The Bill and Boris Show

If you think Strobe Talbott’s title smacks of John le Carre, you are absolutely right: Russians and Americans in his book seem fascinated by the tales of the English master of spy fiction, and “The Russia Hand” suggests one of his twilight experts, put out to pasture at the academic filiation of the Secret Service in the red-brick expanse of North Oxford. That red-brick expanse, however, is the only real link with le Carre’s world. For it was at Oxford 30 years ago that Talbott came to room with Bill Clinton, the unexpected Russia hand in question.

Always in awe of his friend, the self-effacing Talbott would later serve Clinton as Russian expert and foreign policy advisor. Talbott’s credentials were impeccable. In the early 1970s, with extensive training in Russian studies, he smuggled out and translated Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs. From Moscow he covered the Soviet Union for Time magazine and became a master of arms control. What he offers us here is a detailed memoir of the eight years of Clinton dealings with Russia and Boris Yeltsin in the wake of Soviet disintegration. Told in a matter-of-fact tone, Talbott’s story is an insider’s view, intriguing but also selectively silent to the point of distortion and suspiciously devoid of analysis. It will jolt you back to a recent epoch that now seems eons away, to a moment when the “Bill and Boris Show” was center stage with its dark and unintended hilarity.

Talbott casts Clinton as the nation’s chief Russia hand because he believes Clinton demonstrated in his surprisingly voluminous business with that troubled country and its equally troubled president, Yeltsin, that he knew and cared a great deal about its fate. I find the evidence unconvincing. At no point does the Clinton in Talbott’s book reveal any probing insight or critical awareness regarding the deeper nature of Russian problems. Endlessly gregarious, endlessly garrulous, Clinton keeps gushing forth instead about the need to support “Ol’ Boris,” as he refers to his pal.

Indeed, Talbott’s Clinton develops a strong and genuine affection for Yeltsin, in spite, or perhaps because of the Russian president’s often drunken and wildly inappropriate behavior. Yeltsin, Talbott remembers Clinton saying in the fall of 1993, when the Russian bombarded the parliament, “has been brave and consistent.”

Later, while visiting Russia during Yeltsin’s murderous campaign in Chechnya, Clinton likens him to Lincoln, another politician presumably trying to suppress illegitimate secession. When the Russian people persist in electing unpalatable parliamentary politicians, Clinton wonders when they will ever learn the democratic ropes and vote for the right kind of people, thus forgetting the obvious fact that the right kind, his kind, was largely responsible for the most devastating assault on the living standards of ordinary Russians since Joseph Stalin in the early ‘30s and the Nazis in the early ‘40s.

Talbott shows Clinton tenaciously clinging to the belief that Yeltsin is a yearning democrat, whereas the only yearning Yeltsin actually showed, aside from kleptocratic enrichment of his entourage, was a desire to destroy the Communist Party, not quite the same thing in these circumstances as being democratic. His considerable tactical skills he reserved for the domestic scene, where he played a clever political game between elite forces to preserve his own rule. In dealing with the United States and Clinton especially, Yeltsin proved a servile incompetent. So while Clinton in “The Russia Hand” shows himself to have a shallow grasp of Russian realities and Yeltsin’s politics, he turns out to be the ultimate Yeltsin hand, handling the colossally insecure Russian brilliantly while pushing the American agenda with the greatest success.

A certain routine soon emerges. “Ol’ Boris” blusters and shows off expansively. Talbott aptly calls this part of the performance the Rodney Dangerfield moment, with Yeltsin bitterly complaining that “my friend Bill” (a constant term of endearment) and the West have not been showing Russia, and above all him, Yeltsin, proper respect. If only Clinton had done so, the present problems would have been taken care of long ago. Now, luckily, because of their great friendship and leadership, the wise old team has once again saved the day for the world.

Saving the day typically means that Yeltsin comes round to Clinton’s original position. While Yeltsin is giving away the farm, Clinton is only too happy to indulge the Russian’s pitiful desire to plume himself in the cloak of a world leader on equal footing. Feeling Yeltsin’s pain (no doubt truly), Clinton oozes soothing sympathy. As Talbott says, Yeltsin’s grievances are actually put forth “to disguise how pliant he had been behind closed doors.”

