the eXile - Feature Story

Issue #10/91, May 25 - June 8, 2000

Feature Story

Bubba Does Moscow

President William Jefferson Clinton will arrive in Moscow next Saturday, June 3, for his first face-to-face meeting with Vladimir Putin. No angry mobs will be waiting to stomp him at the airport. No columns full of proletarian marchers bearing signs reading “Yankee Go Home!” will hold up his motorcade on his way in to the Marriott. There will be no need for a food-taster when he eats Putin under the table at the inevitable first-night Kremlin banquet. No, Bill Clinton will be safe in Moscow, and not only from actual physical threats, but, for the most part, from criticism as well. Whatever resentment Russia feels toward our illustrious leader will be below the surface-well below the surface.

But make no mistake about it: when Bill Clinton arrives in Moscow next week, he does so as a conquering Emperor. He is a Roman Caesar visiting the front, with his new general, Vladimir Putin, reporting to him on the progress of the campaign. It was under Bill Clinton’s watch that the old bipolar arrangement was left behind forever, and global power became firmly centered around a conspiracy of elites. Under this new system, the Russian nation became a vast, impoverished colony, the overwhelming majority of its population utterly beholden to a rapaciously corrupt group of vicious criminals.

Bill Clinton was the patron of those criminals. He provided them with continual funding in the form of loans, in exchange for a relaxation of Russia’s international ambitions during a period of expanding American influence. It was a symbiotic relationship. He scratched their back; they scratched his. And in the meantime, Russia went to hell.

Throughout Russia’s history, the country’s most violent leaders have often retained relatively good reputations among the majority of the population even during the most repressive eras, because the people often steadfastly refused to believe that the leader was even aware of the atrocities being committed by his subordinates. It’s one of the great cliches of Russian politics: “If only the Tsar knew!”

Bill Clinton’s going to get off easy when he visits next week, mainly because people think that this aw-shucks good ol’ boy from the American south, this perma-smiling blowjob connoisseur, couldn’t possibly have been aware of how badly his policies failed here in Russia.

But he knew. The Tsar knew. And here’s what he knew, a short list of all the Clinton policies toward Russia that will go down in history-if future historians have any scruples— as his administration’s biggest mistakes:

1. His government pursued policies that were designed to destroy Russia economically and emasculate it geopolitically, thereby squandering absolutely in the space of eight years any and all goodwill Russians felt toward America at the end of the Cold War.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the U.S.-backed decimation of the Russian state began, but a good place to start might be in the Yegor Gaidar era. Among other things, the U.S. advised Yegor Gaidar’s government to free prices before the privatization of industry, effectively depriving Russians of their savings overnight as ordinary citizens scrambled to buy basic necessities at ballooning prices from monopolistic industries. American advisers subsequently helped design the voucher privatization campaign and the early direct privatizations, which were theoretically supposed to be the more egalitarian stages of privatization, but mainly resulted in the transfer of property from workers to government insiders and Western investment companies like Credit Suisse. The presence of large numbers of official American advisers in and around the Russian State Property Committee during this period left Russians forever with lingering suspicions that Westerners used to insider information to buy up the most promising properties. Subsequently, the Clinton administration did not cut off aid or even verbally protest in any way after the notorious loans-for-shares auctions, insisting repeatedly that Russia was “on the right road”. By 1996 it became clear that the whole notion of “shock therapy”, which was the brainchild of Harvard economist and key U.S. policy adviser Jeffrey Sachs, had foreseen the instant creation of a super-rich propertied class which would use its resources to block any move back in the direction of communism. By Yeltsin’s second term the plan was more or less perfectly fulfilled, as Russia became a “free market” nation run by a small coterie of obscenely rich private industrialists sitting atop the back of a nation of de facto indentured laborers.

The Clinton government also, of course, pushed IMF/World Bank policies which insisted upon mass layoffs of state workers, an end to as many state industrial and agricultural subsidies as possible, the termination of advantageous trade relationships with other former Soviet Republics, and the immediate exposure of Russian industry to international competition, which it had no chance of defeating in the short run. The result of all this was obvious and unavoidable; Russian industry collapsed, decimated by Western competition, creating the worst depression ever observed in an industrial nation, with GDP falling almost 50% from 1989 levels by the end of the 1990s.

2. It turned a blind eye to corruption, both among its own officials and among the Russians, helping to create a criminal state.

The Clinton administration’s record in dealing with Russia-related corruption couldn’t possibly be worse. There was not a single prosecution of an American official connected with Russian aid or Russian finance throughout Clinton’s tenure. U.S. officials were conspicuously careless when it came to adhering to any kind of ethical standards in the administration of Western aid. The Clinton Administration early on granted Harvard University’s Institute for International Development (HIID) $57 million contract to administer American financial aid without a tender, citing “national security” reasons. USAID subsequently cancelled HIID’s contract after irregularities were discovered, but the government never brought the central figure in the scandal, Jonathan Hay, to trial. Anatoly Chubais’s organizations continued to receive Western aid money even after he was caught improperly using U.S. money to advertise his political party, Russia’s Choice, in the early 1990s. The FBI sat on the Bank of New York investigation for nearly six months, only proceeding with the matter when British law enforcement officials leaked news of the story to the press; the investigation has since apparently been halted following the indictments of a pair of low-level BoNY employees (in Lucy Edwards and Peter Berlin) who clearly played very peripheral roles in the scandal. In a celebrated incident, Vice President Al Gore handed back a CIA report detailing the corrupt activities of then-Premier Viktor Chernomyrdin. Gore, whose name was indelibly linked to Chernomyrdin’s through the much-ballyhooed Gore-Chernomyrdin commission, had scribbled “Horseshit” in the margins of the report before flinging it back at the CIA.

