Bill and Boris
SHUB, ANATOLE
Bill and Boris The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy By Strobe Talbott Random. 478 pp. $29.95. Reviewed by Anatole Shub Former Russian opinion analyst, U.S. Information...
...He shows genuine insight into the President's approach to diplomacy and his affection for "?G Boris": "A signature of his political technique was to begin his reply to almost any proposition by saying, "? agree with that,' even when he didn't...
...Some of it subsequently appeared in a Russian newspaper, Nezavisimaya Gazeta...
...withdraw Russian troops from the Baltic states...
...policies were not the product of summit diplomacy but of Congressional initiative: One was the plan devised by Senators Sam Nunn and Richard G. Lugar for helping Russia dismantle nuclear weapons...
...Talbott summarizes the major achievements of this personal diplomacy as follows: "The two presidents were the negotiators in chief of agreements to halt the sale of Russian rocket parts to India...
...He himself wrote an essay on "Political Pluralism in the USSR" that examined six alternative scenarios for the years ahead and found liberalization more probable than regression...
...Embassy in Moscow, Thomas Graham, drafted an incisive cable describing the Kremlin scene as a struggle among various corrupt "clans," his superiors refused to send it...
...Indeed, Clinton's interest in Russia dates back at least to 1969-70, when he and Strobe Talbott were roommates at Oxford...
...Toward the end, there are dialogues evidencing the cooler seductive powers of Yeltsin's successor, Vladimir V Putin...
...As President, Clinton held more meetings with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin (18) than all his predecessors combined had with Soviet leaders since Potsdam in 1945, and there were also countless telephone calls...
...He understood that Russia had been going through a "nonstop nervous breakdown...
...But one of Talbott's most alarming tales involves Clinton and Yeltsin only at a distance...
...They also prompted the memorable dash of Russian troops from Bosnia to the Pristina airport...
...But "there's a big difference," he told Talbott after they had left office, "between believers in that place and its possibilities—people like you and me—and those other folks who were always saying that the sky was falling, that we'd helped knock it down...
...Talbott is well qualified to tell this story...
...Clinton remained consistent and clear, though, in his efforts to help Russia—and Yeltsin...
...We let our hopes get out in front of reality sometimes, while they let their fears—and maybe their mistrust and some pretty ungenerous instincts—keep them from seeing the big picture...
...The generals involved in these mutinous actions were promoted under Putin, while Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev, who cooperated with Chernomyrdin, was retired...
...He believed that "?G Nikita" had sufficiently shaken the totalitarian system to rule out neo-Stalinism...
...and ensure the participation of the Russian military in Balkan peacekeeping and of Russian diplomacy in the settlement of NATO's air war against Serbia...
...remove Soviet-era nuclear missiles from Ukraine in exchange for Russian assurances of Ukraine's sovereignty and security...
...Reading about the various Administration efforts to reconcile Russia to a strategic move clearly adverse to its interests, through such devices as the Partnership for Peace, I could not help recalling similar bureaucratic expedients of the past, such as the ill-fated European Defense Community in the 1950s and the proposed Multilateral Nuclear Force in the 1960s...
...He describes the bitter, open conflict he witnessed among Russian military officials as he—in support of Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari and Yeltsin's former Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin—attempted to secure ground rules for Russian participation in the Kosovo peacekeeping force...
...Senior generals screamed at Chernomyrdin and at each other, and openly repudiated agreements Yeltsin had already approved...
...The book quotes many of their exchanges verbatim...
...Two of the most successful U.S...
...Talbott was then translating Nikita S. Khrushchev's memoirs, and the future Chief Executive did more than make omelets for (and debrief) him...
...On the whole, Talbott has written an interesting book, even if the last sections updating developments under Putin and President George W. Bush are much less vivid than the encounters between Bill and Boris...
...e - tween 1993 and 2000, Talbott reports, no fewer that 40,000 Russians, and 75,000 from the former Soviet states, came to the U.S...
...Like Russia in those years, the book lurches from one crisis or minicrisis to another: from the Russian Parliament's revolt against Yeltsin in 1993 to Kosovo and Chechnya at the end of the century...
...Besides providing a lively narrative, these candid, conversational, sometimes stormy dialogues illustrate Yeltsin's personal volatility and political neediness on the one hand, and Clinton's self-control and formidable seductive powers on the other...
...Yet, when a political officer in the U.S...
...These and similar episodes suggest that what Russia had under Yeltsin was closer to anarchy, or kleptocracy, than to the "democracy" the Americans liked to preach...
...The key, as I saw it, might be that Yeltsin combined prodigious determination and fortitude with grotesque indiscipline and a kind of genius for self-abasement...
...I also found somewhat wearying the inordinate attention to expanding NATO, which Talbott manfully defends while noting the pressures on the Clinton Administration exerted by Henry Kissinger, the Polish-American activist Jan Nowak, and House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich's Contract with America...
...of pretending to begin a conversation on common ground in order to get there before it was over...
...Despite all the attention paid to NATO, the author does not mention one strategic development that arguably was a consequence of its expansion: I'm speaking of the fall of the "pro-Western" government in Belarus and its replacement by the hardline dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko, who with the support of Russian Communists promptly created a RussiaBelarus "union" as a step toward recreating the USSR...
...Information Agency The "Russia hand" of this book's title is Bill Clinton, not the author who documents in considerable detail how deeply involved with Russia the former President was throughout his White House tenure...
...Both I Talbott and Clinton acknowlI edge that U.S...
...After 21 years as a correspondent and columnist at Time magazine, he served for eight years as Clinton's point man on Russia—first as the head of a new State Department bureau for the former Soviet states, then as a deputy secretary of state...
...All this Clinton reeognized, found easy to forgive and wanted others to join him in forgiving...
...institutionalize cooperation between Russia and an expanding NATO...
...under those programs...
...aid to the Russian economy was woefully inadequate...
...This] was not just a reflection of his desire to be liked—it was also a means...
...the other, largely at the behest of Senator Bill Bradley, expanded exchanges of students and of other persons...
...He was both a very big man and a very bad boy, a natural leader and an incurable screw-up...
...Elsewhere Talbott recounts the continued resistance of top bureaucrats in the Atomic Energy Ministry to halting Russian nuclear aid to Iran...
...However, Talbott "suspected there was more to [Clinton's] affinity with Yeltsin than being approximately the same height and shape and shoe size, or their being the leaders of two countries that could blow up the world, or being fellow politicians who had to contend with obstreperous legislatures and hostile media...
...Sure, we were wrong about some of the little things, but we were right about the big stuff...
...lay the groundwork for the Baltic states to join the alliance...
...Talbott believes Yeltsin functioned best in crisis, "especially if it was one he had helped to provoke...
Vol. 85 • May 2002 • No. 3
