the fifteenth anniversary of the end of the soviet union

The Fifteenth Anniversary ofthe End of the Soviet Union: Recollections and PerspectivesConference Proceedings

Edited by Markian Dobczansky

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The Fifteenth Anniversary of the End of the Soviet Union:Recollections and Perspectives

Conference ProceedingsEdited by Markian Dobczansky

December 13, 2006Washington, D.C.

Stephen F. Cohen, Professor of Russian Studies and History, New York UniversityJames F. Collins, Former Deputy Chief of Mission and Chargé d’Affaires, U.S. Embassy,

Moscow, 1990–1993Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1987–1991E. Wayne Merry, Former Chief Domestic Political Analyst, U.S. Embassy, Moscow,

1991–1994Honorable Richard Miles, U.S. Consul General in Leningrad, 1988–1991Blair A. Ruble, Director, Kennan Institute

O C C A S I O N A L P A P E R # 2 9 9

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Panelist Biographies

THE FIFTEENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE END OF THE SOVIET UNION

Stephen F. Cohen grew up in Kentucky,received his B.A. and M.A. in government andRussian studies from Indiana University, andreceived his Ph.D. from Columbia University.From 1968–98, he was Professor of Politics atPrinceton University, and for much of that timeserved as Director of its Russian StudiesProgram. Since 1998, he has been Professor ofRussian Studies and History at New YorkUniversity. In addition to his many scholarlypublications, he has written widely forAmerican and Russian newspapers and maga-zines. He is also a frequent commentator onAmerican television and radio. ProfessorCohen’s books include Bukharin and theBolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography;Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics andHistory since 1917; Sovieticus:American Perceptionsand Soviet Realities; (with Katrina vandenHeuvel) Voices of Glasnost: Interviews withGorbachev’s Reformers; and Failed Crusade:Americaand the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia.

James F. Collins served from 1997 to 2001 asthe U.S. ambassador to the Russian Federation.He is one of America’s leading authorities onRussia and Eurasia and on U.S. relations withRussia and that region. Before becomingambassador to Russia, Ambassador Collinsenjoyed a broad and distinguished StateDepartment career. As a member of the SeniorForeign Service, he served as a presidentialappointee both overseas and in Washington. Hewas ambassador-at-large and special advisor tothe secretary of state for the New IndependentStates and deputy chief of mission and charged’affaires with Ambassador Robert S. Strauss atthe American Embassy in Moscow during theevents surrounding the collapse of the USSR.

In addition to his diplomatic postings inMoscow, Ambassador Collins held managementpositions at the Department of State and theWhite House in Washington, focusing extensive-ly on Russian/Soviet and Middle East affairs. Hisoverseas tours, in addition to three diplomaticpostings in Moscow, included positions at theAmerican Embassy in Amman, Jordan, and at theAmerican Consulate General in Izmir, Turkey. In

Washington he served at the Department of Stateas deputy executive secretary for Europe andLatin America and as director of the Departmentof State’s Operations Center. He also served atthe White House as director for intelligence pol-icy at the National Security Council, and heldpolicy positions at the Department of State in theBureaus of European and Canadian Affairs, NearEast and South Asian Affairs, and Intelligenceand Research.

Ambassador Collins has received numeroushonors during his career, including the Secretaryof State’s Award for Distinguished Service, theDepartment of State’s Distinguished HonorAward, the Department of Defense Medal forDistinguished Public Service, and the NASAMedal for Distinguished Service, as well as sever-al meritorious and superior honor awards fromthe Department of State. He was the AmericanChamber of Commerce in Russia’s “Friend ofthe Chamber” in 1998. He holds honorarydegrees from University College, University ofMaryland; Indiana University; the RussianAcademy of Sciences; and the LinguisticsUniversity of Nizhnii Novgorod, as well as anhonorary professorship from Moscow StateUniversity. In 2002 he was named to the U.S.-Russia Business Council’s board of directors.

Before joining the State Department,Ambassador Collins taught Russian andEuropean history, government and economicsat the U.S. Naval Academy. He received his B.A.cum laude from Harvard University in 1961 andhis M.A. from Indiana University. He conduct-ed research at Moscow University in 1965 as anexchange fellow and at the British Museum inLondon in 1966 as an Indiana University fellow.

Jack F. Matlock, Jr., a retired diplomat, hasheld the following academic posts since 1991:Sol Linowitz Professor of InternationalRelations, Hamilton College, 2006; visitingprofessor and lecturer in public and interna-tional affairs at Princeton University,2001–2004; George F. Kennan Professor at theInstitute for Advanced Study, 1996–2001;Senior Research Fellow and then Kathryn andShelby Cullom Davis Professor in the Practice

of International Diplomacy at ColumbiaUniversity, 1991–1996.

During his 35 years in the American ForeignService (1956–1991) he served as Ambassador tothe Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991, SpecialAssistant to the President for National SecurityAffairs and Senior Director for European andSoviet Affairs on the National Security CouncilStaff from 1983 until 1986, and Ambassador toCzechoslovakia from 1981 to 1983.

Before his appointment to Moscow asAmbassador, Mr. Matlock served three tours atthe American Embassy in the Soviet Union, asVice Consul and Third Secretary (1961–1963),Minister Counselor and Deputy Chief ofMission (1974–1978), and Chargé d’Affaires adinterim in 1981. His other Foreign Serviceassignments were in Vienna, Munich, Accra,Zanzibar, and Dar es Salaam, in addition totours in Washington as Director of Soviet Affairsin the State Department (1971–1974) and asDeputy Director of the Foreign Service Institute(1979–80). Before entering the Foreign Service,Mr. Matlock was Instructor in Russian Languageand Literature at Dartmouth College(1953–1956). During the 1978–1979 academicyear he was Visiting Professor of PoliticalScience at Vanderbilt University.

He is the author of Reagan and Gorbachev:How the Cold War Ended (Random House, 2004,paperback edition 2005); Autopsy on an Empire:The American Ambassador’s Account of the Collapseof the Soviet Union (Random House, 1995); anda handbook to the thirteen-volume Russian edi-tion of Stalin’s Collected Works (Washington, D.C.1955, 2nd edition, New York, 1971).

Mr. Matlock was born in Greensboro, NorthCarolina, on October 1, 1929, and was educat-ed at Duke University (A.B., summa cum laude,1950) and at Columbia University (M.A. andCertificate of the Russian Institute, 1952). Hehas been awarded honorary doctorates by fourinstitutions. In addition to the books noted, heis the author of numerous articles on foreignpolicy, international relations, and Russian liter-ature and history.

E. Wayne Merry is a Senior Associate at theAmerican Foreign Policy Council, a privateeducational foundation in Washington estab-lished in 1982.

