The Back Channel
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Putin gave us more credit than we deserved for careful plotting against Russian interests. For Putin, the September 2004 Beslan school siege was a turning point. The whole world saw live the massacre of more than three hundred teachers, staff, and students. Putin saw Bush’s response, which included warnings against overreaction and a dalliance with “moderate” Chechen elements to try to defuse tensions, as nothing short of a betrayal. The Orange Revolution in Ukraine that same year, and the Rose Revolution in Georgia before that, led Putin to conclude that the Americans were not only undercutting Russia’s interest in its sphere of influence, but might eventually aim the same kind of color revolution at his regime. These disappointments were piled on top of his anger over the Iraq War, a symbol of America’s predilection for unilateral action in a unipolar world, and President Bush’s second inaugural address and its “freedom agenda”—which Putin believed included Russia near the top of the administration’s “to-do” list. Democracy promotion, in his eyes, was a Trojan horse designed to further American geopolitical interests at Russia’s expense, and ultimately to erode his grip on power in Russia itself.
By the summer of 2005, mutual disillusionment weighed heavily on attitudes in Moscow and Washington. The Bush administration saw a Russia uninterested in democratic values, unlikely to evolve anytime soon into a deferential member of an American-led international club or become a reliable junior partner in fighting terrorism. Putin had already begun to tilt in a more adversarial direction, increasingly persuaded that an American-led international order was constraining Russia’s legitimate interests, and that chipping away at that order was the key to preserving and enlarging space for Russian influence. He also believed that he had a reasonably strong hand to play, with unprecedented domestic approval and support. “Outside Russia’s borders,” I argued in a cable, “Putin sees considerable room for maneuver in a world of multiple power centers, with the U.S. bogged down with difficulties, China and India on the rise in ways which pose no immediate threat to Russia, and the EU consumed with internal concerns. After years of being the potted plant of Great Power diplomacy, Putin, and many in the Russian elite, find it very satisfying to play a distinctive and assertive role.”3
The diplomatic challenge was foreboding, and the stakes enormous. From the outset of my tenure as ambassador, I urged realism about the unlikely prospects for broad partnership with Putin’s Russia, and pragmatism in our strategy. Realism demanded that we come to terms with the fact that relations were going to be uneasy, at best, for some time to come. We should shed the illusions that had lingered since the end of the Cold War, recognize that we were bound to have significant differences with a resurgent Russia, and seek a durable mix of competition and cooperation in our relationship. Pragmatism required that we draw clear lines around our vital interests, pick our fights on other issues carefully, manage inevitable problems with a cool head, and not lose sight of those issues on which we could still find common ground.
Putin understood as well as anyone that Russia had more than its share of vulnerabilities and blind spots, from demographic decline, to worsening corruption, to seething troubles in the North Caucasus. He was not inclined, however, to use Russia’s moment of oil-driven prosperity to diversify and innovate, and unleash Russia’s human capital. The risk to political order and control was too great. I was pessimistic that his outlook would change. As I wrote in an early cable to Washington:
Over the next few years, at least, it’s hard to see any fundamental rethinking of priorities on the part of Putin or his likely successors….Some might argue that this suggests a “paradigm lost,” a sense that a partnership that once was firmly rooted is now gone. The truth is that the roots for a genuine strategic partnership have always been pretty shallow—whether in the era of euphoric expectations after the end of the Cold War, or in the immediate aftermath of September 11. Russia is too big, too proud, and too self-conscious of its own history to fit neatly into “a Europe whole and free.” Neither we nor the Europeans have ever really viewed Russia as “one of us”—and when Russians talk about “nashi” (“ours”) these days, they’re not talking about a grand Euro-Atlantic community.
So where does that leave us? Basically, we’re facing a Russia that’s too big a player on too many important issues to ignore. It’s a Russia whose backsliding on political modernization is likely to get worse before it gets better, and whose leadership is neither overly concerned about its image nor much inclined to explain itself to the outside world. It’s a Russia whose assertiveness in its neighborhood and interest in playing a distinctive Great Power role beyond it will sometimes cause significant problems.4
Pessimistic analysis, of course, did not constitute a strategy. My argument was that if the strategic partnership that had fitfully and loosely framed aspirations in Washington and Moscow for much of the 1990s was out of reach, it was worth testing whether a partnership on a few key strategic issues was possible. That might put the relationship on a steadier track, with limited cooperation balancing inevitable differences.
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I REALIZED THAT stabilizing the relationship, after all the ups and downs of the previous decade and a half, would be a long shot. In our last conversation before I left for Moscow, Secretary Rice made clear that she shared my skepticism, although she encouraged the effort. A student of Russia, Rice was hard-nosed about Putin’s repressive behavior at home and his determination to expand Russian influence in its neighborhood, but sympathetic to the notion that we ought to be able to work more effectively together on certain issues. She highlighted in particular nuclear cooperation, where Russia and the United States shared unique capabilities and unique responsibilities. We had a common interest in promoting the security of nuclear materials in our two countries and around the world. We had a similar interest in nonproliferation, especially the challenges posed by Iran and North Korea. And we had a stake in the stable management and further reduction of our existing arsenals.