3. It supported the development of an overtly undemocratic style of government in order to isolate and protect U.S. interests from the wishes of the Russian people.

For all the talk about “reform” in the nineties, the Clinton administration generally relied on Presidential decrees issued by Boris Yeltsin to get U.S.-backed legislative inititatives into the books. (This is not surprising, of course, since Clinton himself has issued more Executive Orders than any other two American presidents combined). It supported Yeltsin when he bombed the White House, and helped him author a constitution which gave him the power to dissolve the Duma, effectively declawing the parliament. The United States never once protested abuses of press and speech freedoms by the Yeltsin government, helping bring about a situation in which Duma elections in 1999 and presidential elections in 2000 were decided mainly on the strength of gross manipulations of public opinion. In fact, the Clinton administration’s absolute indifference to Russian violations of democratic principles-can anyone remember the Clinton government complaining about voter fraud, censorship, or workers’ rights?-might be the most striking feature of this administration’s Russian policy. Almost overnight, America went from being a nation deeply concerned about the treatment of each and every last Soviet dissident, to being a country totally indifferent to the fate of tens of millions of Russians who suffered violations of rights most Americans would consider inherent on a daily basis. It was this indifference that cost America the average Russian’s faith in American values. This happened exclusively on Clinton’s watch; when Bush left office, America was still the good guy in these parts. It is worth noting that the Clinton administration in the United States loudly lamented the difficulties it faced in its first term when it tried to create a national health care system; in Russia, however, the United States supported IMF reforms which actually destroyed an existing national health care system, leaving the vast majority of Russians without access to good care or medicines.

4. It made far too many strange bedfellows.

Actually, some of the Clinton administration’s unseemly relationships predated its actual ascension to power in America. Al Gore, for instance, had a longstanding relationship-through his late father, the U.S. Senator Al Gore, Sr.-with the late industrialist and reputed Soviet agent Armand Hammer. When ABC news correspondent Bob Zelnick tried to write a book detailing Gore’s relationship to Hammer, Gore spokesmen told him flatly it would be very displeased if he were to continue pursuing the matter. When Zelnick ignored him, he quickly got an ultimatum from his employers at ABC, who told him that his broadcasting contract would be canceled if he continued with the book project. Zelnick resigned and published the book, entitled “Gore: A Political Life”, anyway. Strobe Talbott, the first ambassador to Russia nominated by Clinton, had a longstanding relationship with reputed Soviet double-agent Viktor Louis, a relationship he was questioned at length about in Congress prior to his subsequent confirmation as Deputy Secretary of State. Clinton’s team maintained close contacts with Chubais even as mountains of evidence of the latter’s corruption piled up. In general, the Clinton administration’s unflagging devotion to figures like Chubais, Gaidar, and Sergei Kiriyenko-each of whom seldom recorded approval ratings above two or three percent in national polls— severely damaged the American reputation in Russia. As author Anne Williamson notes, “The U.S. made a big mistake when continually supported the most hated figures in Russia.”

5. It made the world a much more dangerous place.

Without a doubt, the Clinton administration’s biggest mistake with regard to relations with Russia was the war in Kosovo. The ramifications of that action are not obvious, but they will be more and more telling as time wears on. Clinton’s mistake in Kosovo was not only in firmly establishing the U.S. in Russia’s eyes as an immediate military threat; that had become obvious to Russia long before that, through the expansion of NATO right up to Russia’s borders (in particular the courtship of Ukraine and the Baltics) and the various Partnership for Peace programs and numerous joint military exercises which led to Russians seeing U.S. military maneuvers all around their border. Its mistake was also not limited to the failure to consult Russia about the Kosovo attack, though this also helped firm up Russian enmity to the U.S. The war also humiliated Russia’s top brass, as well as its hitherto apolitical youth, to such a point that it made the Second Chechen War that much more plausible, even necessary in the eyes of many in Russia. No, what was probably the worst thing about the Kosovo attack was that it convinced other countries around the world that it would only be able to protect itself against U.S. attack by owning its own nuclear weapons. As Williamson says, “Kosovo made it almost inevitable that other countries would try to acquire nuclear weapons from Russia. The attack made nuclear weapon ownership the standard for sovereignty.” Having destroyed the rest of Russia’s domestic industry through its economic programs, the Clinton administration almost singlehandedly revived the Russian military-industrial complex by creating markets for Russian weapons in third world countries spooked by the NATO action in Yugoslavia.

Most Russians naively believed the Clinton Administration’s early rhetoric about its intention to embrace Russia as an equal and an ally, but eight years later, most polls show that Russians view NATO as a military threat to their nation. Rather than building a lasting alliance, the Clinton Administration succeeded in creating the impossible: it laid the foundations for a second, albeit lop-sided and unpredictable, Cold War.

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