new economy. It sounded pretty good. And it was what was happening in other places in Eastern Europe, so why wouldn't they?
HANNAH: Boris Yeltsin, who had resigned from the Communist Party in 1990, embraced liberal reform when he became president of Russia. But the loss of great power status was a huge blow to Russian elites. Many were reluctant to embrace Western-style democracy.
GRAHAM: I would put it this way. There were a large number of small “d” democrats in Russia, some of them even in the elite. But that was by far, that was hardly the dominant element in the elite at that point.
HANNAH: Here we have Thomas Graham, a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations now, but back in the 1990s, he was a Foreign Service Officer at the US Embassy in Moscow.
GRAHAM: You know, it's perhaps paradoxical as you look back at this, to recognize that the high point of democracy probably occurred during the late Soviet period. If you look at elections, the freest and fairest elections on Soviet or on Russian territory took place during the late Soviet period, specifically to the elections to the Russian Congress of People's Deputies, sort of super parliament at that point in 1990, followed in 1991 by the election, of the Russian president. Boris Yeltsin won that, although Russia was still part of the Soviet Union at that point. Every election after that was slightly less democratic than the one that preceded it in the 1990s. If you look at the breakup of the Soviet Union itself, this is often presented in the West as a democratic breakthrough.
The Russian reformers, the Russian democrats throwing off the Soviet yoke. My view is that if you look at this more closely, this was very much a power struggle between the Soviet leadership and the Russian leadership, between Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. And Yeltsin came out on top for a number of reasons that we don't need to go into here. Yeltsin was supported by a lot of the small “d” democrats, but he was also supported by a large number of people who felt quite comfortable as part of what we call the Soviet ruling class, the Soviet nomenklatura at that point, but they were in the second and third ranks. And what the struggle was about wasn't so much for democracy, as it was for the second and third echelons to become the first echelon and take over the fruits of political power in Russia, and that's what they were focused on building.
The rhetoric may have been democratic. But what they were focused on was maintaining themselves in power, rebuilding the power of the state after the collapse of the Soviet Union and rebuilding Russia as a great power. So somewhat different from, we need to become a liberal Western democracy. What we need to do is restore Russia as a great power on the global stage. And to some extent, some democratic processes may be favorable to that, but those that aren't we’re not interested.
HANNAH: Relations between the United States and Russia are often thought of as inescapably antagonistic. They often have been throughout history. But there was a brief window there in the 1990s when it seemed that there was a genuine hope for cooperation, and there was a debate about how to approach this critical juncture and the relationship between these two great powers.
COLBOURN: I think the way that many people approached Russia in the 1990s was one of profound optimism that change was possible. That you could fundamentally remake the contours of the relationship, and so there are some segments of the policymaking world where, yeah, there was this profound sense of optimism that a world without the Cold War was going to be different, was going to be new, that so much had changed so rapidly.
But I think what's really striking to me is now that we're getting more of the records opening up diplomatically from the 1990s, those sorts of stories we tell ourselves about that optimistic period and things like that, the record shows there's much more complex debate all the time about whether or not the United States was engaging Russia in the right way. How do you prioritize political liberalization versus economic change? Do you lead with politics? Do you lead with the economy? Which one is going to create a democratic Russia that is the kind of partner you want?
You have profound debate about whether or not Russia can be a partner in European security or whether Russia is still maybe threatening in some way, shape, or form. And so, what's striking to me as we get more of those records is that there wasn't really a honeymoon phase where there wasn't debate. There was conversation about whether or not US policy was doing the right thing or pursuing the right thing to achieve the outcomes that so many hoped for.
HANNAH: American policymakers were cautiously optimistic, but there was a natural tension between what they hoped to achieve and what was realistic for Russia at that time.
GRAHAM: The hope and expectation was that they would move in this direction. The hope because obviously this would be good for us, the expectation for the reasons I've just laid out. This is the way history is moving at this point. But there was also a recognition that Russia had this long and complicated history. This perhaps wasn't the most hospitable soil for the development of a full-blooded democratic society, certainly not in the short term. And yet, you know, the drive behind American policy at that point was after the end of the Cold War, we had lost the Soviet Union as our other, what's the purpose of the United States?
