The Back Channel

by William J Burns

  Ambassador Pickering’s deputy chief of mission was Dick Miles, a wise, deeply experienced Russia hand. Down-to-earth, with excellent Russian-language skills, Dick had common sense and a talent for connecting with people across Russian society that proved to be huge assets for the embassy, and a strong example for the rest of us. As head of the political section, I was nominally the number three officer in the mission. Largely because of the frequency of Pickering’s travels, I would spend half my nearly two years in Moscow as acting deputy chief of mission, and several weeks as chargé, when both Pickering and Miles were away.

  We had twenty-seven officers in the political section, by far the biggest of any in the Foreign Service, as well as four administrative assistants, and two Russian nationals, who arranged appointments and translated documents in an office separated from the parts of the embassy where classified work was done. Our job was to provide ground truths, a granular sense of political and economic realities in Russia, so that policymakers in Washington could weigh them against all the other considerations overflowing their inboxes. We roamed widely across Russia’s eleven time zones, trying to convey to Washington as clear an understanding as we could of the unfolding drama of a Russia struggling to absorb simultaneously three immense historical transformations: the collapse of Communism and the tumultuous transition to market economics and democracy; the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the security it had provided to historically insecure Russians; and the collapse of the Soviet Union itself, and with it a Russian empire built gradually over several centuries. Any one of those would have been difficult to manage; all three together were profoundly disorienting.

  Travel in Russia in that chaotic time was always memorable. I spent one frigid afternoon talking to coal miners a thousand feet underground in Kemerovo, a fast-fading city in Siberia. In Vladivostok, then the murky heart of Russia’s “wild east,” I talked to a couple of local mafia pretenders, expansive in their description of new “business possibilities,” none of which sounded much like the new market models that Western advisors were earnestly promoting in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Departing on one wintry trip to the North Caucasus, I watched in amazement as a technician for Air Dagestan, one of Aeroflot’s countless dodgy post-Soviet spin-offs, went to work de-icing the wings of the battered old Ilyushin aircraft with a blowtorch. It wasn’t much more reassuring to climb into the plane and walk past the cockpit, where the rheumy-eyed pilot was putting away a half-empty bottle of vodka.

  Moscow had its own unique charms in the mid-1990s. I remember heading off one morning for an appointment in the Moscow mayor’s office. As I walked toward the entrance, I noticed a number of Russians in suits lying spread-eagled in the snow, with a group of armed, uniformed men wearing black ski masks standing over them. It turned out that the men in ski masks were members of President Yeltsin’s presidential guards, led by Yeltsin’s increasingly powerful former bodyguard, Aleksandr Korzhakov. They were paying a courtesy call on executives of the Most Group, run by one of Russia’s wealthiest oligarchs, Vladimir Gusinsky, whose offices were a few floors below the mayor’s. Gusinsky had run afoul of Korzhakov, and this was how gentle reminders were conveyed in Moscow in 1994.

  Moscow’s lawlessness produced plenty of scary moments. One weekday afternoon in the early fall of 1995, someone fired a rocket-propelled grenade into the sixth floor of the chancery in broad daylight. The round pierced the wall and detonated in a copying machine, sending metal fragments and glass in all directions. Miraculously, no one was in the copying room at the time, and no one was injured or killed. The authorities rounded up a number of the usual suspects, but the culprit was never identified. It was symptomatic of life in Moscow in that era that it didn’t seem wildly out of the ordinary for someone to have an RPG in the center of the city in the middle of the day.

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  BY THE SUMMER of 1994, Boris Yeltsin was a wounded figure, his limitations as a leader growing more and more apparent. Despite the sustained efforts of Bill Clinton and his administration to cultivate relations with the new Russia and accommodate the post-traumatic stress of the post-Soviet world, the limitations of U.S.-Russian partnership were also laid bare.

