Moreover, at a political level, the Georgians were remembered as the rough and dangerous “muscle” of the Bolshevik Revolution. Josef Stalin was, of course, Georgian. So too was Lavrenti Beria, the hated chief of the intelligence services, who was executed in 1953 for trying to overthrow fellow members of the Politburo after Stalin’s death. And then there was Sergo Ordzhonikidze, a man so vile that a purge was named for him.
Notwithstanding all this, a Western-oriented revolution in Georgia in the short term was tolerable, if troubling. Upheaval in Ukraine was quite another matter.
The shock waves that Ukraine’s Orange Revolution produced in Moscow can be understood only in the context of how disoriented most Russians felt after Ukraine declared its independence from the Soviet Union in August 1991. It has been said that, for Russia, losing Ukraine was like the United States losing Texas or California. But that doesn’t begin to capture it; it would be like losing the original thirteen colonies. Slavdom, including the Cyrillic alphabet, had roots in Kiev and had spread to Russia. Ukraine had belonged to Poland during the near collapse of the Russian Empire in the seventeenth century and Germany had recognized Ukraine’s short-lived independence at the end of World War I. Some Nazi leaders had also dangled independence in exchange for collaboration in World War II. For the Russians, that proved simply that only in weakness had Moscow been unable to defend the unity of the Slavic people—Ukrainians and Russians.
In 1954 Nikita Khrushchev gave the Crimea, along the Black Sea, to the Ukrainian people to celebrate hundreds of years of Russian-Ukrainian friendship. It didn’t matter at the time. The collapse of the Soviet Union, however, revealed that move to be a strategic error; Russia suddenly found itself with important assets and a large part of its population trapped in the newly independent Ukraine. The Russian navy’s most important base, at Sevastapol, now resided in a different country, along with almost 700,000 ethnic Russians, roughly 70 percent of the city’s population. Both from the perspective of Russia’s strategic interests and its national identity, the Orange Revolution was a tremendous blow to Moscow.
During the Soviet period and after it, I’d visited Russia and Ukraine several times. It was quite apparent that the Ukrainians—particularly in the western part of the country—did not feel warm fraternal ties with Russia. It was also apparent that the Russians underestimated how much antipathy the Ukrainians held for them. The Ukrainians were still ethnically and linguistically distinctive people despite generations of intermarriage. With their misplaced expressions of the unbreakable bonds of brotherhood between the two peoples, Russians only further alienated Ukrainians. So although it was no surprise to me that the leaders of the Orange Revolution could barely disguise their anti-Russian sentiments, Moscow seemed to have been caught off guard.
It didn’t take long for Putin to recover his footing after the shock of the events in Kiev. I came face-to-face with that reality when I visited the Russian president at his dacha outside Moscow in May 2004. It was several months before the presidential elections in Ukraine. Putin took me on a tour of his newly refurbished office. Within a few minutes Viktor Yanukovych emerged from a side room. “Oh, please meet Viktor,” Putin said. “He is a candidate for president of Ukraine.” I greeted the pro-Russian politician and took the message that Putin had intended: the United States should know that Moscow had a horse in the race to defend its interests.
But the election produced a result that the Kremlin didn’t welcome. Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko’s blocs won the election, and the two pro-Western politicians formed the government as their orange-clad supporters cheered in the streets. For the next five years they would struggle to define a path and identity for Ukraine.
As in any country emerging from tyranny, elections were but a first step toward democracy. Institutions were weak, corruption was rampant, and there was thus a tendency for personalities—and personal animosities—to overwhelm politics. Unfortunately, as time passed, the Ukrainian leaders would increasingly turn on each other and the struggle would become more about them than about the future of their country.
It was against that backdrop that I took my first trip to Russia as secretary of state. A month before, Kyrgyzstan had joined the growing list of color revolutions, prompting President Askar Akayev to flee his people’s wrath for the safety of Moscow. Needless to say, upon my arrival I found a Russian president who appeared outwardly cool but quite bothered by the direction of events on his country’s periphery.
I established a pattern that I would follow in my visits to Moscow. My counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, was, of course, my host. Lavrov had been the Russian ambassador to the United Nations for almost ten years. He spoke nuanced English and was widely regarded as a tough-minded but capable diplomat. He loved fine wine, good food, and hunting in the wilds of Siberia. Well, he was Russian, after all.
We developed a good relationship, slightly formal and sometimes contentious. He was, like me, a natural debater who didn’t mind verbal combat. That sometimes unnerved our European friends, but we were usually able to work our way through and make progress on an issue—at least until the Georgian war, when our relationship broke almost irreparably.
Early on, though, I liked working with Lavrov, principally because he was respected enough in Moscow to get things done. Over the years, the colleagues I valued most were those who could move the policies of their governments. It was fine to have perfectly nice and friendly relations, but too often I was forced to work alongside a number of counterparts who were good dinner companions yet feckless politicians.