We also discussed our shared interest in creating more economic ballast in our relationship. U.S. investment in Russia was minuscule, and bilateral trade insignificant, but possibilities were growing in sectors like energy and aerospace. Moreover, Putin had revived Russia’s campaign to join the World Trade Organization. That would require a bilateral agreement with the United States, and the lifting of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment of 1974, which had denied the Soviet Union a normal trading relationship because of its restriction of Soviet Jewish emigration. That purpose had long since been achieved, but congressional reservations about other aspects of Russian behavior remained, and there were also continuing concerns about Russian barriers against agricultural products and piracy of intellectual property. Rice agreed that it made sense to make another push, as part of a long-term investment in a more open and competitive Russian economy. WTO accession would help reinforce the rule of law, and create a model of progress in the economic system that might someday spill over into the political system. The expansion of trade and investment would give both countries something positive to safeguard in the relationship, and more to lose if differences got out of hand.
I highlighted a third priority, encouraging the gradual increase of exchange programs, mainly aimed at bringing young Russian students and entrepreneurs to the United States and developing the network of some sixty thousand exchange alumni around Russia. With a mostly bleak outlook for any rapid improvement of relations, it made sense to continue to invest in the next generation of Russians and in their deepening stake in individual freedoms and interaction with the rest of the world.
I knew that each of these initiatives could easily be swallowed up by mounting friction over Ukraine and Georgia, as well as the Kremlin’s tightening political squeeze at home. The next couple of years would be critical. Putin was term-limited, and at least according to the Russian constitution would step down as president in 2008. The Russian elite’s obsession with
succession would mount as that date grew closer, and it would be important to do all we could to anchor our relationship well before then.
In my first few months in Moscow, I was persistent in engaging senior Russians. One of the most important challenges for any ambassador is to develop wide-ranging contacts, to gain as solid a grasp as possible of the views of different players and their interactions. Russia in those years was particularly difficult terrain, with many senior officials suspicious of American diplomats, and oppositionists under intense scrutiny and pressure.
After I presented my credentials in an elaborate ceremony at the Kremlin, Putin took me aside and stressed his personal respect for President Bush, along with his disappointment in American policy. “You Americans need to listen more,” he said. “You can’t have everything your way anymore. We can have effective relations, but not just on your terms.”
Sergey Ivanov, the minister of defense, was a longtime friend and former KGB colleague of Putin. A fluent English speaker, able to charm or bludgeon as circumstances required, Ivanov had aspirations to succeed Putin. Not shy about projecting strength, he had limited popular appeal, and not much of a political base beyond his personal bond with Putin. His steely personality and ambition unsettled others in Putin’s orbit, and the fact that he had been a far more accomplished KGB officer than his friend may have unsettled Putin a little too. Alone in his office at the Defense Ministry, Ivanov was matter-of-fact about relations with the United States in our first meeting, sharply critical of American naïveté and hubris in underestimating the complexities of Iraq, as well as of Russia’s neighbors. He said forthrightly that it was important to have stable relations between Russia and the United States, but a few “course corrections” were necessary.
Dmitry Medvedev, then the chief of presidential administration at the Kremlin, was another friend of Putin’s with ambitions to succeed him. Medvedev was younger than Ivanov and softer around the edges. Unlike Putin and Ivanov, Medvedev was never a Communist Party member; his whole professional life had unfolded after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Like Putin, he came from St. Petersburg, but from the better side of the tracks. He grew up in a stable, well-educated suburban family that had escaped the purges and rejected atheism when it became politically possible. Diminutive, polite, lawyerly in manner, and utterly loyal to Putin, Medvedev nevertheless had a spine, and no shortage of drive. As I put it in a cable to Washington after our first meeting, “He would not have survived as long as he has in the dark and unforgiving corridors of the Kremlin if he did not.”5
After an initial meeting in his office, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov came to a one-on-one lunch at Spaso House. Lavrov was a world-class diplomat and adept negotiator, with a keen eye for detail and an endlessly creative mind. He could also be prickly and obnoxious, especially if he had a dim regard for his counterpart or had to defend positions he knew were indefensible. A veteran of the peculiar form of multilateral torture that comes with long service at the United Nations, where he was Russia’s permanent representative for nearly a decade, Lavrov had survived deadening hours of UN debate by becoming a gifted sketch artist and cartoonist. (I still have one of his doodles, a wolf’s head whose detail betrays a particularly boring session with a visiting American delegation.) At lunch, after a large glass of his favorite Johnnie Walker Black, Lavrov dissected the mistakes he perceived in American foreign policy in the Bush administration. He took some pleasure in underscoring the ways in which he thought they opened up scope for Russian diplomacy, and warned of trouble ahead over Ukraine and Georgia. He was too smart and too skilled to ignore the potential for cooperation, especially on the economic and nuclear fronts.