Mr. Merry is a Russia Country Specialist forAmnesty International/USA and serves on the

boards of directors of the Kolodzei ArtFoundation and the Center for Realistic ForeignPolicy Studies. He was Director of the Programon European Societies in Transition at theAtlantic Council of the United States inWashington (1999–2000) and later a non-resi-dent Senior Fellow there. He also served as aSenior Fellow of the Lester PearsonPeacekeeping Center in Nova Scotia.

In a twenty-six year career in the UnitedStates Foreign Service (1972–98), Mr. Merryserved six years in Moscow as a specialist inSoviet (1980–83) and Russian (1991–94) poli-tics. In the early 1990s he was in charge ofreporting and analysis on the Soviet collapse andemergence of independent Russia.

In early 1995 Mr. Merry joined the staff ofSecretary of Defense Perry as Regional Directorfor Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia to developdefense relations with the states of the formerSoviet Union. Before retiring from the ForeignService, Mr. Merry was Senior Advisor to theU.S. Commission on Security and Cooperationin Europe, a bipartisan Congressional-Executivehuman rights monitoring body.

Mr. Merry also served in the GermanDemocratic Republic during the early period ofthe U.S. diplomatic presence in East Berlin(1977–79). At the Embassy in Athens (1987–90),he reported on domestic politics, Greek-Turkishrelations and the Cyprus issue, and terrorism. Atthe U.S. Mission to the United Nations in NewYork (1983–85) he specialized in arms controland disarmament issues. He also served in theState Department’s Office of CongressionalRelations (1972–74) and Office of CentralEuropean Affairs (1985–87), at the Headquartersof the U.S. Marine Corps (1976–77), and at theEmbassy in Tunisia (1974–76). He worked ontrade issues at the U.S. Treasury (1972).

A native Oklahoman, Mr. Merry attendedthe University of Wisconsin, Madison (B.A.1970), Princeton University’s Woodrow WilsonSchool of Public and International Affairs(M.P.A. 1972), and the U.S. Army RussianInstitute in Garmisch-Partenkirchen (1990–91).

Richard Miles is the Executive Director of theOpen World Leadership Center, located in theLibrary of Congress.

He was born in 1937 in Little Rock, Arkansas.He grew up in rural and small-town Indiana.After serving in the Marine Corps from 1954 to

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1957, he obtained degrees from BakersfieldCollege, the University of California at Berkeleyand Indiana University. He is also a graduate ofthe U.S. Army Russian Institute, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany.

Ambassador Miles worked for the SouthCarolina Voter Education Project from 1964 to1967 in the field of voter registration and politi-cal leadership training. He entered the ForeignService in 1967 and has served abroad in Oslo,Moscow, Belgrade, as Consul General inLeningrad (now St. Petersburg), and as PrincipalOfficer of the U.S. Embassy Office in Berlin.

Ambassador Miles worked for Senator ErnestF. Hollings (D-SC) on an American PoliticalScience Fellowship in 1983–84, and in 1987–88he was a fellow at Harvard University’s Center forInternational Affairs.

Ambassador Miles served as Ambassador toAzerbaijan from 1992 to 1993, as Chief ofMission to Belgrade from 1996 to 1999, and asAmbassador to Bulgaria from 1999 to 2002. Inthe State Department, he also worked in theOffices for Soviet and East European andYugoslav Affairs and in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs.

Mr. Miles was U.S. Ambassador to Georgiafrom 2002 until 2005.

Ambassador Miles has been awarded the StateDepartment’s Meritorious Honor Award andGroup Superior Honor Award (twice). In 1992

he was awarded a Presidential MeritoriousService Award and a national award for reporting.In 2004 he was the recipient of the StateDepartment’s Robert C. Frasure Award forpeaceful conflict resolution.

Blair A. Ruble is director of the KennanInstitute of the Woodrow Wilson InternationalCenter for Scholars in Washington, D.C. He alsoserves as director of the Comparative UrbanStudies Project at the Wilson Center. Hereceived his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in politicalscience from the University of Toronto (1973,1977), and an A.B. degree in political sciencefrom the University of North Carolina at ChapelHill (1971). He has edited more than a dozenvolumes. His book length works include a trilo-gy examining the fate of Russian provincialcities during the 20th century: Leningrad: Shapinga Soviet City (University of California Press,1990), Money Sings! The Changing Politics of UrbanSpace in Post Soviet Yaroslavl (Woodrow WilsonCenter Press and Cambridge University Press,1995), and Second Metropolis: Pragmatic Pluralismin Gilded Age Chicago, Silver Age Moscow, and MeijiOsaka (Woodrow Wilson Center Press and JohnsHopkins University Press, 2001). His latestbook, Creating Diversity Capital: TransnationalMigrants in Montreal, Washington, and Kyiv, waspublished by the Woodrow Wilson Center Pressand Johns Hopkins Press in 2005.

3THE FIFTEENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE END OF THE SOVIET UNION

THE FIFTEENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE END OF THE SOVIET UNION 5

BLAIR A. RUBLE: We are here to talk aboutevents that happened 15 years ago. Fifteen yearsis a kind of awkward moment because not every-one, but probably most people in the room,remembers 15 years ago. It still seems fresh, andyet we know that memory sometimes can playgames after 15 years, and information that wasnot available at the time is available now. So it’s anawkward moment because people’s perceptionshave changed, and yet the memories are verystrong. So we thought we would try to talk aboutthe collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 byinviting here some Americans who were in a wayinvolved. They were professional observers,inside the government and without, of the eventsthat were unfolding, and we would like to askthem to reflect back on how they viewed theevents then and how they view the events now.This is an American perspective. There are noRussians here, but we think that that is valid aswell, because we are in yet another period inwhich discussions about policies toward coun-tries like Russia and Ukraine and the countries ofCentral Asia are beginning to take off again, andwe thought it would be useful to hear what peo-ple who dealt with some of the issues raised bythe collapse of the Soviet Union felt at the time.

I’m not going to give a full introduction ofthe speakers, because time is short and each oneof their biographies is far too long. As you’ll see,they’re all quite distinguished. I will, in amoment, quickly identify everyone. But I haveto say the one discovery I made in looking overthe biographies is that despite the fact that theyare associated with such august power institu-tions as the State Department, in fact they’re allfrom the South and the Midwest. So I think thatsays something about the American system thatwe shouldn’t forget.

Let me just identify the speakers in the orderin which they’re going to speak, and then we’llget right to the remarks. Each speaker has beeninstructed to take no more than 15 minutes, sowe’ll have plenty of time for discussion.

We’ll hear from Ambassador Jack Matlock,who is former George F. Kennan Professor,Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NewJersey. [He was] U.S. ambassador to the USSRbetween 1987 and 1991, and he’s also a formermember of the Kennan Institute AdvisoryCouncil.