It's no longer simply protecting the free world. It's actually propagating the benefits of liberal democracy, democratic societies across the globe. So, there was, I think, a tremendous desire to demonstrate that we could push history in this direction. And yes, we were always concerned about Russia, about its authoritarian past. You'll see that, you know, there was tension in the US government between this desire to promote democracy, but also to hedge against the return of an authoritarian Russia and an expansionist Russia, and those two policies were in tension, but the rhetoric of the US government always focused on the democratic aspect of this, the possibility of a democratic transition in Russia.
And certainly, during the Clinton administration, it was the position of the Clinton administration in public that Russia was making progress in that direction. And that was a fundamental aspect of the way we talked about policy during the 1990s in the Clinton administration.
HANNAH: Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin had a very friendly relationship, and this personal affection between the two men shaped much of America's approach to Russia throughout the 1990s.
GRAHAM: The two men got along. I think that's clear. President Clinton developed a fondness for Yeltsin at their first meeting in 1993. They were both politicians, extroverted, they loved mixing with people, they were genuine politicians, and they understood each other at that level, I would say.
I think President Clinton had also, sort of, in his mind, surveyed the landscape of other Russian leaders and come to the conclusion that Yeltsin was the only one that offered any hope for a democratic transition. So, yes, he may have made some undemocratic steps at this point, but those were intended to deal with the communists and the ultranationalists in Russia who clearly weren't committed to democracy over the long haul.
And so, I will look at these as, you know, minor transgressions in the broader historical play of democratic transition in Russia being led by Yeltsin. So that was a very important element of the relationship at that point and probably led to greater support for Yeltsin, the people around him than even some people who were close to Clinton at the upper level that the administration felt comfortable with at that point. But this is where the president was. This is the political situation in which we have to operate. Let's make the best of it.
HANNAH: As Ambassador Pickering reminds us…
PICKERING: There was never a perfect set of circumstances where you sailed off into the sunset and everything fell into place, and it stayed in place.
HANNAH: And the US made plenty of mistakes when it came to its Russia policy.
GRAHAM: You know, the policies that we advocated did deepen the socioeconomic crisis at that point. The people that we supported exacerbated some of the political problems in Russia. We acted in ways that were contrary to our own democratic rhetoric, and you saw that repeatedly in the first years of the Clinton administration, where we consciously supported Yeltsin in his struggle against the Congress of People's Deputies in October of 1993.
HANNAH: The first major democratic test came in 1993. Yeltsin sought to increase his constitutional powers, leading to a standoff with the Russian parliament. Legislators there attempted to impeach Yeltsin and barricaded themselves inside the parliament building, which was known as the White House, on October 4th. Yeltsin ordered the military to fire on the building and 145 people were killed.
GRAHAM: This was a dispute over where supreme power lay in the Russian political system at that point. The Congress of People's Deputies was probably elected in the freest, fairest election in Russian history. They were opposed to a lot of the economic reforms at that point. And not surprisingly, because the economic reforms or the economy itself was in collapse at that point, an outcome or a continuation of what we had seen in the late Soviet period.
So, it'd be only natural that people represented, or deputies who represented the people would have certain questions about where the government was headed. Yet we supported Yeltsin wholeheartedly in a way that led to the bombing of the Russian White House, the seat of the Supreme Soviet, its dissolution and a movement towards a new constitution that put in place a super presidency that Putin clearly has exploited in ways that we didn't imagine in 1993.
HANNAH: Russia was also facing a dire economic crisis. As Yeltsin moved the country from a command economy to a market economy, he introduced something called shock therapy. It involved removing price controls and privatizing massive state enterprises. The result was hyperinflation, which caused prices to skyrocket. Russians could no longer afford basic necessities, and their life savings virtually vanished into thin air.
AMOS: I think the Russian lesson is they had 10 years of pain. Ten years of people not knowing if they could feed themselves. That all of a sudden capitalism looked pretty dangerous. While places like Poland and, you know, Hungary were managing, somehow the Russians were not. And I think that there was a shock therapy that was used that didn't work. And the chaos, really, there was a price to pay for that. Because it went on for a long time.