  In his rivalry with Mikhail Gorbachev, Yeltsin had been the heroic destroyer of the old, calcified Soviet system. But he faltered in the next phase, the construction of an open political and economic system out of the rubble of Communism. At first, he gave full rein to a group of young reformers led by his first prime minister, Yegor Gaidar. Self-styled “kamikaze pilots,” they rushed to reform, acutely conscious of the gravitational forces of impossibly high popular expectations, the hard realities of economic change, and the inevitable counterreaction of conservative factions. Hardship was the dominant feature on their landscape. Industrial production in Russia had fallen by half since 1989. Agricultural production was dropping too. At least 30 percent of the population lived below the poverty line, and massive inflation had wiped out the meager savings of a pensioner generation that had endured the trials of the Great Patriotic War (World War II) and postwar recovery. The public health system had collapsed, and contagious diseases like tuberculosis and diphtheria were reemerging. Nevertheless, Yeltsin and his small band of reformers pushed ahead. A massive and unwieldy “voucher program,” theoretically offering shares in state-owned companies to individual citizens, resulted in the privatization of some 70 percent of the economy by the end of 1994. Somewhat predictably, the process was monopolized by a tiny minority, a new class of oligarchs who were as ruthless as they were entrepreneurial.

  As reform spawned political resistance, Yeltsin seemed adrift. When the Duma’s reactionary leadership challenged the constitutional basis of his rule in the fall of 1993, Yeltsin resorted to the use of force, relying on loyal military units to rout his opponents. While he believed he had no choice, the cost was high, politically and personally. New parliamentary elections at the end of the year boosted the rabid nationalist party of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, as well as a reemergent Communist Party. Lonely and overwhelmed, Yeltsin retreated steadily from day-to-day government business, drinking heavily to ease physical and political pain.

  In December 1994, on the eve of a visit by Vice President Al Gore to Moscow, I tried to capture Russia’s domestic predicament in a cable to Washington.1 “Winter in Russia is not a time for optimists, and in some respects the popular mood here mirrors the descending gloom.” Yeltsin’s foreign policy sought to mask national weakness and reassert Russian prerogatives. “Born of a mood of national regret over the loss of superpower status and an equally acute sense that the West is taking advantage of Russia’s weakness,” I wrote, assertive policies abroad had become one of the few themes that united Russians amid continued bickering over domestic issues. Yeltsin was determined to reaffirm Russia’s great power status and independent interests in Russia’s so-called Near Abroad, the neighboring post-Soviet republics of Eurasia.

  Stressing the attachment of Yeltsin and the country’s political elite to Russia’s sphere of influence in the former Soviet space, I emphasized mounting Russian concern about expansion of NATO. I noted that Yeltsin’s tough public statements in the fall of 1994 about NATO expansion “were an unsubtle reminder of Russian angst about neglect of its interests in the process of restructuring European security institutions.”

  The cable concluded that “the honeymoon in American relations with the new Russia that blossomed in the immediate aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union is now long past.” Russia had embarked on a long journey of redefinition, which would inevitably prove frustrating and perplexing as personalities shifted and policies collided, but that continued to hold potential for effective post–Cold War relations between us. It was critical, in my view, to “prioritize better among the many concerns on our agenda with the Russians. Two years ago, we could pretty much have it our way on a whole range of issues, so long as we paid some minimal deference to Russian sen
sibilities. That is no longer the case.”

  I visited a retired Soviet diplomat late one afternoon that winter in his modest apartment in central Moscow. He was a widower, alone with his memories and photographs of foreign postings across the Cold War. As we slowly drained a bottle of vodka, the snow falling silently outside his sitting room window, he reminisced about his career. He was not especially nostalgic about the Soviet system, and acknowledged its many weaknesses and cruelties. “We brought this upon ourselves,” he said. “We’ve lost our way.” It might take another generation for Russia to recover its confidence and purpose, but he had no doubt that it would. It would be a mistake to leave the impression with Russians that we had taken advantage of them when they were down on their luck. “Remember Churchill,” he said. “In victory, magnanimity. You won’t regret it.”

