A Tragedy of Errors

...The participants agreed that to protect their privileged position, Yeltsin had to be saved, regardless of the condition of his health...

...He resisted the drive of the Clinton Administration and the International Monetary Fund to rush Russia into the free market through shock therapy...

...author, "The End of the Communist Revolution," "Russia's Transformation" Everybody talks about the New World Order, but nobody does much about it...

...Such tactics will make Russia more difficult to deal with, Simes continues, when it eventually recovers its strength: "The dilemma for U.S...

...The non-Russian Soviet republics (except for the Baltic States) did not really want to be cut loose from Soviet society, the author claims, they only wanted to achieve genuine autonomy within it...

...Finally, we are given a running critique of U. S. policy toward Russia during the George Bush and Bill Clinton administrations...

...Yeltsin was inflamed against Gorbachev ever since their falling-out in 1987...

...That is part of the indictment against the Clinton Administration brought by Dimitri Simes, who now heads the Richard M. Nixon Center in Washington...

...He was broad-minded about other countries' aspirations, while holding firm on America's own interests and facing differences with Russia candidly...

...He put national interest ahead of Russia's ingratiating itself with the West, notes Simes, while still exercising tactical restraint commensurate with Russia's weakness...

...Nixon never thought that the United States should try to help Moscow remake Russia in the American image or turn Russiainto an American dominion," says Simes, and he told the Russians so...

...Simes is right on target, too, regarding the great crisis in 1993...

...Throughout Communism's collapse and Yeltsin's floundering reforms, Simes worked closely with ex-President Nixon as he pursued a comeback in the form of elder statesman status...

...As the standoff between Yeltsin and the Russian Parliament was reaching a crescendo in 1993, Nixon said of Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and his colleagues, "These guys are just plain nuts...

...Simes' assessment of Yeltsin's rule after the Soviet breakup is the most damning I have ever seen in print, and I completely agree with it...

...devoid of any meaningful purpose beyond his own political fortunes...

...The outcome (not exactly "independence" for Russia as Simes sometimes refers to it, but rather the decolonization of the Russian Empire) was an economic and geopolitical disaster unprecedented for any country not actually defeated in war...

...Resistance to Yeltsin's stance on the Union and the economy crystallized in the same Russian Supreme Soviet that had made him the leader in 1990-91...

...In the 1990s, "Rehabilitation was not his principal motive...

...Associating himself with "conservatives from the realist school"—former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger, and political scientist Samuel P. Huntington—Simes criticizes the preachy yet squishy opportunism he sees in the Clinton Administration and its "selfrighteous attempt to remake the world in the image of the United States...

...The country was thus presented with a stark choice between the President and his Communist challengers (whom Simes regards not as a menace but as fearful and irresolute...

...policy is whether it is more important to sustain a compliant government in Moscow today or to build lasting ties to Russia based on mutual interests and respect...

...Clinton's greatest mistake, he believes, was his blind embrace of Yeltsin as a "democrat," in "reckless disregard of reality...

...As Prime Minister, "It is unclear whether he has the political courage to make tough decisions and exercise real leadership," but he could provide stability until the mad scramble for Russia's presidency next year...

...Inherently suspicious, Yeltsin is described as disliking bright aides and equating disagreement with disloyalty: "His understanding of democracy was limited to the notion that free elections offered him his best chance to come to power in Russia and to do whatever he chose...

...policy around the globe...

...that ends justify the means and specifically, that Russia's rulers are entitled to rape the ruled into a better tomorrow...

...Simes has unearthed the story of a secret meeting Chubais held with the Russian bankers attending the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, in February 1996...

...Events in Russia have been moving fast of late, and Simes is only able to touch on the new government of Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov in general terms...

...The Clinton Administration's "dangerous mythmaking" was not a matter of ignorance, Simes contends, but a deliberate tactic to push the free-market agenda at whatever cost to real democracy: "The Clinton Administration has a propensity to support Yeltsin no matter what, precisely because he has tended to subordinate Russian foreign policy interests to Western, particularly American, preferences...

...He considers Gorbachev's rival and successor aman of "arrogant capriciousness," both authoritarian and undisciplined...

