Yeltsin was up to his ears in alligators, and I wanted to help him. I was encouraged to do so by Bob Strauss, whom President Bush had sent to Moscow as our ambassador even though he was an ardent Democrat and a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Strauss said I could work with Yeltsin and give him good political advice, and he urged me to do both. I was inclined to accept Yeltsin’s invitation to go to Russia, but Tony Lake said Moscow shouldn’t be my first foreign stop, and the rest of my team said it would divert attention from our domestic agenda. They made strong arguments, but the United States had a big stake in Russia’s success, and we sure didn’t want hard-liners, either Communists or ultra-nationalists, in control there. Boris made it easier when he suggested a meeting in a mutually acceptable third country.
About this time, I persuaded my old friend and Oxford housemate Strobe Talbott to leave Time magazine and come to work in the State Department to help us with policy on the former Soviet Union. By then, Strobe and I had been discussing Russian history and politics for almost twenty-five years. Ever since he translated and edited Khrushchev’s memoirs, Strobe had known and cared more about Russia and the Russian people than anyone else I knew. He had a fine analytical mind and a fertile imagination behind his proper professorial façade, and I trusted both his judgment and his willingness to tell me the unvarnished truth. There was no position in the State Department hierarchy that described what I wanted Strobe to do, so he set out to create one, with the blessing of Warren Christopher and the help of Dick Holbrooke, an investment banker and veteran foreign policy hand who had provided advice during the campaign and who would become one of the most important figures in my administration. Eventually, Strobe’s new job had a title: ambassador-at-large and special advisor to the secretary of state on the new independent states of the former Soviet Union. He later became deputy secretary of state. I don’t think five people could repeat Strobe’s title, but everybody knew what he did: he was our “go to” man on Russia. For eight years, he was by my side in all my meetings with Presidents Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, eighteen with Yeltsin alone. Since Strobe spoke fluent Russian and took copious notes, his participation with me and his own interactions with the Russians guaranteed a precision and accuracy in our work that would prove invaluable. Strobe chronicles our eight-year odyssey in his book The Russia Hand, which is remarkable not only for its insights but for the verbatim accounts of the colorful conversations I had with Yeltsin. Unlike what happens in most books of the genre, the quotes are not reconstructions; they are, for good or ill, what we actually said. Strobe’s main point is that I became my own “Russia hand” because, while not an expert on Russia, I knew “one big thing: on the twin issues that had constituted the casus belli of the cold war—democracy versus dictatorship at home and cooperation versus competition abroad”—Yeltsin and I were, “in principle, on the same side.”
During the transition period, I had talked to Strobe a lot about the deteriorating situation in Russia and the imperative of averting disaster. At Renaissance Weekend, Strobe and his wife, Brooke, who had campaigned full-time with Hillary and was about to become head of the White House Fellows program, were jogging with me on Hilton Head beach. We wanted to talk about Russia, but the leader of our group, the great Olympic hurdler Edwin Moses, set such a brisk pace that I couldn’t keep up and talk at the same time. We came upon Hillary taking her morning walk, so the three of us had an excuse to slow down and visit. President Bush was in Moscow signing the START II treaty with Yeltsin. It was good news, though like everything progressive Yeltsin did, it was facing strong opposition in the Duma. I told Strobe that things were changing so much in Russia that we couldn’t have a completely defensive strategy; we had to help solidify and accelerate positive developments, especially those that would improve the Russian economy.
In February, I went over to Strobe’s house one night to see his family and talk about Russia. Strobe told me about a recent meeting he’d had with Richard Nixon, in which the former President had urged us to support Yeltsin heavily. The $24 billion assistance package President Bush had announced the previous spring hadn’t done that, because the international financial institutions wouldn’t release the money until Russia had restructured its economy. We needed to do something now.
In early March, Yeltsin and I agreed to meet on April 3 and 4 in Vancouver, Canada. On March 8, Richard Nixon called on me at the White House to urge me personally to support Yeltsin. After a brief visit with Hillary and Chelsea, in which he reminded them that he was raised a Quaker and that his daughters, like Chelsea, had gone to Sidwell Friends School, he got down to business, saying I would be remembered as President more for what I did with Russia than for my economic policy. Later that night, I called Strobe to report on the Nixon conversation and to stress again how important it was that we do something at Vancouver to help Russia, with a high-impact follow-up at the annual G-7 summit in Tokyo in July. All through March, as I got updates from our foreign policy team and Larry Summers and his assistant David Lipton at Treasury, I pushed them to think bigger and do more. Meanwhile, in Moscow, the Duma was reducing Yeltsin’s power and endorsing the fruitless inflationary policies of the Russian Central Bank. On March 20, Yeltsin struck back with a speech announcing a public referendum for April 25 to determine whether he or the Duma ran the country; until then, he said, his presidential decrees would remain in effect, no matter what the Duma did. I watched the speech on one of two television sets in my private dining room off the Oval Office. The other TV was showing the NCAA tournament basketball game between the Arkansas Razorbacks and St. John’s University. I had a dog in both hunts.
My entire foreign policy team and I had a vigorous debate about how I should respond to Yeltsin’s speech. They all cautioned restraint, because Yeltsin was stretching the limits of his constitutional authority, and because he might lose. I disagreed. Yeltsin was in the fight of his life against the old Communists and other reactionaries. He was going to the people with a referendum. And I didn’t care about the risk of losing—I reminded our team that I had lost plenty of times myself. I had no interest in hedging my bets, and instructed Tony Lake to draft a statement of strong support. When he presented it to me, I made it even stronger and gave it to the press. In this case, I went with my gut instincts and placed a bet that Russia would stick with Yeltsin, and stay on the right side of history. My optimism was bolstered by Arkansas’ come-from-behind victory in the ball game.
Finally, in March, I got an assistance program I could support: $1.6 billion in direct aid to help Russia stabilize its economy, including money to provide housing for decommissioned military officers, positive work programs for now underemployed and frequently unpaid nuclear scientists, and more assistance in dismantling nuclear weapons under the recently enacted Nunn-Lugar program; food and medicine for those suffering from shortages; aid to support small business, independent media outlets, nongovernmental organizations, political parties, and labor unions; and an exchange program to bring tens of thousands of students and young professionals to the United States. The aid package was four times what the previous administration had allocated and three times what I had originally recommended. Although a public poll said that 75 percent of the American people were opposed to giving Russia more money, and we were already in a hard fight for the economic plan, I felt we had no choice but to press ahead. America had spent trillions of dollars in defense to win the Cold War; we couldn’t risk reversal over less than $2 billion and a bad poll. To the surprise of my staff, the congressional leaders, including the Republicans, agreed with me. At a meeting I convened to push the plan, Senator Joe Biden, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, strongly endorsed the aid package. Bob Dole came around on the argument that we didn’t want to foul up the post–Cold War era the way the victors in World War I had done. Their shortsightedness contributed mightily to World War II, in which Dole had served so heroically. Newt Gingrich was passionately in favor of helping Russia, saying it was a “great defining moment” for America and we had to do the right thing. As I told Strobe, Newt was trying to “out-Russia” me, which I was only too happy to have him do.