E. Wayne Merry is a senior associate with theAmerican Foreign Policy Council here inWashington, and between 1991 and 1994 he waschief domestic political analyst with the U.S.Embassy in Moscow.

Ambassador Richard Miles is executive direc-tor of the Open World Leadership Center herein Washington. He happens to be chair of theKennan Institute Advisory Council, and he’s aformer U.S. ambassador to Georgia, Bulgaria,and Azerbaijan. Between 1988 and 1992, hewas U.S. consul general in Leningrad.

Ambassador James Collins is presently seniorinternational adviser at Akin, Gump, Strauss,Hauer, and Feld, and former deputy chief ofmission and chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Embassyin Moscow, [serving] between 1990 and 1993,and U.S. ambassador to the Russian Federationbetween 1997 and 2001.

Professor Stephen Cohen is professor ofRussian studies and history at New YorkUniversity.

So Jack, the floor is yours.

JACK F. MATLOCK, JR.: I thank you verymuch for the invitation to come and be herewith so many colleagues and friends. I must saythat I know that there are people in the audiencewho very much went through these periodswith us not only on the American side but alsoon the Soviet side, and I hope we will hear fromthem in the discussions.

For a start, I will address what I considersome of the most damaging and mistaken mythsabout the breakup of the Soviet Union, becauseI think that these are widespread. I hope they’renot widespread among those of us who really

The Fifteenth Anniversary of the End of the Soviet Union:Recollections and Perspectives

experienced these events, but they are amongthe public at large. I would like to set them torest at least in terms of the way I understandthings, and understood them at the time.

First, I would say that I was outraged at themultipart TV series on the end of the Cold Warthat was shown on CNN a few years ago thatended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ithink that’s absolutely incorrect. The Cold Warended well before the Soviet Union collapsed.One has to look at the three seismic events—seis-mic in geopolitical terms—that occurred right atthe end of the 1980s and culminated in 1991.These three events are interconnected, but theywere separate events. They had different causes,and the American role in each was quite different.

The first geopolitically seismic event was theend of the Cold War. We can argue about whenit ended. I think it ended ideologically inDecember 1988, but obviously there was still alot of cleanup diplomacy necessary at that time.I’ve been accused of belittling it by calling it“cleanup diplomacy.” I don’t belittle it at all. Itwas extremely important diplomacy. But cer-tainly by, say, early autumn of 1990, the ColdWar was totally over, with all the importantissues raised by the Cold War settled. By then, ofcourse, Europe had been united. Germany wasunited and allowed to stay in NATO—and withSoviet blessing. Emigration was virtually free atthat time from the Soviet Union. That had beena big issue for us. Reform of the Soviet systemwas proceeding at a dizzying pace, and whenIraq invaded Kuwait, the Soviet Union votedwith the United States and others in theSecurity Council. There was not one significantelement of the Cold War left unresolved at thatpoint. The first of these seismic events was infact the end of the Cold War, and that’s one thatI think the United States and the Soviet leader-ship at that time cooperated on.

One of the myths that we hear—and I thinkit’s very damaging—is that we won the ColdWar, as if it was a victory over another country.President Reagan put it much more accuratelyin his memoirs when he said it was a victory ofone system over another. I would add to that:when the Cold War ended, the Soviet systemwas no longer what it had been. In cooperatingto end the Cold War, Gorbachev made no con-cessions that were contrary to the interests of hiscountry. The agreements we made were in theinterests of both countries. It was a “win-win”

solution, and it freed the Soviet Union of theburden of the arms race, which was really killingit. There was cooperation, and both sides won.It was the communist system and the old policiesthat lost, but they were changing already.

The second big change—and this didn’t occurovernight, but it occurred very rapidly—was theend of communist control over the Soviet Union,ultimate communist control. Now this was notdone by Western pressure. I’m a great admirer ofPresident Reagan and his diplomacy—as peoplewho have read my books know—but he was notthe man who defeated communism. The manwho defeated communism in the Soviet Unionwas Mikhail Gorbachev. As general secretary, hewas probably the only person who could havedone it, by forcing or tricking the party and thenomenklatura to take themselves out of ultimatecontrol of the country. It was these two events,the end of the Cold War and the end of commu-nist control of the Soviet Union, that eventuallymade the breakup of the Soviet Union possible. Itbroke up, I think, entirely because of internalpressures, internal contradictions. That would nothave happened, in my judgment, if the Cold Warhad still been raging. Under those conditions,Gorbachev could not have embarked on his pere-stroika, and without perestroika the CommunistParty and the organs of repression it controlledwould have prevented the Soviet republics fromseceding and destroying the Soviet state.

The Cold War had served to contain tensionsin the Soviet Union as a pressure cooker con-tains steam. This helped keep the Soviet Unionintact. It helped keep the Communist Party incontrol. When the Cold War ended, this createdan entirely new situation. The idea thatAmerican or Western pressure brought downthe Soviet Union seems to me utterly absurd. Itturns reality on its head. And this attitude isquite dangerous: it led to triumphalism in the1990s and the idea that Russia should be treatedas a defeated power. Actually, Russia wasn’t evena party to the Cold War. It was only one part—though the largest part—of the Soviet Union.

Now related to that is the myth that some-how the U.S. forced the end of the Cold Warthrough military pressure. In fact, I recall thatduring the first Reagan administration, when Idrafted guidance for government officials, Iincluded instructions not to question the legiti-macy of the Soviet government. We did not askfor regime change, we asked for a change of


behavior, particularly a change of behaviorexternally. Our military buildup was meant toback up our diplomacy, not to give Gorbachevan easy way out, knowing that he really neededto reduce the defense burden, but to encouragehim to open up the country and reform simul-taneously. This, I believe, was in the ultimateinterest of the Soviet Union, if it could havebeen kept together at all. So I think the idea thatwe somehow forced the Soviet collapse is theopposite of the truth. And frankly, that percep-tion, which many people have, has led us intosome very serious foreign policy blunders.

A third myth I will mention is that the U.S.was caught unawares. It’s usually said that thismust be true because the CIA never predictedthe breakup of the Soviet Union. That’s true.Thank goodness the CIA never officially pre-dicted the breakup, because the moment theydid, if they had, it would have leaked, and thewhole process of reform in the Soviet Unionwould have ended. But the fact that the U.S.intelligence community refrained from a formalprediction that the Soviet Union would destroyitself doesn’t mean our policymakers didn’tunderstand what was going on. As ambassador tothe Soviet Union, I sent my first message thatadvised the United States government to makecontingency plans for the possible breakup of theSoviet Union in June 1990, 18 months before ithappened. My “heads-up” was not based uponclandestine intelligence. During my term asambassador, and that was from 1987 to August1991, we did not have a single spy recruited inthe Soviet Union because our moles here,[Robert] Hanssen in the FBI and [Aldrich]Ames in the CIA, had betrayed them all.