...Simes adds the new thought that Yeltsin failed to anticipate how his actions would lead to the actual breakup of the Union...

...Simes interweaves three themes more or less chronologically...

...he portrays him as a leader who genuinely believed in reform but was overwhelmed by the forces that his steps toward democracy released...

...After the Collapse is an interpretation of Russia and RussianAmerican relations based on that experience...

...Yeltsin re-entered the political fray only to show who was ultimately boss, as when he impulsively fired Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin in March 1998 and briefly installed the unknown Sergei V Kiriyenko...

...The Clinton Administration has clearly preferred the former...

...The author traveled to Russia with Nixon four times in the early 1990s, and thereby gained entree to the highest levels in Moscow as well as in the U. S. His account of Nixon's thinking about Russia is one of the most intriguing aspects of this book...

...He had no political philosophy, we are told, except "the Leninist belief...

...Moscow Mayor Yuri I. Luzhkov, currently the front-runner to succeed Yeltsin, is merely mentioned in passing by Simes, but fits his less-than-optimistic scenario...

...Still amassing wealth and power without much regard for legal niceties or the line between the official and the personal, Luzhkov may prove to be the oligarch to beat all other oligarchs...

...With his nationalistic proclivities, he could very well activate the Russian backlash against "American unilateralism" and set his country to "organizing an opposing coalition" that would pose "consistent and firm resistance to U.S...

...Yet he had no compunctions about shelling the parliamentarians into submission and swinging his "iron fist" to impose his own authoritarian constitution...

...In fact, "Boris Yeltsin has created a system in which Al Capone would be more at home than Thomas Jefferson...

...A compulsive alcoholic, subject also to bouts of depression, he was at one point so befuddled that he thought Nixon's grandfather came from Russia...

...The desire to shape history rose above all else...

...Simes has a certain sympathy for Gorbachev...

...To destroy his enemy he did not hesitate to exploit the Soviet Union's difficulties, particularly the national minority problems it inherited from the Tsarist Empire...

...The effects, including economic disruption, national chagrin, and the straits of Russian-speaking minorities remaining in the republics, have still not been fully felt...

...He even wrote Yeltsin and urged him (unsuccessfully) to hold off dissolving the Supreme Soviet...

...One is a fresh cut at the history of the unraveling of Communism and the Soviet Union under Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and of the ill-advised efforts under Boris N. Yeltsin to fashion an alternative system...

...The author's unreservedly caustic view of Yeltsin, however, will stir the pot of controversy...

...Contempt for true democracy reached its peak in the Yeltsin entourage in the 1996 Russian presidential campaign...

...Yeltsin, he writes, was driven by a "quest for personal power," a "self-obsession...

...A foreign policy expert even before he emigrated from the Soviet Union to this country in the early 1970s, he served for a number of years as Russian affairs guru to the ex-President...

...Another strand is the author's personal memoir of his work with Nixon, and how the latter perceived what was taking place at the time...

...They don't understand that by encouraging Yeltsin's authoritarian temptation they're playing with fire...

...Skilled in the art of political maneuvering," Primakov, we are told, turned Russian foreign policy around after his appointment in 1986...

...Pell-mell economic decontrol and privatization, pushed by the Russian President's Thatcherite lieutenants Yegor T. Gaidar and Anatoly B. Chubais, opened the gates to crime, corruption, and the emergence of a robberbaron financial oligarchy more interested in plundering the country and salting the proceeds away abroad than in rebuilding anything at home...

...Accordingly, every form of financial leverage and media pressure was exerted to create an "artificial polarization" that smothered nonCommunist alternatives to Yeltsin...

...Reviewed by Robert V. Daniels Professor emeritus of history, University of Vermont...

...He expresses high regard for the man, whom he encountered during his own Soviet days and later when Primakov became Foreign Minister...

...Although he acknowledges Nixon's darker side, Simes maintains that Nixon was a "romantic pragmatist," a Wilsonian idealist...

...After Yeltsin's inevitable victory (and his critical heart trouble, concealed at the time), Chubais and the financial oligarchy were riding high, defying the impotent outrage of the Communists and nationalists in the legislative branch...