Let us not forget Yugoslavia, communism’s other multiethnic federation, in those same years. It was a school picnic compared to a possible conflagration in the middle of Eurasia, where the Russians would have been cast as the xenophobic and irredentist Serbs and Yeltsin as Slobodan Milošević. The Russians outnumber the Serbs fifteen to one, and a war of Russians against non-Russians in the former Soviet Union, or of all against all, would have been fought on territory larger than the South American continent and housing millions of soldiers, trainloads of atomic arms (many of them not initially under Moscow’s control),16 and a thousand tons of fissile material. Yeltsin’s foreign minister from 1990 to 1996, Andrei Kozyrev, knew the Balkans well and often hashed over with him a Yugoslav scenario for Russia. Gaidar, who had lived in Belgrade as a boy and graduated from secondary school there, had similar conversations with the president.17 The range of comparisons would include partitions and intercommunal wars in the Indian subcontinent, North Africa, and Indochina. Without hyperbole, the historian Stephen Kotkin underlines what Yeltsin avoided: “The decolonization of Western Europe’s overseas possessions had been drawn out and bloody. The Soviet land empire… could have unleashed a far nastier bloodbath, even an end to the world” through thermonuclear holocaust.18
For diplomacy with the world powers, the man from Sverdlovsk was at first woefully unprepared. Kozyrev shopped around in Washington and West European capitals the message that their leaders should personalize their relations with him and appeal to his better instincts.19 Yeltsin took to addressing his opposite numbers by their first names, often prefaced by “my friend” (my friend George, my friend Bill, my friend Helmut), no easy thing for a stolid Russian male. A mutual admiration society with Robert S. Strauss, the American ambassador to Moscow in 1991–92, helped groom him for the relationship with the United States.20 Yeltsin was a quick study. On his first official visit to Washington, D.C., he announced in Reaganesque words to a joint session of the U.S. Congress on June 17, 1992, that Russia “has made its final choice in favor of a civilized way of life, common sense, and universal human heritage…. Communism has no human face. Freedom and communism are incompatible.” Referring to an agreement he and Bush had just concluded to trim nuclear arms by the year 2000, Yeltsin pointedly told Americans that it was in the West’s as well as Russia’s interest for his Great Leap Outward to succeed: “Today the freedom of America is being upheld in Russia. Should the reforms fail, it will cost hundreds of billions” to mop up.21
The hope for a deep partnership with Western governments and institutions, and for buttressing the post-communist Russian state from without, proved evanescent. In 1991–92, as price reform bit and living standards sank, never did the United States, the European Union, or the G-7 really consider forgiveness of Russia’s foreign debt—a liability, incurred by the regime the reformers were trying to put behind, whose impact has been compared to that of World War I reparations on Weimar Germany.22 The U.S. Freedom Support Act, passed in October 1992, earmarked about $400 million for technical and humanitarian assistance to all the post-Soviet countries, a drop in the bucket of need if there ever was one. Under the Clinton administration, American bilateral assistance came to $2,580,500,000. Two-thirds of those dollars were spent in 1994, and Russia’s slice of the pie, with no ethnic lobby to fight for it, slouched from more than 60 percent in 1994 to less than 20 percent in 1999.23 From 1993 to 1999, American aid would come to $2.50 annually per Russian man, woman, and child. It totaled about 1 percent of the U.S. defense budget in the year 1996, or one-quarter of the cost of a single Nimitz-class aircraft carrier—at a time when the evisceration of the Soviet threat let the United States draw down military manpower by 30 percent—and the money flowed primarily to American contractors, not to Russians or Russian organizations. Multilateral assistance siphoned through the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (the IMF, which Russia joined in June 1992) was larger in volume, yet was belated and took the form of repayable loans. “In spite of requests for support from radical reformers of whose goals it could only approve… the Fund was slow in giving meager support on stringent terms.”24 Not inaccurately, Bill Clinton was to adjudge the effort as “a forty-watt bulb in a damned big darkness.”25 In the security sphere, the Cooperative Threat Reduction program (sponsored by Democratic senator Sam Nunn and Republican senator Richard Lugar) funded the decommissioning of nuclear arsenals in Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan and enhanced the safety of all. In Yeltsin’s and Russia’s estimation, and in mine, this gain paled before the loss caused by the policy of mechanically expanding the NATO military alliance eastward to take in former republics and dependencies of the USSR but not Russia itself.
At Camp David in 1992, Yeltsin pressed President Bush for reference in the communiqué to Russia and the United States as “allies.” Bush refused. For the time being, “transitional language” about “friendship and partnership” would have to suffice.26 The transitional idiom persisted, even as neocontainment put Yeltsin on the defensive. Western governments never saw Russia’s transformation as an urgent task for them and never found or tried terribly hard to find a niche for Russia in a new security architecture for Europe and Asia. For his part, Yeltsin more than once couched Russia’s policy in the ethic of prickly self-reliance that he preached for individuals. In 1991–92, when the case for debt relief was strongest, he did not set about drafting a formal request for it. Meeting Clinton the presidential candidate in June 1992, Yeltsin stressed that Russia was “a great power” and was “not asking for handouts.” At the first meeting with Clinton as president, in Vancouver in April 1993, Yeltsin solicited outside help, “but not too much,” since a big subsidy would open him to criticism for making Russia dependent on outsiders.27 In early exchanges, Yeltsin was more than willing to play with Russia someday joining NATO, although, again, his government never articulated it as policy. Yeltsin told Clinton in January 1994 that the post-Soviet countries should enter NATO as a bloc, after an acclimation period, and he repeated this to reporters in August. By December of that same year, as Washington and the alliance moved toward selective admission, Yeltsin informed Vice President Al Gore in Moscow that it would never add up for Russia to join, since it is “very, very big” and NATO “quite small.” “Yeltsin put Gore in the bizarre position of trying to persuade him that Russia might actually someday qualify.”28 Future conversations were infrequent and unlinked to current decisions.