Against a backdrop of Russian tumult, the rest of the story is mainly devoted to Talbott’s important dealings with various Russian counterparts. Conducted in the spirit of Bill and Boris, these agreements amount to pushing the Russians into accepting, with cosmetic cover, whatever Talbott and the United States want them to do. To what end? one might ask.

There were of course acute issues: Bosnia, Kosovo, the bombing of Russia’s Serbian allies, preventing transfer of nuclear technology to Iran, removing Russian troops from Eastern Europe. But the two projects that the Clinton administration pushed with extraordinary perseverance and conviction were the so-called market reforms (falsely conflated with the cause of democracy) and the expansion of NATO into, in principle, every conceivable part of the old Soviet sphere.

The former, in line with Clinton’s one consistent foreign policy overall, market “liberalization,” was a hopeless failure and contributed to a monumental obliteration of public resources in Russia, along with massive impoverishment of millions of people and the grimmest destruction of lives without actual physical violence imaginable. “Market reform” also fueled the scandalously corrupt transfer of wealth to a small coterie of individuals, members of the old elite along with some new “oligarchs,” who were awarded staggering amounts of property for a pittance in exchange for supporting Yeltsin in the crucial presidential election of 1996.

Instead of productive investment, this looting was followed by enormous capital flight. This “market reform” also turned the Russian state--because of massive international borrowing--into an abject problem client of the International Monetary Fund.

Most dominant Western voices favored the self-evident virtues of market reform: Who could possibly be against it? NATO expansion was another matter. Some traditionalists claimed that it would dilute the alliance into an unrecognizable political jumble. They were right. If it was (barely) credible that an American president would commit nuclear suicide over West Berlin, would anyone believe he would do so because of a future conflict between Lithuania and Russia? Yet NATO, founded as an anti-Soviet alliance, had arguably already lost its raison d’etre. For the present administration, it has become a mere political instrument to be used at will.

A second camp argued that it was wrong, or at least imprudent, to take geopolitical advantage of Russia’s temporary decline. Better then to seek alternatives to NATO and other ways of including Moscow and Eastern Europe in some new framework of cooperation.

This latter route was also followed in a minor key by Clinton to make the expansion digestible to the Russians. Talbott portrays this as a compromise, but he also says that when push came to shove, the administration thought Moscow had no say in NATO expansion. Russian President Vladimir Putin, doing the best he can with a very weak hand, has now decided to play along with Washington to open up for his real goal: long-term integration into Europe.

Progressive diplomats at the United Nations, as I recall, found Talbott an open-minded, honest and cooperative American policymaker, a thoroughly decent guy. This is perhaps why he seems incapable of probing into the private when it is clearly disgusting. Talbott does not intrude or become polemically critical. He looks away, literally, from what he does not want to see. When Clinton devastates him with his wretched Monica Lewinsky affair, Talbott cannot bear to read the stories. He looks out the window, goes for a jog and then hides the hurt by burying himself in work. The matter never comes up again.

Talbott also wants what he genuinely thinks is in everybody’s best interests. Precisely because he equates his interests with Russian interests, however, he can provide no sustained reflection on the disastrous developments in Russia or on the role of Clinton in them. Nor can he say anything critical about the painful debasement of the Russians in terms of professional trade craft.

Some things, nevertheless, slip through the repressive grid. Talbott is much more enthusiastic about advances in security, such as NATO expansion, than about advances in markets. An aura of bad conscience hovers over his account of marketization, though he talks himself into believing that, errors by Yeltsin aside, the whole bungle had been the fault of recalcitrant hardliners in parliament.

And then he tells the brief but poignant story of catching up with his oldest Russian friends, Slava and Rita Luchkov, in one of those new “garish restaurants” in Moscow. After pushing through “the hookers, hoods and high rollers” waiting to get into the casino, the Luchkovs talk with sorrow of the hollow culture of capitalist Westernized Moscow. Talbott, a Russophile, does not reveal his response. He merely notes that it was the last time he got to see Slava Luchkov. The many subsequent trips to Moscow are too hurried, and within a year Slava is dead “at the age of fifty-seven, approximately the median age of male mortality in Russia.”