  The embassy urged caution on NATO enlargement. Before thinking seriously about extending offers of formal NATO membership to Poland and other Central European states, we recommended considering other forms of cooperation with former Warsaw Pact members, and perhaps a new “treaty relationship” between NATO and Russia. We underscored the utility of including Russia in the new “Contact Group” on Bosnia, which gathered together key European and American diplomats to resolve a conflict spinning out of control in the former Yugoslavia. Russia had limited weight on Balkan diplomacy, but engaging it systematically reduced its temptation to be a spoiler, and was a smart investment for the day when it would add more muscle to its assertiveness. Another good example was the inclusion of Russia in meetings of the “G-7”—the principal players in the post–Cold War West. The emergence of the “G-8” helped anchor a weak and floundering Russia in the respect and status that came with regular dealings with the G-7 countries.

  President Clinton was quick to appreciate what was at stake. In a speech in April 1993, he noted, “The danger is clear if Russia’s reforms turn sour—if it reverts to authoritarianism or disintegrates into chaos. The world cannot afford the strife of the former Yugoslavia replicated in a nation as big as Russia.”2 Clinton and Yeltsin developed a surprisingly close personal relationship, despite their differences in age and political culture, and despite all the storms in U.S.-Russian relations in the 1990s. Both big, hearty men blessed with natural political gifts if not born into political privilege, they helped navigate a complicated and uncertain era. Strobe Talbott, an accomplished Russian specialist and Clinton’s former Oxford roommate, dubbed the president “the U.S. government’s principal Russia hand.”3 Clinton made a high priority of managing Russia and its erratic president. As the head of a new bureau in the State Department overseeing policy toward Russia and the other former Soviet states, Talbott became the day-to-day manager of the relationship.

  Talbott and his Russian counterpart, Deputy Foreign Minister Georgiy Mamedov, understood how to steer through their own bureaucracies and politics, and had a solid appreciation of each other’s political limitations. Together, they constructed an elaborate architecture of cooperative U.S.-Russian mechanisms aimed at cementing an image of partnership between at least nominal equals. At the core was the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission, led by Vice President Gore and Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, which was set up to organize relations between the two governments more systematically. Following its inaugural session in Washington in September 1993, the commission met twice yearly, home and away. Eventually growing to include eight different subcommittees, each co-led by an American cabinet officer or agency head along with his Russian counterpart, the commission fostered cooperation across a wide range of areas, from the environment to outer space. Gore and Chernomyrdin also developed an effective relationship. They were an unlikely duo, the ambitious young Tennessee politician with a penchant for technical detail, and the gray, sometimes inarticulate apparatchik. Nevertheless, their informal conversations on the margins of the commission meetings were often productive, and Chernomyrdin developed a reputation in the West for efficiency, at least by the low-bar standards of the old Soviet system.

  For all the mechanisms and the high-level attention and visits, Russia’s post-Soviet transition was proving a long and painful slog. As his health deteriorated and his political clout and attention span grew more attenuated, Yeltsin was anxious for an opportunity to show people that he was still capable of decisive and effective action, a political step around which Russians could unite. Reasserting Moscow’s authority over Russia’s increasingly disconnected regions was one obvious possibility, and the most obstreperous and defiant region of all, Chechnya, was a tempting target. With a rebellious history and an especially dark and forbidding presence in the Russian psyche, Chechnya seemed to Yeltsin to be overdue for the application of a strong hand. As tensions built in 1994, the embassy highlighted the danger signs on the horizon: “Yeltsin is by no means out of the woods on political arrangements with the regions—a serious misstep on Chechnya, to cite the most obvious trouble spot, could cause the unraveling of much of what has been achieved.”4 The serious misstep was not long in coming.