Before that April 2005 visit to Moscow, Lavrov and I had already met in Turkey shortly after I became secretary of state. There, for almost an hour, he delivered a list of Russian complaints about U.S. policy. I listened patiently but told Bill Burns, then our ambassador to Russia, to get the message to him that our interactions would have to improve or our meetings wouldn’t be worth my time. I expected to engage in an exchange of ideas, not listen to a monologue. Moreover, foreign ministers should concentrate on big issues, not every niggling problem between us. When Lavrov and I met in Moscow, the conversation was somewhat better, and over time we got to a place where we could really engage each other rather than just go through our respective lists.
After seeing Lavrov, I would usually meet with President Putin, sometimes in his ornate Kremlin office and sometimes at his government dacha. Russians love their dachas, or summer houses, which can range from small, unheated shacks to grand mansions. Needless to say, Putin’s was in the latter category, located about fifteen miles outside Moscow. Along the road leading out of the city’s center, one could view the ostentatious character of the new Russia: the route was a kind of Russian Rodeo Drive, occupied by the likes of Dolce & Gabbana and Rolls-Royce. Clearly the days of Soviet autarky were over.
Putin and I rarely met more than two-on-two, and increasingly over the years we would meet one-on-one. We covered a few issues, but as time went on, he’d use the conversation to expound not just on his many “disappointments” with U.S. policy but on his own notion of democracy. “Tui znaesh nac” (you know us), he would say, referencing my academic background. The phrase usually introduced a long disquisition on how Russia would come to democracy: through a strong hand (his) and the gradual development of “factions” within his party, which could then represent varying points of view. He thought of it like the factionalized Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, which had been, aside for a brief period in the early 1990s, the ruling party in Japan since 1955 and had varying voices within it. The Russians were a fractious bunch whose many revolutions always turned out badly, he would note. They had to be led.
Though this was radical for a former Marxist, it was quite distant from our modern notions of democratic development. At our meeting that April, Putin did not yet say explicitly that the color revolutions were a U.S. tool to throw Russia off this planned course, but the implication lurked just beneath the surface. Putin told me that he opposed any “revo
lution from the streets.” Saying that it was silly to talk about re-creating the USSR, he nonetheless reminded me that the newly independent states had taken their institutions and wealth from the Soviet Union. It was therefore not surprising that Moscow would have a “continuing interest” in them.
On this particular occasion, the upcoming sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Great Patriotic War, as the Russians called World War II, gave Putin significant cause for concern about our approach to the neighboring states. President Bush had agreed to come to the commemoration of this seminal event in Russian history, but he would visit the Baltic states first. The President had asked me to tell Putin that he would do nothing to embarrass Russia but that the new members of NATO would expect him to address their long, troubled history with Moscow. Putin used the meeting with me to excoriate the Balts for trying to relitigate the past. “They want me to apologize for the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact,” he said. “Maybe they can’t read because we already did that in 1989.” In fact, there had been a halfhearted acknowledgment by Mikhail Gorbachev of the sinister deal between Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. It could hardly have been called an apology.
I decided to let the point go, recognizing how bitter the wounds of World War II remained in Russia; the Soviet Union had lost an estimated 26 million people to German aggression. The history was too complicated to debate at that moment. One year before, at the French observance of the D-Day Normandy landing, we’d all witnessed how sensitive such historical narratives can be. I was seated behind German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder—who’d been invited, ostensibly, to underscore the reconciliation of France and Germany—as he glared, stone-faced, at a scathing (but accurate) video portrayal of his country’s past crimes against humanity. I felt very bad for him, remembering our first encounter, when he had told a touching story of finding a photograph of his father, who had been killed on the eastern front when Schroeder was a baby. “It was my face,” he had said in broken English. It was a good reminder that the lives of many ordinary citizens on both sides of the conflict had been changed by that war. It was a good reminder that that was true in any war.
I returned to my message to Putin that the President would make a statement that tried to heal old wounds, not reopen them. Seemingly satisfied, Putin went on to say that he was delighted that the secretary of state was a Russia specialist. “That will mean that the relationship will be central to you,” he said. I don’t know if he really thought that or if it was meant to be flattery. I made a mental note not to underestimate the Russians—both the help they could provide and the damage they could do.
Putin went on to other issues on the agenda, including a plea to be included in the G7 finance ministers group. Moscow cared about status and bristled at having been excluded from the economic group while being allowed to participate in the political discussions of the G8. “I know our economy is ranked sixteenth,” he acknowledged, but he maintained that it was still an important economy. The statement was on the face of it contradictory, and I moved on to Russian membership in the WTO.
That night, I had dinner with Sergei Ivanov, who at the time of this first visit was the minister of defense. I have earlier described my relationship with Ivanov. Owing to our long association, I was able to talk with him candidly. He was no Jeffersonian democrat, but he was—and still is—a modernizer. That was always the true divide in Russia: Slavophiles versus modernizers, not democrats versus authoritarians. He talked about reforming the backward Russian armed forces from a brutal conscript military to a modern one, and he wanted Russia to become technologically more sophisticated and make a contribution to the global economy. Ivanov, it turned out, was one of the two men whom Vladmir Putin pitted against each other two years later to decide who would succeed him as president. Ivanov would lose.