HANNAH: Shock therapy was implemented at the recommendation of many American economists, and Russia received significant loans from the International Monetary Fund. Secretary of State James Baker did not believe enforcing the repayment of Soviet debt, which was about $65 billion in 1991, should take priority as the nascent Russian democracy was already struggling. But Baker was overruled.
PICKERING: The destructive elements of economic policy, including inflation, was a real blow. We worked very hard and we appointed a group of people who were, in many ways, top-tier American economic-thinking people to give the Russians private advice from them on how and in what way they could adopt policies which would help them overcome the really baleful influence of quite rampant inflation that affected the economy in those early years.
There was resistance to that. No country that considers itself as great as the Soviet Union considered itself likes to be seen in the context of accepting advice from a former rival in a context of competition, characterized by the epithet Cold War. Russia was not defeated during the Second World War. Russia was part of the victory. The calculations are that they lost 27 million people in the conflict, soldiers, civilians, all the rest. The sacrifices made in that period to the Allied cause are highly consequential, and we were acting in ways that they might have concluded they did not deserve, in terms of how and in what way people thought about them.
HANNAH: The crisis also provided fertile ground for organized crime and corruption.
GRAHAM: It isn't the market reforms, per se, that lead to the rise of oligarchy. It's the way a Russian ruling elite exploits the opening up of the economy for its own purposes. And this is deeply corrupt, I think that's clear. And you see effort in the 1990s under the guise of market reform to create a situation in which a limited number of people really seized the crown jewels of the Russian economy at this point, particularly the natural resource sector, oil and gas, for example. You know, before these were all controlled by the Soviet government, it was all state-owned. The market reforms allowed this to become private property in some way, and through a series of, I would say, deeply corrupt processes, a few, a very small group of individuals come to control vast wealth in Russia. This gives rise to the oligarchy in the 1990s, and in a sense, in various forms, with personality changes, that defines the structure of the Russian political system up to today.
HANNAH: A third crisis erupted in the small republic of Chechnya. Yeltsin approved sending Russian troops to crush a separatist movement there. It set off a bloody conflict and it would become known as the First Chechen War.
COLBOURN: So, you have a Russia that is engaged in flattening neighborhoods in places like Grozny, right, in 1993, 1994. And that is allegedly now the sort of heyday of, oh, that was the kind of Russia with whom we could do business.
HANNAH: Western leaders were taken aback by Russia's brutal crackdown in Chechnya. And Russia's smaller neighbors became nervous at the aggressive show of force. Soon, countries like the Czech Republic and Poland and Hungary were clamoring to join the NATO alliance. But US policymakers were uncertain at first about the pace and scope of NATO enlargement. It was still important to preserve good relations with Russia in the interest of nuclear disarmament. So, they developed an alternative.
GRAHAM: Before that, we had developed a policy that was called Partnership for Peace that gave all the countries of the former Soviet bloc, so Central East Europe, the former Soviet Union, a liaison with NATO. We created a council where they all came together to discuss various issues. There was a debate in the US government whether we should have continued solely with that program or we should expand NATO.
And there were people at the Defense Department, in particular the Secretary Bill Perry at that point, who said, you know, our primary concern has to be getting control over the Soviet nuclear arsenal, making sure that that is under solid command and control. That's why we wanted it. This arsenal that had been spread out over four successor states all brought back under Russian control. And then work with the Russians to reduce the nuclear arsenals in both countries, as a way of, in a sense, advancing our security. And that should be the primary focus.
NATO expansion will get in the way of that because we know the Russians are going to be opposed to that, and there are others who were less concerned about that and more about how we shape the geopolitics of Europe going forward. That's where the real debate was inside the administration. And the decision for the Clinton administration and the president himself came down on, let's reshape the geopolitics of Europe.
HANNAH: By 1994, the Clinton administration had largely abandoned the Partnership for Peace and made clear to Russia that NATO had intentions to expand eastward. Yeltsin also dismissed the Partnership for Peace after Russia failed to be one of the first countries admitted.