One of my most interesting early encounters was with Vladislav Surkov. Surkov was a young Kremlin political advisor—undoubtedly the only Kremlin official with a photo of the rapper Tupac Shakur on his wall. He was also the architect of Putin’s then-fashionable concept of “sovereign democracy,” which put a lot more emphasis on the first part of the term than the second.
Surkov and I later appeared together on a program at MGIMO, Russia’s elite international affairs university for aspiring diplomats and entrepreneurs, focused unusually on the 125th anniversary of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s birth. With speculation running high about Putin’s intentions in 2008, Surkov cleverly spun FDR’s legacy to highlight his four terms in office, and their significance for the United States at a moment of crisis and transformation. I replied that the main lesson was not FDR’s four terms, which were permitted at the time under our constitution, but rather his historic accomplishments in establishing the political and economic institutions that propelled America out of the Great Depression, through to victory with the Soviet Union in World War II, and into postwar prosperity. Personalities mattered, but democratic institutions endured. Surkov wasn’t convinced.
Nor was he convinced by my pitch to think hard about the consequences of continued democratic rollback for the success of the upcoming G-8 summit in St. Petersburg. Like it or not, I stressed, the summit would bring eight thousand of his closest friends in the international media to Russia. They would have only a passing interest in the main summit theme—energy security. The stories on the domestic front would be far more captivating, and not very uplifting. Surkov just shrugged, reflecting his patron’s utter disregard for international opinion.
I worked just as hard to cast a wide net for contacts and conversations beyond current government officials. Since traffic had become horrendous, I’d sometimes take advantage of the Moscow Metro, to the consternation of my security detail. The Metro retained its Soviet efficiency, with all its jostling and familiar wet wool smells in winter. I met regularly with Putin’s most outspoken opponents, including Garry Kasparov, the legendary former chess champion. Boris Nemtsov, a onetime presidential hopeful turned Putin critic, was always accessible and full of energy and opinions. (He would be murdered a few hundred meters from the walls of the Kremlin in February 2015.) I met frequently with a stalwart group of human rights activists, from the indomitable Lyudmila Alexeyeva, unbowed in her eighties, to younger advocates passionate about concerns that ran the gamut from brutality in Chechnya to environmental degradation and the rights of the disabled.
Moscow had no shortage of larger-than-life personalities. Reviled by many as the breaker of the Soviet empire, Mikhail Gorbachev kept a low profile, sitting in a spacious office in central Moscow, lonely after the death of his wife and concerned about Putin’s increasingly authoritarian instincts. He seemed wistful about what might have been, and a bit lost in the new, gleaming, frantically acquisitive Moscow. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn continued to write relentlessly at a small dacha complex outside Moscow, secure behind a tall green fence. When I went out to see him one late autumn afternoon, he spent a couple hours, as the light was dimming outside, talking about his life, the privations of the war and Communist rule, and the hope he had for Putin and for Russia. He distrusted the materialism of a Russia intoxicated by oil and excess, and emphasized his belief in the spiritual underpinnings of Russian exceptionalism. He saw nothing out of the ordinary about a Russia with predominant influence in the former Soviet space, “including our brothers in Ukraine.” Although he had spent almost two decades in Vermont after his exile from the Soviet Union, he was not a convert to liberal internationalism, and especially not its hawkish neoconservative variant on full display in Iraq.
I made the best use I could of Russian television and newspaper interviews to convey American policy concerns and my commitment to healthier U.S.-Russian relations. I also took the somewhat unusual initiative of offering to appear before the Duma foreign affairs committee to answer questions about American policy. However imperfect my Russian-language skills, the nearly three hours I spent with Duma members that day were a good investment in our relationship. Several apologized afterward for being too harsh in their comments and questions. I assured them that congressional hearings in Washin
gton could be at least as contentious.
I was convinced by my previous experience that no one could hope to understand Russia without exposure to the country beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg, nor could Russians understand America if all they had to draw upon was the caricature fed them by the Russian media, most of which was by now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Kremlin. I made some fifty extended trips outside Moscow during my three years as ambassador, from Kaliningrad in the west to Vladivostok in the east, and from the frigid Arctic north to Sochi on the Black Sea. Lisa and I traveled a good chunk of the Trans-Siberian Railway, still the best way to grasp Russia’s sheer size. I spent a fascinating couple of days in Chukotka, just across the Bering Strait from Alaska, where Roman Abramovich, one of Russia’s wealthiest men, served as governor by long distance, investing heavily in local infrastructure as part of what had become in Putin’s Russia a kind of community service for oligarchs. I had poignant conversations with aging Soviet war veterans in Volgograd, the former Stalingrad.
There were plenty of vodka-filled evenings in Siberia and the Urals, where local governors and their aides tried to drink the visiting American ambassador under the table. Like my predecessors, I practiced all the tricks of the trade—surreptitiously draining my shot glass in the houseplants, slipping water into my glass, sipping instead of chugging—but I was badly outmatched. I continued to indulge my fascination with the North Caucasus, but never managed to return to Chechnya, now ruled harshly by Putin’s rent-a-thug, Ramzan Kadyrov.
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