WE WORKED HARD to add more economic weight to the relationship and finally overcome trade disputes. Our aim initially was to reach a bilateral trade agreement by the time of the G-8 summit in St. Petersburg in July 2006, which seemed to fit Putin’s agenda and give us some negotiating leverage. The pace of negotiations was painfully slow. Rapid progress in parallel U.S. negotiations with Ukraine, which resulted in a bilateral accord and a normalization of trade relations in the spring of 2006, only rubbed more salt in the wound for Putin. In a classified email to Rice in April, I painted a gloomy picture. “We have hit the point of diminishing returns in the negotiations. Absent a bold move by the President to close the deal, the Russians are going to slide backwards very quickly, as only they can do, into a swamp of real and imagined grievances. Unfortunately, Putin is taking an increasingly sour attitude toward us on WTO….He’s now at the stage where he’s quite capable of shooting himself (and Russia) in the foot by declaring that Russia doesn’t need the WTO, and the U.S. can shove it.”6
U.S.-Russian negotiations lurched along, and a bilateral deal was finally signed in November 2006—more than a dozen years after negotiations had begun. WTO accession and repeal of Jackson-Vanik would drag on for another several years, and Russia grew to resent the regulatory colonoscopy to which it was subjected—including revisions of hundreds of domestic laws and more than a thousand international agreements. This was nevertheless the single biggest step in our economic relationship in more than a decade.
Meanwhile, we continued to work hard to enlarge two-way trade and investment. I spent considerable time with American business representatives, from the biggest energy companies to medium-sized enterprises trying to get a foothold in the elusive Russian market. Doing business in Russia was not for the fainthearted; one senior American energy executive wound up in his company’s version of the witness protection program, shielded from rapacious Russian partners taking apart a major joint venture. Despite the risk, there were profits to be made and markets to be opened, and I lobbied everyone from the most senior Kremlin officials to regional governors and local administrators on behalf of a level playing field for American companies. American direct investment in Russia increased by 50 percent in 2005–6, and business picked up in both directions.
The most ambitious commercial deal was a nearly $4 billion purchase of Boeing aircraft, including the new 787 Dreamliners. Boeing had a savvy local head of sales and operations, and had made Russian titanium an important component of the new, lighter-weight 787. It had also set up a research and design operation in Moscow that employed some fourteen hundred Russian engineers. It was a smart investment in Russian interest in acquisitions, and a powerful advertisement for what Russia had to offer at the high end of the technology industry. Formally signed in mid-2007, it was the largest nonenergy U.S. venture in post–Cold War Russia, and it encouraged other businesses in other sectors to give the Russian economy a try.
Our progress on nuclear cooperation was equally positive, and equally incremental. Bush and Putin had made broadly similar proposals for global civilian energy cooperation, aimed at boosting nuclear energy as a cleaner alternative to hydrocarbons, and reducing the risks of nuclear weapons proliferation. Among their common ideas was creation of multilateral enrichment facilities to eliminate the need for countries to enrich nuclear material or store and reprocess spent fuel—all of which posed serious proliferation risks. There was also shared interest in a variety of initiatives to ensure the safety and security of nuclear materials. Chafing at remaining the object of U.S. and international concerns about nuclear safety, Putin was eager to widen the lens and show cooperation in dealing with third-party challenges. We saw value in that too. When Qaddafi turned over enriched materials after we negotiated the end of his nuclear program, we arranged for the Russians to take custody. It was striking, and strangely satisfying, to see containers of enriched uranium that had been the object of so many of our efforts in Libya a couple years before sitting in a facility outside Moscow.
To codify our work in this field, we negotiated a bilateral civilian nuclear cooperation agreement in early 2007. Progress on civilian nuclear cooperation helped improve the atmosphere for collaboration on critical nonproliferation issues, especially Iran and North Korea. Although never an easy negotiating partner on UN Security Council resolutions, Russia joined in two significant sanctions measures against both countries in late 2006.