COLBOURN: You see some patterns in Russian diplomacy, even in the 1990s, of a strong attachment to and a desire for great power status. Alright, so even at a point where the Russians were significantly diminished and weakened in their overall stature, had lost obviously considerable territory, not just with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, but then also the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself, they still talked about themselves as a great power who deserved the recognition and respect of a great power. This is a huge part of how Russian politicians engaged with NATO in the 1990s, and one of the stumbling blocks in some of the proposals and various fora that emerged in the 1990s is that the Russians don't want to be treated as the same as Hungary or the same as the Czech Republic. They see themselves as fundamentally different.
And so, I think that sentiment does exist in some form, but of course it's different to act upon that sentiment. But we know that even in the 1990s, the Russians waged brutal wars in their near neighborhood to try and preserve influence, to try and make sure that if they had neighbors that were not controlled by Moscow, that they were weakened. And so, you do see those dynamics. I mean, the story of the 1990s is one of constant sort of hand wringing and debate about how Russia has engaged, with its now new neighbors.
HANNAH: But for many, the question still remains. As the sole global superpower facing no military threats to its security, why did the United States move forward with NATO enlargement when it knew that that decision would likely anger the Russians and potentially threaten Russia's legitimate security interests in the region?
GRAHAM: We're trying to build this cooperative relationship with Russia. We are concerned about its authoritarian imperialists. And we want to hedge against that. We would like to prevent that to the extent possible. A democratic transition would have done that, but that's a long term proposition. And we have this problem of instability in Central Europe because of the breakdown of the Soviet Union, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. And what are you going to do with these countries in Eastern Europe? These countries in Eastern Europe, some of them justifiably concerned about Russian imperialism.
If you're a Balt or a Pole, you've got good historical memory that says I need to be wary of this country. But it wasn't only that. It was also the recognition that instability in Central East Europe and in the Balkans had actually been the cause of two great wars in the 20th century, right? Think about how the First World War develops out of the struggle in the Balkans between Austria, the Brits, the Russians. But the Serbs are big players in that. There was all sorts of tension between the Poles, the Czechs and Hungarians in Central Europe as well that created the possibility for what Hitler does in that part of the world in the late 1930s, at least to the Second World War. So, we wanted to stabilize that as well.
And finally, we wanted to keep the United States engaged in European affairs. Now it wasn't a significant trend at that point. But there was always this concern about the isolationist tendency in American foreign policy. If you solve the problems in Europe, if the Soviet Union has broken up, the Cold War is over. Why are we still engaged in Europe, 350,000 troops and so forth, when the threat has vanished. It's time to bring the troops home. Now I said that wasn't a very prominent argument at that time but nevertheless, in the backs of people's minds, you've got the 1930s. You know what American traditions are in this regard. And so, we needed NATO as a way of anchoring the United States in Europe. And all these things came together in the decision to expand NATO eastward.
HANNAH: Yeltsin and others in the Russian government expressed their dissatisfaction with the direction NATO was heading many times throughout the 1990s. Yeltsin warned of a “cold peace” in 1994, after feeling the West had misled Russia about intentions to expand NATO.
COLBOURN: It's a subject of considerable debate. So, we know from about 1993 on that once NATO enlargement beyond the German Democratic Republic is on the table, there are some unhappy rumblings in Moscow about what that will mean. And if you look at, I mean, freely available public documentation, open newspapers from '94, '95, '96, there's plenty of evidence of Russian officials who were displeased with the prospect of enlargement. That was in what ran parallel to the invitation for the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland to join the alliance was a sort of new social contract between NATO and Russia, right? The NATO Russia Founding Act. The creation of a permanent joint council of consultation.
And so, there was a considerable emphasis on crafting a new partnership. And so, you see some interest in that project. But certainly, there's plenty of evidence that there were some circles of Russian politics that were not pleased about enlargement in the ‘90s. I don't think you can sidestep that. The archival record is very clear that that's true.
HANNAH: Russians were not the only ones who were skeptical. French President Jacques Chirac feared that further humiliation would lead to dangerous nationalist backlash within Russia. George Kennan, the American diplomat and strategist who had devised the Cold War strategy of containment, also vocally opposed NATO enlargement. He called it, “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”
Our guest Thomas Pickering, the career ambassador, also had reservations at the time, which he shared with Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott.