Though that election was in the future, its outcome was clear to me when I returned to Moscow with President Bush the next month for the Great Patriotic War celebration. The streets were decked out with banners commemorating the victory of Soviet forces in World War II. There on light posts in front of stylish European stores were signs saying “Dyen pobedi” (day of victory) and “Slava narodoo” (glory to the people). I flashed back to my days as a graduate student in the Soviet Union; the slogans were eerily familiar. Then I looked closely at one of the banners. “Brought to you by Nokia,” it said. Things had indeed changed.
But it was at the parade on Red Square that I made my very early prediction about Ivanov’s future. As minister of defense, Sergei stood in the back of a black ZiL limousine and reviewed the thousands of Russian military personnel arrayed along the cobblestones in front of Lenin’s tomb. Saluting the assembled armies of the Russian Federation, he yelled congratulations to each contingent. He looked, well, presidential. Putin will never let him become president of Russia, I thought. He will not want a strong successor and rival in the Kremlin when he finally moves on.
Thanks to President Bush’s having kept his promise in the Baltics, the atmosphere of the Moscow visit was good. I hadn’t been so sure that the Russians would react well to the President’s speech in Latvia just prior to our arrival in Moscow. Baltic leaders, including Latvian Prime Minister Aigars Kalvītis, Estonian President Arnold Rüütel, and Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus, had gathered to hear the U.S. President tell them that their accession to NATO in 2004 meant that they could never be threatened with impunity again. Old men and women cried at the thought of never again having to fear Russian occupation.
But the President also reminded the Balts that they would have to live with their neighbor and that the many ethnic Russians among them should find a place in their new multiethnic democracies. The message struck just the right balance. Clearly the Russians got that point and appreciated it.
In that regard, I was glad that our trip to Tbilisi, Georgia, would come after—not before—the visit to Moscow. Among Georgia’s citizenry, anti-Russian sentiments were more pronounced. The overflowing crowd that had gathered in Tbilisi’s Freedom Square sang a stirring rendition of the national anthem a cappella after the recorded music tract had failed. We didn’t know at the time that a man carrying a live grenade had been caught not far from President Bush.
DRIVING BACK to the hotel from Red Square after the Great Patriotic War celebration, I had been struck by the sight of young Russian families strolling along, eating morozhenoe, tasty Russian ice cream. It felt like just another holiday in any country—a time for kids to be out of school and for families to enjoy a warm spring day. The image was in stark contrast to the occasional glimpses of old veterans who’d been honored on Red Square and were hobbling along in the streets. Russia was finally pushing from its national memory the psychic weight of the Great Patriotic War, which Stalin had used to justify repression and the people’s meager lives. Their “greatest generation,” the peasant boys who’d been recruited from the villages to repel the German armies, were quickly dying off. I wondered if the commemoration of the war’s end would have any resonance at all for the country when the seventieth anniversary rolled around.
This was indeed a new Russia. Despite the approaching authoritarian backslide, Russians enjoyed more personal freedom than at any time in their history. I’d first been in Moscow in 1979, when people never looked you in the eye; they just trudged along and looked down at their feet. These days, things were much different. Now, although mortality and morbidity rates rivaled those in the developing world, the population was so much better off. Ordinary Russians traveled and talked to foreigners in a confident, engaging manner. They lived in private apartments decorated with items from the huge IKEA furniture store just outside the city. There was plenty to eat, and stores had great variety. That had been Vladimir Putin’s bargain with the Russian people: “I will give you order and prosperity and dignity; you will leave politics to me.”
The hardening of Putin’s resolve to enforce the second part of that bargain would test our relationship increasingly over the next years. A few months before I
became secretary, Putin proposed radical new legislation that went a long way to centralize political power in the Kremlin. In the name of strengthening unity after the terror attack in Beslan, Putin proposed doing away with the election of the country’s 89 regional governors. He wanted the Kremlin to appoint them instead. As with a number of other proposed reforms during his tenure, Putin succeeded in pushing his plan through parliament (which his party controlled) and strengthening his grip on Russian politics.
The independent media also became a target. In 2006 the campaign against the press turned violent with the murder of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, an unrelenting critic of the regime. I met with some of her associates in Moscow shortly after her death and could see the pain and fear in their eyes. Though Putin promised to investigate the crime, it wasn’t too hard to imagine that she’d been killed by allies of the Kremlin, with or without its knowledge. Independent television and radio stations were disappearing at an alarming rate, replaced by state-run channels that were increasingly indistinguishable from one another in their full-throated defense of the regime. Then, when ABC News conducted an interview with the Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev, Moscow expelled the American network and its correspondents. The message was clear to journalists, both foreign and Russian: don’t criticize the Russian state.
No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington Page 43