In addition to our efforts on the economic and nuclear fronts, I made a high priority of sustaining and expanding our exchange programs. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings visited to discuss new bilateral education initiatives with her Russian counterpart, including university partnerships and exchanges of secondary school teachers in math and science. We looked for ways to expand English-language training programs in Russia, and Russian-language programs in the United States.
As we pushed forward on these initiatives, we relied on a high tempo of senior-level visits and meetings throughout 2005–6. President Bush met with Putin four times, and Secretary Rice led a steady stream of other cabinet visitors in 2006. Steve Hadley, Rice’s successor as national security advisor, visited too, and was a sensible voice in the sometimes fractious Russia policy debates in Washington. High-level attention helped significantly, but didn’t insulate the relationship from the troubling currents that were gathering momentum.
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DESPITE ALL THESE efforts, the steadier track we were looking for in relations with Moscow seemed no closer at the end of 2006 than when I arrived eighteen months before—and in some ways even more remote. For understandable reasons, the patience of pragmatists like Rice and Bob Gates, who succeeded Don Rumsfeld at Defense late in 2006, and President Bush himself, wore thin, and neoconservatives saw an opening to push for a tougher approach. As he became more assertive about Russia’s sense of entitlement in the former Soviet space, the dark side of Putin’s rule at home clouded any remaining glimmers of political openness.
As Putin’s fireplace exchange with Rice in the fall of 2006 made clear, he was growing impatient with Georgia and its president. Mikheil Saakashvili made no secret of his interest in NATO membership and closer ties to the West, and flaunted his relationships in Washington, where he had been lionized by many for his political dexterity during the Rose Revolution and his impressive economic success since then. Although he professed to seek a good relationship with Putin, his glee in poking the Russian bear was unbearable in the Kremlin. Russian policy was based on the presumption that it was entitled to expect—and if not forthcoming voluntarily, to enforce—a substantial degree of deference to its interests on the part of a small and poor neighboring country like Georgia. To Putin’s growing annoyance, Saakashvili was defiantly nondeferential. Not unreasonably, he made clear his determination to recover Abkhazia and South Ossetia, parts of Georgia that had been under de facto Russian occupation for years. He was eager to make tangible progress toward NATO membership, and relished the leverage that any steps forward might give him with Moscow.
There was a growing danger that Saakashvili would overreach and the Kremlin would overreact. Reporting to Washington after a meeting between Putin and Saakashvili in June 2006, I noted, “No one evokes greater neuralgia in Moscow these days than Saakashvili.” Putin’s not-so-subtle message to the Georgian leader was: “You can have your territorial integrity, or you can have NATO membership, but you can’t have both.”7
Earlier that year, I had stressed in another cable that “nowhere is Putin’s determination to stop the erosion of Russia’s influence greater than in his own neighborhood.”8 Georgia was the proximate concern, but Ukraine remained the reddest of red lines for Putin. The Orange Revolution in 2004 was a massive blow for the Kremlin, a warning shot that Ukrainians might drift away from historic dependence on Moscow and toward formal association with the West. The next couple years brought some relief in the Russian leadership, as the victors in Kyiv
indulged in the traditional Ukrainian habit of squabbling among themselves and bogging down the economy in corruption and bureaucratism. Putin was acutely sensitive to any signs that the Ukrainian government might encourage Washington to lay out a clearer path to NATO membership, and he was paranoid about American conspiracies.
Russia’s domestic landscape was hardening too. As Putin looked ahead at the likely 2008 succession, he sought to eliminate any potential wild cards and to cow his opponents. Late in 2005, with his encouragement, the Duma introduced a draft law to severely restrict nongovernmental organizations, especially those receiving foreign funding. At the embassy we made strenuous efforts to push back, consulting with Russian NGOs as well as U.S.-based organizations still operating in Russia, and meeting with a variety of Duma leaders and Kremlin officials. I also enlisted my European counterparts in the effort, conscious that the Russian government was more likely to pay attention if we were part of a chorus of concerns, not a solo act. We made a little headway, and the legislation approved by the Duma in the spring of 2006 was slightly less onerous. Nevertheless, the trend line was clear. In case I had missed the message, Surkov drove the point home in a conversation that spring. “NGOs won’t be able to act in Russia as they did in the color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia. Period. In the ’90s we were too weak and distracted to act. Now Russia will defend its sovereignty.”