PICKERING: I wrote a personal cable to the Secretary of State and to Strobe, and I believe it got, in some cases, to the White House as well, about my deep concern about how we were proceeding on these issues, and more importantly what Russian perceptions were, and the things that we could do to strengthen what I thought was the legitimacy of what we had undertaken to do to give the newly opened states of the former Warsaw Pact in Eastern Europe the opportunity to join a united Europe in a number of ways, including NATO, but to do so on a basis that we did our best to try to assure the Russians was not threatening but defensive, and that was not an easy course. Mr. Putin is living proof that we did not succeed entirely.
HANNAH: Ultimately, the faction in favor of NATO enlargement, including the National Security Advisor Anthony Lake and Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, won that debate. An invitation to join NATO was extended to the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary in 1997, and the three countries officially joined the Alliance in 1999.
Bill Clinton: We are building a new NATO just as the Russian people are building a new Russia. I am determined that Russia will become a respected partner with NATO in making the future for all of Europe peaceful and secure.
HANNAH: 1999 was a year which would prove extremely consequential for the future of US-Russia relations. Violence had once again erupted in the Balkans, this time in Kosovo, a tiny autonomous republic in the former Yugoslavia. In 1998, war broke out between Albanian separatists and the Serbian army. Fearing a repeat of the catastrophe in Bosnia, NATO launched a bombing campaign in 1999 without UN authorization.
COLBOURN: It seems to me that NATO enlargement pales in comparison to the war in Kosovo and NATO's bombing campaign in Kosovo in 1999 in changing the way Russians feel about the United States and feel about NATO. And Kosovo, it seems to me, looms much larger because the inability of Yeltsin to change NATO's diplomacy, to protect Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia being a traditional ally or partner of Russia, was taken as a hard blow in Russia, a sort of crushing defeat at a time when the Russian economy had already undergone considerable challenges.
HANNAH: NATO's unilateral intervention in Kosovo marked a turning point.
GRAHAM: Two things here that are important. First is that the Balkans, for centuries, had been an area of strategic interest for the Russians. They are engaged there in the 18th century, they play an important role in the liberation of certain countries from Austro-Hungarian rule in the 19th century, the Greeks, the Serbs, in particular, the Bulgarians. And so, this is an area of historical Russian strategic interest. That's one.
Two, this was a case of NATO, that defensive alliance, actually acting in an offensive fashion, right? This is nothing about the protection of NATO territory. This is about imposing a solution on a problem in the Balkans, specifically a Serbian problem, and Kosovar, Albanian problem, where we decided that the appropriate approach for us was to get engaged in a way that prevented what we call ethnic cleansing at this point.
Again, it's a real issue. It's a real problem. You know, this was probably an important part of the solution to the problem. And yet, it is in violation of what NATO stated purpose is. And the final point here is it was all done without UN authorization. Of course, at the end of the day, we turned to the Russians to help us mediate with Milosevic at that point. But nevertheless, we had already created a precedent that suggested that we weren't going to take Russia's interest into account. We were going to bypass the UN Security Council when we needed to. And oh, by the way, NATO's capable of operating beyond NATO territory and not simply in the defense of NATO countries.
HANNAH: 1999 was also the year that Yeltsin designated Vladimir Putin as his successor. The former intelligence officer assumed the Russian presidency on December 31st. Putin's outlook toward the West was much more skeptical than that of his predecessor. He would later claim NATO enlargement was a betrayal of the promises made to Russia in the 1990s. Recall James Baker's informal pledge that NATO's jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward of a unified Germany.
GRAHAM: It's a matter of having a fundamental respect for other societies, realizing their differences, that societies operate in different functions, and that you can't fully grasp the history, the traditions, you know, as much as you try and therefore to go in and try to consciously manipulate, you fall into all sorts of traps and pitfalls. And that's what happened to the United States in the 1990s. So, we wound up supporting a side that actually lost the political struggle, and now we see that in the 2000s and the 2010s. But that also creates an atmosphere inside Russia where the United States gets blamed for many of the problems of the 1990s.