But our diplomats were there. We had a terrif-ic staff, and Jim Collins led it and managed itbeautifully. They were all over the place. Ints Silinsout of Leningrad was going to the Baltic statesand Latvia and so on. We had people who spokeUzbek. We had people who spoke Ukrainian.And once the country began to open up, frankly,we were all over it. I think our embassy under-stood much better what was happening in thecountry than Gorbachev did himself, because theKGB was giving him false information.

There is another lesson here that some peo-ple seem to have forgotten. When you insistupon hearing only what you want to hear, youusually don’t get the true picture. So yes, we inthe American embassy in Moscow saw what was

happening. We did not want it to happen theway it did. Of course we wanted the three Balticcountries to recover their independence. Wewould have been very happy to see Gorbachevnegotiate a voluntary union treaty of theremaining 12 republics.

As a matter of fact, when President Bush theelder, on August 1, 1991, in Kyiv, made aspeech that Bill Safire jokingly called “theChicken Kiev speech,” it was supposed to be forall the non-Russian republics, not just Ukraine.What he said was “don’t confuse freedom withindependence.” Freedom first. Although Bushdid not explain in detail, what he had in mindwas that if a republic became part of a federal,democratic state, they could, if they had goodcause later, secede. If, however, they declaredindependence before they had a democratic sys-tem, freedom might be harder to obtain. Bushalso spoke of “suicidal nationalism.” He wasn’tthinking of Ukraine at that time, but of Georgiaunder Gamsakhurdia.

So, the fact is that the United States did notengineer the Soviet collapse, we did what wecould to encourage a democratizing SovietUnion. Obviously we had no influence over thesituation by the summer of 1991 because inter-nal forces, aided by some of Gorbachev’s mis-takes, were what was forcing the country apart.

I would just add one thing, and that is thatmany people cheered when the Soviet Unioncollapsed, thinking this is the end of problems,that suddenly everything was going to be sweet-ness and light and so on. When I wrote a bookon the collapse of the Soviet Union, Autopsy onan Empire—it was published in 1995—I said mychampagne is still corked because we didn’tknow what’s going to happen. The problem wasthat in Gorbachev’s last years it was Moscowthat was giving great support to the democraticmovements in many of the other republics. Ihad a Belarusian tell me, “When our local offi-cials would not let me publish my things, Iwould go to the Central Committee inMoscow, and they would order them to be pub-lished.” I talked in 1991 to democratic forces inUzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and so on.Now almost all of these forces have been virtu-ally wiped out, and they went very quickly.

Often I think that the regional parties, therepublic party leaders, saw that Gorbachev’sreforms were going to undermine their power,and chose independence in order to maintain


their power. So as we look back, I think it isimportant, as we remember those days, to thinkabout what really happened, and to reconsiderthe lessons we might have drawn from them.

Thanks very much.

E. WAYNE MERRY: Thank you, Blair. Let mesay it is a privilege to appear on so distinguisheda panel.

For me, the breakup of the Soviet Union andits attendant empire was one of the three greattransformative geopolitical events in my lifetime,the other two being the decolonization of theformer European imperial empires, to which thebreakup of the Soviet Union contributed, andthe return to global prominence of Asia, andparticularly China, to which the breakup of theSoviet Union also contributed. These three greattransformations had deep roots and long histo-ries, and the consequences will be with us forthe rest of our lives and well beyond.

But the breakup of the Soviet Union wasunique in at least two respects, from my personalexperience. The first was just as geopoliticaldrama. Even to be a bit player mostly in the wingsduring that period was a unique experience andalmost worth entering the Foreign Service just tobe able to do so. Because of the concentration intime and space, I think it presented to the worldevents worthy of consideration and historicaldebate of a kind that we haven’t seen since theend of the Second World War.

And the second thing that was so importantwas its impact on the interests and the policiesof the United States because, since the end ofthe Second World War, the United States hadlargely defined its role in the world in con-tradistinction to the Soviet Union and itspower system. Almost all of our policies aroundthe world were in whole or in part defined bythat rivalry. In the absence of the Soviet Union,we’ve been going through a 15-year-longprocess of trying to figure out what we want todo in the world and to define what our roleshould be. Some people are looking for a newenemy, whether radical Islam or China orsomething else. And I think, really, much ofthe debate between neoconservatives and so-called realists is a debate about what the UnitedStates should be in a world in which the fun-damental definition of our role is not anymoreabout “them” but is about us, and I don’t thinkthis process is anywhere near an end.

Another thing the breakup of the SovietUnion did was to totally transform the relation-ship of the United States with what had been,not the only stage but the principal stage of thatrivalry, which was Europe. This had largelydefined my entire professional career—the divid-ed city of Berlin, divided Germany, dividedEurope, NATO-Warsaw Pact, everything thathad gone on in the East-West relationship acrossthe Iron Curtain—and the extent to whichAmerican policy and American interests hadbeen engaged in that and then no longer were.So the transatlantic relationship 15 years on is stillvery much at the beginning of a transformationin which most people in policymaking positionsin capitals on both sides of the Atlantic haven’tquite yet accepted the fact that that which joinedus together then is no longer joining us togethernow nor will be in the future.

Now, unlike the other panelists, I had theadvantage of being up on this stage a year ago fora solid hour talking about what it was like to bein Moscow in the political section of the U.S.Embassy during the breakup of the SovietUnion, so I’m not going to repeat myself onthat. I want to draw attention to what I thinkwere two important aspects of it. One was thateveryone in Moscow, observer and participant,Russians and foreigners, did have a sense of theimportance of what was going on, of beinginvolved in a tectonic, historical transformation.This was not like going through a normal crisis.In the Foreign Service, you go through crisesaplenty. This was something very different inwhich every week, every day, sometimes almostevery hour brought about events that you neverexpected to see in your lifetime. The pressure onus in the embassy was colossal, the pressure onthe Russian participants much more so. I’vesometimes been asked by scholars why certainthings weren’t done, why Yeltsin didn’t do thisand that. My usual response is to say that this isbecause there are only 24 hours in the day, andeverybody was at saturation point.