Ahead of the uncertain 2008 transition, many in the Russian elite were scrambling for wealth and power. Meanwhile, structural problems—corruption, the absence of institutionalized checks and balances, pressure on the media and civil society—were getting worse. “The real danger,” I cabled Washington at one point, “is that the excesses of Putin’s Russia are eating up its successes.”9 Murders of dissidents and prominent journalists were, sadly, not uncommon in Russia in this era. Paul Klebnikov, a courageous American journalist working for Forbes, had been killed in Moscow the year before I arrived. In the fall of 2006, the pace accelerated. Aleksandr Litvinenko, a former Russian security officer turned outspoken critic of the Kremlin, was poisoned in London and died a horrible, protracted death. Responsibility for his killing was traced directly to the Kremlin. Anna Politkovskaya, a fearless journalist for the liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta, who had covered the wars in Chechnya and a variety of abuses in Russian society, was gunned down outside her Moscow apartment. Some suspected that it was no coincidence the murder fell on Putin’s birthday.
As a mark of respect, I went to Politkovskaya’s funeral. I had only met her once, but her reputation and life deserved to be honored, and it was also important for me to make a point about where the United States stood. I recall the day vividly—a cold late-autumn afternoon, dusk settling, a few snowflakes beginning to fall, long lines of mourners, about three thousand altogether, shuffling slowly toward the hall where Politkovskaya’s casket lay. I was asked to speak, along with one of my European colleagues and a couple of editors at Novaya Gazeta. Speaking for a few minutes in Russian, I said that Politkovskaya embodied the best of Russia, and that the best way for all of us to honor her memory was to continue to support the ideals she cherished and the kind of Russia she sought. Not one representative of the Russian government showed up.10
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AGAINST THAT DARKENING backdrop, 2007 began with another jolt. In early February, Putin became the first Russian leader to attend the Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering of transatlantic security experts and officials. He didn’t waste the opportunity to unburden himself. He bitterly criticized American unilateralism, which had “overstepped its national borders in every way.”11 Warning his audience sardonically that his comments might be “unduly polemical,” Putin plowed ahead, assembling in one edgy speech the criticisms he had been making for years. The audience was taken aback, but the senior American official there, Secretary of Defense Gates, responded with aplomb. He noted drily that he shared Putin’s background in intelligence, but thought that “one Cold War was quite enough.”
In an email to Rice shortly afterward, I tried again to explain the mindset in the Kremlin. “The Munich speech,” I wrote, “was the self-absorbed product of fifteen years of accumulated Russian frustrations and grievances, amplified by Putin’s own sense that Russia’s concerns are still often taken for granted or ignored.” Understanding the Kremlin was as much about psychology as about geopolitics. “It’s immensely satisfying psychologically,” I continued, “to be able to take a whack at people after so many years of being down on their luck, and for Russians nothing is more satisfying than poking at Americans, with whom they have tried to compare themselves for so long.” This was a moment that had particular appeal for Russia’s president. “A large element was pure Putin—the attraction of swaggering into a den of transatlantic security wonks, sticking out his chin, and letting them have it with both barrels.”12
There was an element of political convenience for Putin too. Certainly trumpeting about enemies at the gate and overbearing American behavior was a way to divert attention from domestic insecurities. It was also a matter of deep conviction—his sense that Russia had been taken advantage of in the 1990s by oligarchs at home and hypocritical Western friends abroad, and that Putinism was at its core all about fixing the playing field for the Russian state. Putin was giving voice to the pent-up frustrations of many Russians, not just striking an expedient pose. His view of his legacy at that point, and the source of his popularity, was that he had restored order, prosperity, and pride to a Russia sorely lacking in all three when Yeltsin left office.