And you've seen the way that Putin has reinterpreted this now as, you know, the United States really wasn't out to help Russia in the 1990s. All of this was a policy to undermine Russia, to erode our power base, to prevent us from returning as a great power that would challenge the United States on the global stage. And you've seen that reflected in public opinion.
HANNAH: Decisions made in the 1990s set Russia and the West on a collision course. But regardless of what was happening outside Russia, conditions inside Russia were just as important.
GRAHAM: I was always a skeptic about how rapidly Russia could democratize. Again, you can't categorically rule it out. Countries change over time, but it's a slow evolutionary process. If you look back at the beginning of the 1990s, it's not only Russia's history, alright? It's authoritarianism, it's imperialism. That's a factor. But it's also the character of the state of Russian society at this point. It had been atomized during the Soviet period. You don't have any, even the seeds, the seedlings of a genuine civil society. You look at political party development. Political parties and the proliferation of political parties at this point don't really form in order to defend what we would term as sort of class interests or societal interests. They form around individuals, personalities, and that I think showed the immaturity of Russian society at that point. So, it was going to take a significant amount of time for society to develop and differentiate itself to create clear interest groups that could then be represented through a political process and through political parties the way they are in Western Europe and in the United States.
HANNAH: Of course, we now know that Russia would not democratize under President Vladimir Putin, although the deteriorating state of Russian relations with the West was not a foregone conclusion as the decade drew to a close.
COLBOURN: The Putin we see today is not the Putin of 1999, right? And so, when we think of the sort of waypoints in the mythology of Putin, there's a reason why people thought that speech he gave at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 was so significant, because it seemed like a departure. And so, early Putin's views focused largely on domestic issues, right? I mean, this is a period where Putin promotes himself as a potential partner in the War on Terror, that he too is worried about terrorism. And so that's a very different Putin than the Putin we know or try to know today.
HANNAH: His speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference marked a turning point. Putin criticized the US-led world order and NATO enlargement. Here are some of his comments.
Vladimir Putin: I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernization of the alliance itself, or with the ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. We have the right to ask, against whom is this expansion intended? And what happens to the assurances our Western partners made? After the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, where are those declarations today?
GRAHAM: In the 2000s, we see him begin to eliminate the free press, crack down on civil society. But some of this, in a strange way, is also a reaction against what he sees as pressure from the United States. It's not only intervention in Russia in the 1990s, but the color revolutions that take place in the former Soviet state: Georgia in 2003, Ukraine, in particular, in 2004, Kyrgyzstan to a lesser extent in 2005. And this sense that the United States is using domestic political processes in these countries to eliminate pro-Russian political figures to assert its authority in these countries that Russia sees vital to its own security. And so, he looks at the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004 and comes to the conclusion that democracy promotion for the United States is really about undermining Russia's geopolitical position in the former Soviet space, specifically in Ukraine. But it's also a rehearsal, a dress rehearsal, for regime change in Russia itself.
HANNAH: Real or imagined, Putin's perceived threat of Western influence led to increasingly aggressive behavior toward Russia's neighbors, military support for separatists in Georgia in 2008, the annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in 2014, and finally, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022.
But this was not yet reality in the 1990s, a decade which held the promise of a better future. While the US was preoccupied with transatlantic relations, a new threat was emerging in a country most Americans, at the time, probably couldn't have pointed to on a map: Afghanistan. That's next time here on None of the Above.
Thank you to Thomas Graham, Susan Colburn, Deb Amos, and Ambassador Tom Pickering for joining our podcast. Our producer is Eloise Cassier, and our associate producer is Sarah Leeson. Special thanks go out to the None of the Above team, Jonathan Guyer, Lucas Robinson, and Ransom Miller. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please consider sharing this episode with a friend or a family member who might be interested.
Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you find podcasts. You can also find us on X @podcastNOTA. That's @podcastN-O-T-A. Rate and review us, and if you have any suggestions or comments, please send them to me at info@noneoftheabovepodcast.org. I'm Mark Hannah. Thanks for tuning in.
