Publication: The American Prospect
Publication Date: 26-AUG-02
Format: Online - approximately 3214 words
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Galbraith, James K.

Article Excerpt
The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy By Strobe Talbott. Random House, 457 pages, $29.95

The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia By David E. Hoffman. Public Affairs, 567 pages, $21.00

Russia's Post-Communist Economy Edited by Brigitte Granville and Peter Oppenheimer. Oxford University Press, 551 pages, $29.95

The New Russia: Transition Gone Awry Edited by Lawrence R. Klein and Marshall Pomer. Foreword by Mikhail Gorbachev. Stanford University Press, 451 pages, $24.95

IN THE LATE DAYS OF 1992, ECONomist Axel Leijonhufvud of UCLA got in touch with me. Leijonhufvud was then an adviser to the new country of Kazakhstan. He had written a penetrating analysis of how free-market policies would destroy the industrial structure of the old Soviet Union, and with it the livelihoods of many millions living there. Leijonhufvud asked that I find a way to convey his papers to Strobe Talbott, who had just assumed a position as President Clinton's special adviser on Russian matters. Through a personal connection, I forwarded the materials to Talbott.

The anecdote is trivial, except for two points. First, it illustrates that there were economists who did know just how disastrous the "shock therapy" program then under way in Russia would prove. The notion that no one knew has been widely used as an alibi since then, but it is false. Second, there is no evidence that this information made any impression on Talbott, nor indeed on anyone in the Clinton administration.

Talbott's memoir, The Russia Hand, helps to clarify why this could be so. Talbott knew Russia. The opening pages evoke his youthful visit--and that of his friend Bill Clinton a year later--to the Soviet Union, the great shades of Russian intellectual life (from Mandelstam to Brodsky) encountered over the years, and how the young scholars "quietly detested" the system. (It is Clinton, not Talbott, who is the Russia hand of the book's title.) Though Moscow was "better heated" than Oxford in 1968, the Soviet Union was drab and repressive. The regime had a criminal past; in the present, it is seen distributing "stale bread and rotten sausages." It did not occur to Talbott that the alternative--well-stocked shops selling excellent produce that almost no one can buy--might, for many Russians, prove to be worse.

Once he achieved a position of power, Talbott shared with Clinton a tendency to view diplomacy in terms of contests and teams. Friends had to be supported, their adversaries opposed. This meant in practice that support for Boris Yeltsin took precedence over policy, time and again. (On one occasion, to make the metaphor explicit, Talbott finds Clinton watching a Yeltsin speech on one television and an Arkansas Razorbacks game on the other. "You know who I'm rooting for, in both cases," the president explains.) When an honest old Soviet, Georgi Arbatov, aligned with Yeltsin's opponent Ruslan Khasbulatov in 1992, "spewing accusations about how the government was bankrupting the state and beggaring the people," Talbott...



NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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