We obviously judge the impact of theseevents in terms of their importance for the out-side world, for our own country. The Russians,of course, viewed them differently, in terms ofthe role of and impact on their own country,and I think this did tend to skew our perspec-tives a good deal. But I think something that isnot recognized is how much time and attentionwas consumed by those things that in fact did not


happen, by events that did not transpire butwhich might have, and the degree of concernthat there was in our government and on theRussian side for the so-called nightmare scenar-ios: so-called loose nukes, warlordism, true dis-integration of the Russian Federation, collapseof the social system, large-scale migrations.Now we know that these things did not happen,but the fact that they did not happen doesn’tmean that they didn’t consume an enormousamount of time and energy ensuring that theydidn’t happen. And I do not accept the notionthat they could not have happened, because ifyou look at the former Yugoslavia, parts of theCaucasus and Tajikistan, there were some prettynasty nightmares that did come into existence.

I think they didn’t happen in the Russiancase for two reasons. One is because so much ofthe end of the Soviet Union in Russia was atop-down Moscow-centric event that did not,unlike East Germany or Poland or the Balticstates or some other cases, involve societal-widetransformations. The other reason is because theinstitutions tended to behave extremely respon-sibly. People went to work even when theyweren’t being paid. People went to work whenthey had no idea what their future was going tobe. And I think, unrecorded and unacknowl-edged, was the extraordinarily responsiblebehavior of what we call the power ministries:the KGB, the other security services, and themilitary, who accepted an extraordinary loss inglobal status. They went in a couple of yearsfrom having their western frontier beyond theElbe back to borders that Russia had had aboutthe time of the beginning of the Romanovdynasty. And yet look at the things that did nothappen. There was no Russian Stahlhelm; therewas no Bonapartism, even though there were afew candidates for that role. And most extraor-dinary to me, there was no Russian equivalentof the OAS (Organisation de l’armée secrète);there was no extralegal action by people fromthese enormous structures of power. And I tosome degree attribute that to one of the positivelegacies of the Leninist state, which was its res-olute subordination of instruments of statepower to civilian political authority. And I thinkthat if there had also been such a legacy in theTitoist system, the tragedy of the westernBalkans would have been much less.

Now, 15 years on, I must say that I am pret-ty pessimistic and negative in my views about

how things are likely to develop in Russia, butnot principally because of the current affairs thatso focus the attention of headline writers andeditorial writers, but mostly because of myappreciation of how massive is the inheritedburden of the seven decades of Soviet misruleand how extraordinary are the challenges thissociety faces, most particularly in demographicsand health, which go way back. Those numberswere going in the wrong direction as far back asthe 1960s. But there are also challenges in areaslike agriculture, misinvestment in industry, andin particular the legacies of power structures thatare vertical in a modern world in which mostinnovation and creativity take place in what arenormally thought of as horizontal relationships.Another problem is the continued vitiation ofwhat is normally called civil society—that partof society that exists between the state and thefamily, and also the site where most innovation,creativity, and responses to societal challengestake place. So the inheritance of a system that isso statist and so vertical makes Russia remark-ably unprepared to deal with these multiplecrises, these legacies of the Soviet period.

But, you know, if you look at the first 15years of postwar Germany or France, you mightwant to take a somewhat more optimistic view.Fifteen years on, postwar Germany had experi-enced a good deal of economic recovery butwas still deep in the great historic amnesia, asthe society had not even begun to deal with thelegacy of its Nazi past. Fifteen years on, postwarFrance was in transition from the Fourth to theFifth Republic as well as damn near civil war. Imean, there were tanks in the streets of Parisand the OAS literally was trying to take theircountry into civil war.

And what I think of when I look at theexperience of those two countries in the peri-od, say, between the 15-year mark and the 50-year mark is how much domestic turmoil,including genuine political violence, wasrequired to get those two countries to be thekind of successful, stable, moderately boringsocieties that they are today. I don’t know whereRussia is going to be at the 50-year mark, but Ithink it would be reasonable to expect that theyears between the 15-year post-Soviet mark andthe 50-year mark will experience a great deal ofinternal turmoil and probably a good deal ofpolitical violence. I don’t think anyone shouldbe surprised by that, and we, especially, should-


n’t be condescending about that. If it could hap-pen in France and Germany, it could happen inRussia as well.

At the 15-year mark I don’t think it’s toosoon, however, to give something of a reportcard on U.S. policy during this period. I wouldgive the U.S. government an A– in 1991. (Inever give an A+ because my principal professorin graduate school never did.) I’d give a B+ in1992 and then a declining grade thereafter. Ithink the general crisis management of the U.S.government during the period 1989–1992 forthe most part was excellent. I think there weresome serious failures of omission rather than ofcommission. These included the institutionallack of responsiveness of the international finan-cial institutions and parts of the U.S. governmentto challenges that they did not recognize andunderstand, their tendency to respond with veryoff-the-shelf USAID programs and with macro-economic stabilization programs that missedwhat was really necessary, and the disinclinationof these institutions to give serious, let alonepositive, consideration to creative solutions. Ithink back—just as an example—to GeorgeSoros’s proposal to fund a supplement to thesalaries of social workers like teachers and nurs-es during the period of the high inflation in1992: a very creative idea which I think couldhave made a real difference and which unfortu-nately got nowhere.

I think it’s sort of characteristic that in manyways the most imaginative U.S. governmentresponse to these events came from Capitol Hillin the form of the Nunn-Lugar (CooperativeThreat Reduction) Program, and that what youneeded was that kind of individual initiative,because the bureaucracies were so experiencedat dealing with undeveloped countries that theyreally had little inclination to do the kind of seri-ous examination of what was required in the sit-uation of post-Soviet Russia.

Finally, just sort of as a coda to my remarks,I am going to repeat one point that I made ayear ago. It’s a somewhat pedantic one, but it’sthe issue of when the Soviet Union in factended. Now, the popular view is associated withMikhail Gorbachev signing his letter of abdica-tion. To me that’s confusing the ship of statewith the figurehead of the ship. I think that in ade facto sense the Soviet Union had long beenout of existence, somewhere between theAugust putsch and certainly no later than the

Ukrainian independence referendum. But as ade jure juridical point, I choose another datewhose anniversary passed earlier this week: inthe aftermath of the signing on December 8,1991 of the agreement by Yeltsin, [Chairman ofthe Belarusian Supreme Soviet Stanislav]Shushkevich, and [Ukrainian President Leonid]Kravchuk that created the Commonwealth ofIndependent States, Yeltsin returned to Moscowand had the Russian Federation unilaterallyabrogate the 1922 Treaty on the Creation of theUSSR. Then, the Russian Federation Congressof People’s Deputies, somewhat reluctantly as Irecall, ratified that act. I choose that as the endof the Soviet Union because the Soviet Uniondid have a technical starting point. It was theTreaty on the Creation of the USSR, whichwas signed on December 29, 1922 and ratifiedon December 30. But that treaty created anasymmetric structure in which the RussianFederation really was the keystone, and otherunion republics could come and go and bereformulated and renamed, as they were in sub-sequent decades, without affecting the constitu-tional integrity of the whole.