I had attempted a more detailed stocktaking a couple of weeks earlier in another personal note for the secretary. I reported that Putin’s Russia remained a paradox. On the one hand, Putin and those around him had contracted a case of golovokruzhenie ot uspekhov, “dizziness from success,” an old, Stalin-era slogan appropriate for a new post-Soviet elite awash in petrodollars. The international landscape looked more promising than it had in years, which fed their hubris:
For most of the Russian elite, still intoxicated by an unexpectedly rapid revival of Great Power status, the world around them is full of tactical opportunities. America is distracted and bogged down in Iraq; China and India are unthreatening and thirsty for energy; Europe is consumed with leadership transitions and ultimately pliable; and the Middle East is a mess in which vestigial connections to troublemakers like Syria offer openings for diplomatic station identification. From the Kremlin’s perspective, Russia’s own neighborhood looks a lot better than it did a year ago, with NATO expansion less imminent, Ukraine’s color revolution fading, Georgia at least temporarily sobered, and Central Asia more attentive to Russian interests.13
The picture at home, at least on the surface, looked similarly promising. Putin was now running at 80 percent approval in the polls. The annual economic growth rate was 7 percent, and Russia had put away $300 billion in hard currency reserves. A middle class was emerging, focused on rising standards of living and individual choices that their parents could only have dreamed of, and mostly oblivious to politics. The oligarchs were quiescent, and Putin and his circle, never content to live off their government salaries, were steadily monopolizing major sources of wealth.
“Behind the curtain, however,” I continued, “stands an emperor who is not fully clothed.” As elites became more convinced that Putin was leaving the presidency in 2008, he was finding it harder than he thought to manage a neat succession. The only real checks and balances in Russia revolved not around institutions, but around a single personality. It therefore fell to Putin to convince the motley crew in and around the Kremlin—from the hard men of the security services to the remaining economic modernizers—that his successor would not threaten the current order.14
Beneath all the impressive macroeconomic indicators and apparent stability, troubles lurked. Demographic decline was not an abstract problem if you were one of the lonely thirty million Russians east of the
Urals—distributed sparsely over a vast swath of the earth, sitting on vast natural resources, and staring across a long border at nearly a billion and a half Chinese. Corruption was worsening rapidly, as was Russia’s overdependence on unsustainably high-priced hydrocarbons and an equally unsustainable energy infrastructure showing its age and decay from serial underinvestment. The North Caucasus was deceptively quiet, with a security lid on its dysfunctions but no real solutions in sight. And even though it was hard to see a rational prospect for color revolutions bubbling up in Russia, the Kremlin was paranoid about external meddling and insecure about its own grip.
So where did that leave American strategy? I warned that the Russians would likely become even more difficult to deal with, noting that it was a safe prediction they would often “exhibit all the subtlety and grace of the ‘New Russian’ businessmen of the 1990’s—with lots of bling, and a kind of ‘I’m going to drive my Hummer down the sidewalk just because it feels good’ bluster.”15 The Russians’ thirst for respect was insatiable, their sensitivity to being taken for granted always turned on high.
For all its irritations, we couldn’t afford not to engage Putin’s Russia, tempting as that might sometimes be. We’d have to build on common ground where we could, and limit the damage where we couldn’t. I urged that we keep the Europeans close, and be careful about pushing too hard on issues where our key allies might start to back away from us. I stressed in particular that we ought to be “careful about our tactical priorities; if we want to have every issue our way, simultaneously, we’ll make it harder to get what we want on the most important questions.”16 That became a broken-record theme in my messages and conversations over the remainder of my tenure. I knew how hard it was to break the post–Cold War habit of assuming that we could eventually maneuver over or around Moscow when it suited us, and I knew that was especially difficult as an administration looked to cement its legacy on issues like European security and missile defense. I also knew that we were running out of room for maneuver with Putin, and risked bigger collisions on critical issues like Iran if we weren’t careful.
The Back Channel Page 24