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  THROUGHOUT THE YEARS I served in Russia, I was always fascinated by the North Caucasus. At one time or another, I traveled to each of its five autonomous republics, which had been gradually swallowed up in the advance of Russian imperial power in the nineteenth century. With the snowcapped peaks of the Caucasus Mountains looming off in the south, there was a wildness and beauty to the terrain unlike anything else I saw across Russia’s huge expanse. Mostly Muslim and mostly poor, the North Caucasus was one of the few parts of the Russian Federation in which populations were still growing. And like mountain peoples everywhere, they had a defiant streak.

  Most defiant of all, at least in the eyes of suspicious Russians, were the Chechens. For nearly fifty years in the nineteenth century they had waged a guerrilla war against imperial Russia. During World War II, wary that the Chechens might side with the invading Nazis, Stalin brutally deported nearly the entire population—some four hundred thousand men, women, and children—to Kazakhstan. They returned more than a decade after the war, with a whole new set of historical grievances. When the Soviet Union collapsed, with Moscow distracted and struggling with reform, Chechnya grew increasingly restive and isolated—ripe for the reckless ambition of its first elected president, Dzhokhar Dudayev, a recently retired Soviet air force general. Erratic and self-important, Dudayev alternated between declarations of Chechnya’s quasi-independence and protestations that he remained a “Russian patriot”; more mob boss than revolutionary, he manipulated Chechen clan politics and set up a variety of criminal rackets.

  The truth, however, was that Chechnya’s lawlessness differed only in degree from what was going on across much of Russia in the early 1990s. In many tangible respects, Chechnya remained a part of the Russian Federation, its borders open and its oil and gas flowing freely out of the republic, its meager pensions paid out of the Russian budget. Dudayev himself gradually lost popularity in Chechnya. While his thugs enriched themselves, local government services atrophied. Dudayev’s openly rebellious behavior grated on Yeltsin, a deeply irritating reminder of his inability to assert his grip. Similarly proud, impulsive, and disinclined to compromise, they were heading for a tragic collision.5 Demonizing rhetoric came easily to both, with Dudayev playing on decades of Chechen mistreatment at the hands of Russians, and Yeltsin exploiting the peculiarly hard view that most Russians had of Chechens.

  Tired and isolated, Yeltsin relied more and more on an inner circle of conservative power ministers and drinking companions, whose capacity for court politics exceeded their professional competence. Their argument to Yeltsin was that subduing Dudayev gave him a perfect opportunity to assert his control, outflank nationalist opponents, and show his wider international audience that Russia was beginning to reemerge after its moment of weakness. In the summer of 1994, with their encouragement, Yeltsin set in motion a series of escalating efforts to bring Du
dayev to heel.

  Serial humiliations were the result, first a failed coup d’état using Chechen oppositionists, and then a botched intervention in late November backed by Russian troops. The Chechens paid and recruited to undertake the operation fled at the last minute, and a number of Russian soldiers were captured and paraded before television cameras. There still may have been a chance to pressure Dudayev, whose position at home had been steadily weakening, and eventually negotiate an acceptable arrangement for Chechnya within the Russian Federation. Yeltsin, whose sense of embarrassment was now overflowing, instead doubled down and authorized a full-scale military invasion in early December. His defense minister, Pavel Grachev, assured him that the Russian army would easily overwhelm Chechen resistance. He could not have been more wrong.

  Disregarding the advice of a number of senior army officers, Grachev sent three armored columns, poorly prepared and poorly led, into Grozny. Dudayev’s forces, led by a former Soviet colonel, Aslan Maskhadov, slaughtered hundreds of Russian troops in fierce urban combat, and routed the rest. Beaten back, a furious Grachev began an intense aerial and artillery bombardment, determined to, as he said, “make the rubble bounce.” Over the next few weeks, bombs and shells rained down on the city. Much of the bombing came from high altitude, and winter fog obscured targets. The result was devastating; many of the civilian victims were elderly ethnic Russians living in the center of the city, who had been unable to flee.