But once the Russian Federation itself left theUnion, I believe the Union became a juridical aswell as a practical nonentity. Now what wasremarkable is that at the time the only people whotook this action terribly seriously were thosemembers of the Russian Federation Congress ofPeople’s Deputies who were opposed to it. I recallin particular that the U.S. Embassy reporting on it,which I wrote, was brief and focused exclusivelyon the importance of this event for Russia, not forthe Soviet Union. And I think that if in some waysmy analysis of when the Soviet Union legallycame to an end is a correct one, it is characteristicthat such a momentous event passed into the flot-sam of history almost without any notice.

RICHARD MILES: Thank you very much. Iwant to make one little correction on the bioremarks that were made earlier. I don’t usually doit, but it’s important in this case. I left Leningradin the summer of 1991. I was not there during theputsch and the subsequent events. Others in theaudience were there, and while I may say a fewwords about those events in August of 1991, ifothers want to correct me, fine, because I wasn’tthere. What I know about that period came fromreading about it and talking to others. But I wasthere from 1988 until 1991, and it was certainly


an extremely exciting time. Most people in theaudience know this, but I’ll just remind you thatbecause of the U.S. policy of not recognizing theincorporation of the Baltic states into the SovietUnion, the American ambassadors had not beenallowed to visit the Baltic states. So the consulsgeneral in Leningrad—after the establishment ofthe consulate general in 1971 or 1972—did go,except they would just make polite protocol vis-its in and out very quickly to not give undorecognition to those communist governmentsthere. Usually they went once a year.

Well, when I arrived in 1988 things alreadywere changing, I would say, and in 1989,1990, and 1991, of course, they changed quitedramatically, so that in the last year and half—from late 1989 until the summer of 1991—Iwas asked by the embassy and by the people inWashington (the National Security Councilwas quite interested in all this) to keep a near-continuous presence in the Baltic states, whichwas not always easy to do because we had a rel-atively small embassy. But we wanted desper-ately to keep people like Wayne tucked away inMoscow and not come and encroach on ourturf, and so we did the best we could. I’m aformer marine, and in the marines every per-son is a rifleman no matter if they’re a profes-sional cook or whatever. In a similar way, everyAmerican in the consulate general became aprofessional diplomat. We had GSO [generalstaff officer] people and administrative peopleand consular people going over and writingquite interesting reports, actually, because theybrought a little different viewpoint to things.

We had pretty intensive contacts with thewould-be reformers in Leningrad and with thenationalist leaders in the Baltic states. I must sayI felt all the time I was there that I was just turn-ing pages of history right in front of my eyes.There were some villains around, of course, butthere were also some real heroes and heroines inboth northwest Russia and Leningrad, and alsoin the Baltic states—people who had sufferedfor their beliefs and now felt that times hadchanged and they were not going to be putdown. In many cases this reform movementgrew out of ecological movements—environ-mental movements—in both Leningrad andEstonia. Certainly, that was true. But theyquickly became politically oriented, and inLeningrad they became really quite active, moreactive than I realized.

I think we tried to report accurately whatwas happening, but we underestimated them,and frankly I guess we underestimated the times.I remember the election for the Supreme Sovietdeputies when the first secretary of theCommunist Party was denied his seat; the com-mander of the Leningrad Military District wasdenied his seat. I don’t know how many otherpeople fell, in a sense. I was called on theevening of that election day by an Americancorrespondent in Moscow, and was told thatinformal election polls of people coming outfrom having voted showed that theseCommunist Party apparatchiks and so on hadnot retained their seats. And with good diplo-matic chutzpah I said, “Really, I find that pret-ty hard to believe. And even if the votes turnedout that way, the authorities would probably notallow it to happen, so I urge you to discountthose election polls.” I did have the grace to callback the next day and say, “Well, you want tohear a diplomat eat humble pie? I’m prepared toeat it.” Because that’s exactly what happened.

That was followed, of course, by the democ-rats taking control of the Leningrad City Soviet.That was not all as smooth as people like tothink in retrospect, and there are some goodarticles about that which go into much moredetail about it. Once they took control of thecity soviet, they could not agree among them-selves on who would become chairman, that isto say mayor, and everyone liked Mr. [Anatoly]Sobchak, who was in fact a deputy of theSupreme Soviet. But he was, unfortunately foreveryone, not a member of the Leningrad CitySoviet, and therefore could not become chair-man of it. However, there was a handy by-elec-tion that was coming up where insufficientvotes had been cast the first time around. Theyurged him to run for that, and they urgedeveryone else to stand down, and he indeed waselected to the soviet. He was then elected chair-man and became rather famous as mayor. Hemore famously appointed Vladimir Putin as hiseconomic adviser and later as his deputy mayor.

Putin’s appointment as deputy mayor cameafter I left, and so I don’t know how he func-tioned in that capacity. But I knew him reasonablywell when he was economic adviser to the mayor.I found him a reasonably straightforward andpragmatic individual whose “yes”meant “yes”andwhose “no” meant “no,” and “maybe” actuallymeant “maybe” rather than “forget about it.” So


we had a pretty good relationship. He came to theresidence there, the consulate general. He nevercame with his wife—he was not a very sociablefellow—but he would come to these receptions,working lunches, and dinners and so on, have adrink, answer people’s questions. He wouldn’tengage much in conversation. He was a goodobserver, and that was pretty much my experiencewith Mr. Putin. I don’t know what role he playedduring the days of the putsch in Leningrad. As Isaid, I wasn’t there. I read some things about it thatsuggested that he played a strong role on behalf ofthe people trying to resist the putschist elements. Idon’t know if that’s true or not true.

What I do know is that the Leningrad author-ities rather quickly, although not immediately,rallied around the democratic reform movementand against the putschists, although the com-mander of the Leningrad Military District wenton television early on to urge calm and to saythat they were taking charge of the situation. Hequickly backed down, and after conversationswith Mr. Sobchak and others and the chief ofpolice, we had gotten to know these people pret-ty well. Again, things had changed, asAmbassador Matlock said. Soviet authorities,who earlier would never have dreamed of settingfoot in the residence there in Leningrad, wouldcome and have a drink and see a movie or what-ever. So we knew the chief of police, we knewthe KGB chief, we knew the commander of theLeningrad Military District, and they did rally.Sobchak came back from Moscow. I don’t knowexactly the circumstances under which he cameback. The deputy mayor at that time was a retiredSoviet navy admiral, [Vyacheslav] Shcherbakov, anuclear submarine commander, and asShcherbakov told me later, they had gone up andsent for Sobchak to bring him back. They had tofind him and bring him back, which they did.Shcherbakov is a rather conservative person, asyou might imagine, but nonetheless, Sobchak,Shcherbakov, and even Yuri Yarov from theregional party committee came down to the statetelevision on the evening of the putsch, and thatbroadcast in which they rallied people against theputschists was broadcast over a good deal ofRussian territory. Leningrad TV was not exactlynational TV, but it was not exactly local either; ithad pretty wide coverage. And that TV broad-cast, I’m quite sure, was a morale boost for thepeople in Moscow who were themselves tryingto do the same thing.

In the Baltic states—again, I left before theactual events of August 1991—but I do knowthat, as Ambassador Matlock indicated, things hadalready gone along pretty far. The Soviet authori-ties were divided, I think, over how exactly tohandle this incredible nationalism that grew ratherquickly starting around 1987–1988, from songfestivals and things of that sort, and then blos-somed into human chain demonstrations thatextended all the way from Tallinn and Estoniadown to Lithuania and sometimes involved vio-lence on the part of OMON [Special PurposePolice Detachment] elements and Soviet armyelements in the capital cities. Tallinn, Estonia wassomewhat of an exception. The Estonian author-ities even signed a treaty with the RussianFederation, and they themselves played a ratherquieter role in the expression of their own nation-alism. In Lithuania and in Latvia, the nationalistleaders were much more outspoken. They hadbasically taken control of the parliament buildings,and had built barricades around them.

When I used to go down to Lithuania, I hadthis great big American car. I hated it, frankly,but it was certainly big and imposing. We flewthe flag. The consul general had the right to flythe American flag on it. We would drive that carup between the ranks of the Soviet tanks andarmored personnel carriers on our way into theparliament building itself. Local television wasthere. Sometimes Leningrad television was there,and even television reporters from theScandinavian states were there; Finland, especial-ly, was quite interested in what was going on.They focused not on me, to be quite blunt, buton the American flag on this enormousAmerican car.

When you would approach the parliamentbuilding, there would be fellows with red arm-bands standing around barrels of burning trashand so on trying to keep warm, and they wouldbe armed with a rifle or a shotgun. You would goinside, and you would find sleepy guys with theirguns or shotguns, sitting on sofas and chairs andwhatnot. Eventually you would find, in the caseof Lithuania, you’d find Mr. Landsbergis, wholooked just about as tired as a human being canlook, but who was very appreciative of these vis-its and of the somewhat vague but positive mes-sages we could convey from Washington. I thinkit did a lot for the morale of the nationalist lead-ers in the Baltic states, and it helped us to knowwhat was going on, of course.


In Estonia, I wouldn’t say it was all sweetnessand light up there. I remember President[Arnold] Rüütel, who is not a bombastic manand not a real macho type either, to tell thetruth, showing me a pistol in his pocket and say-ing, “If they come for me, I’m prepared toresist. I’m not going to go peacefully.” Thosewere dramatic moments. Like Wayne said,diplomats live for moments like that, and [theywere] very, very moving, I must say.

I don’t have much more to say about thesethings. We saw them from our own somewhatrestricted perspective, but we did see them fromthe standpoint not just of northwest Russia andLeningrad but also from the standpoint of thosethree Baltic countries. Very brave people. It wasreally an honor for me to be able to work withthem and to report what we saw back toWashington and to the embassy in Moscow.Thank you.

JAMES COLLINS: Thank you very much. Iwill try to pick up a bit from where JackMatlock, Richard Miles, and Wayne Merryhave brought us. I would like simply to talk a bitabout the context that I feel faced people in theUnited States who were trying to cope with thecollapse of the Soviet Union and its conse-quences, and the dynamics that were at workover the period from the August coup onthrough at least the middle of the 1990s.

There is, first of all, one point that everyonereally has to bear in mind, because it was verymuch present—certainly for all of us in theembassy or when I was back in Washington deal-ing with all the former Soviet space. At thattime, the United States had two parallel sets ofthoughts going on almost continuously as wetried to cope with this sort of revolutionary,rapid change that we saw going on in this part ofthe world. On the one hand, we had what Jackhas called cleanup diplomacy, but which reallyhad dimensions beyond cleanup. For instance,we were engaged from the summer of 1991 onwith the Soviet government, and then immedi-ately with its successor, in figuring out what wasgoing to happen to the Soviet nuclear arsenal.Now, we had previously established agreements.Were they going to be negotiated on and simplydeveloped? Suddenly we had more states, play-ers, in the equation. How were they going to bebrought in? Trying to maintain the framework todeal with the terribly dangerous phenomenon of

the Cold War nuclear arsenal—tactical andstrategic nuclear weapons spread over Eurasia—was a preoccupying part of the whole policy dis-cussion in the United States.

The second set of thoughts concerned theMiddle East, which occupied a very significantplace in our discussions with Moscow duringthe fall of 1991. The Madrid Conference [onpeace in the Middle East] took place, and wewere engaged in active diplomacy on the Arab-Israeli dispute, and so forth. To some extent,inertia played a role in this process. The SovietUnion had always been a major player in theMiddle East, and the concept that somehowMoscow wasn’t going to play that role was dif-ficult to accept. Moreover, it was even more dif-ficult when they were playing a constructiverole, frankly. The idea that we were finally ableto work together but maybe lacked diplomaticoptions to make something work presented uswith an immense challenge.

Now, I give you this only as a set of consider-ations and thoughts that were major factors in theway the United States responded to all of thesedevelopments that you’ve heard described. WhatI’m really suggesting is that, number one, the firstpreoccupation was not always just what was hap-pening to Moscow, pieces of the RussianFederation, or the Soviet Union. There wereother large issues out there, and they tended to, ifyou will, balance off what might have been per-fectly logical and rational approaches if you werelooking only at the day’s changes in Moscow.

The second thing that seemed to me to bevery important in shaping the American responseis the fact that bureaucracies tend not to respondwell to revolutions. The pace of change that weall lived through for the next few years afterAugust 1991 was so rapid that the United Statesbureaucratic response was always so far behindthe events on the ground that for the most partthose of us who were on the ground found our-selves in essence wondering what was going onin Washington. What they were talking aboutnever showed up where we were. This is partlybecause Congress thinks it does something whenit appropriates money. Well, it does, but it does-n’t do anything five thousand miles away until themoney shows up, and that was usually a year ortwo years later. So the response time lagged.Dealing with the crisis or, if you will, the devel-opmental issues that were going to face the U.S.government, was a real problem. Most of us who



were on the ground or who dealt with it on adaily basis understood that we were always behindthe curve.

The systems were simply not compatible. Iused to tell people that in Moscow in thoseyears, a day was a week, a week was a month,and a month was a year. And our system backhere just was never functioning on the same cal-endar. So this had an impact on shaping theresponses. For one thing, it tended to focus youif you were trying to address issues and beresponsive or to shape a direction. It focused youon the tools at hand, that is, what you could usein time or could have at your disposal in time. Sothis often got us into the situation where theproblem was defined by the old adage that if allyou have is a hammer, everything looks like anail. And to some extent that meant economictools, loans, things that could be done reason-ably expeditiously in the international andfinancial institutions. Those became the tools ofpolicy, even though they often were not neces-sarily the ones that were perhaps best adapted tothe issues before us.

A third factor that was always at play—and Ithink it made a huge difference in the way weapproached post-breakup developments into theearly ’90s—was domestic politics here at homeand international politics with our allies, and thewhole mind-set we inherited from the end ofthe 20th century. This was cleanup diplomacyand cleanup politics big time, and it was achance when everybody felt you could rightevery wrong and tidy up every imperfect situa-tion left over since 1945. And so we got an awfullot injected into American policy that, I think,really in some ways made certain issues very dif-ficult to think about conceptually.

It seemed to me that the most difficult onewas the approach that emerged as almost thegospel in Washington regarding the independentstates of the former Soviet Union. One of thegreat strategic decisions made by the UnitedStates at the beginning of 1992 was to recognizediplomatically each of the former republics, saythey were independent states, and treat themaccordingly. Nobody else, more or less, wasdoing that until we started. Many of the formerSoviet republics themselves weren’t quite surewhat it meant; I remember getting a call fromthe Tajik minister of foreign affairs asking for theforms to apply for diplomatic recognition. Thiswas really a time in which, to some extent, what

the United States said and what it did in thosevery critical moments shaped the entire interna-tional system of that part of the world, becausewe said, “You are independent states. We recog-nize you. Where is your ambassador?” etc.

But one of the shortcomings that followedfrom much of that was that this became almostan obsession. The obsession was that we could-n’t even speak of something or think conceptu-ally of anything that would look like it wasrestoring the Soviet Union. So we got into a sit-uation where I could not put in a memo here inWashington the term “CIS” [for“Commonwealth of Independent States”]; ithad to be “new independent states.” And wewere hamstrung, it seemed to me, in manyrespects by what I used to call “terminal bilater-alism.” We could basically work bilaterally witheach one of these states, but to talk about or todiscuss somehow the broader context of whatarrangements would come to govern the rela-tions between and among the peoples of thatregion, and how we would deal with the differ-ent arrangements that really ought to be made,was a topic that just never could really get on theagenda. I think this often made it difficult to dealwith a number of the developmental and politi-cal issues in that region because we never reallyhad a regional policy—we always had a bilateralpolicy with everybody.

The final point I simply wanted to suggest isthat what happened as the Soviet Union fell apartwas a phenomenon for which, frankly, the UnitedStates was totally unprepared in terms of aresponse. Now I’m not here to suggest that wedidn’t do a pretty good job in response, and Ithink in many ways we did. But in terms of whatI suppose today we would call “state building” or“state rebuilding,”we really didn’t have the tools orthe conceptual framework to deal with the chal-lenges that were put in front of us. I think it’salmost impossible for people who didn’t livethrough this or were not part of it to have a feelfor the total disorientation of a society that wokeup one morning and said that basically everythingthat it had had the day before was illegitimate, andthat everything would be starting over. And thatessentially is what happened to people in everycorner of the former Soviet Union. Whether youpick Christmas Day 1991 or the 8th of December,I don’t care, but it happened when, in essence, theflag came down and everybody understood thatthere was a new system. That resulted in a number

of reactions, of course. Internally people were atsea, and they were looking for whatever anchorsthey could find. But one anchor that was oftenout there and thrown out more often than prob-ably was wise was the United States—that wesomehow would have the answer to what you didnext. Having overthrown the communist system,what did you put in its place? I remember havingthe question put to me very seriously by seniorpeople in the Russian government and other gov-ernments, essentially, could you tell us how tomake a market economy? Or, could you tell ushow to set up a democracy? The fact of the mat-ter is that we didn’t have the answers, and yet wewere under great pressure to provide answers tomany different queries and questioners. I think wedid our best, but often fell short in terms ofaccomplishment.

So I think the reality is that whatever short-comings there were in American policy in the1990s—and there were many—it was more thananything else a simple fact that we were ill-equipped institutionally as a government, as asociety, to take on the question of how onecopes with something that was at least as big, ifnot bigger than, the American depression in the1930s. We just didn’t have the structures to doit, we didn’t have the intellectual construct to doit, and we certainly didn’t have the bureaucracyin place to make an effective job of it. And so weused what we could and we did what we could.And, of course, it disappointed; it fell short inmany ways. Now there were many cases inwhich we assisted—and I think we did a goodjob—but it was never possible, in my view, tomeet the expectations that the Russian peopleand the Russian government had for what wecould provide in the way of suggesting a pathforward for them from the end of one system tothe flowering of another. And as Wayne said, andI totally agree, 15 years in is not very far into thesystem. We’ve got a long way yet to go.

One final concluding comment that I decid-ed I really should make to this group: the onething that I learned on the 19th of August 1991is that you can never underestimate the role ofserendipity and pure chance in the way thingswill develop. There were two things that stoodout to me during those days of the putsch thatI think were extraordinary. One was that theydidn’t prevent Yeltsin from moving to theWhite House in Moscow. I mean this is realineptitude. And they managed to create for

themselves an opponent who basically ensuredthat the effort to take the government undercontrol of a different group of people was notgoing to succeed.

The second was CNN. There is one storyabout CNN that has always remained with mebecause it almost symbolizes the role of moderncommunications and the fact that you can’trepeat history when certain things havechanged. At one point—and I think it was onthe second day of the coup—[Soviet VicePresident and putschist Gennady] Yanayev called[Kazakh President Nursultan] Nazarbayev inAlmaty and in essence said, “What are yougoing to do? We haven’t heard from you. We arein charge, and we are looking for a statement ofsupport and for you to assure that everything iswell in Kazakhstan. Nazarbayev was reported tohave said, “Well how are things going inMoscow? Is everything under control?” He gotthe song and dance from Yanayev about howthere was nothing going on, everything wasfully under control and they were just makingsure that the meetings worked right, and soforth. Nazarbayev was sitting there watchingCNN, and he knew that there was a very dif-ferent picture from what he was being told overthe phone. And I think somehow that’s a fittingway to understand an awful lot that happened inthat peculiar period from August through theend of 1991. There was just way, way too muchserendipity in much that was going on for peo-ple to cope with. I’ll end with that.

STEPHEN F. COHEN: Not only are all of uson this panel from the South or Midwest, butAmbassador Collins and I went to IndianaUniversity, as did the new Secretary of DefenseRobert Gates. Since they may not want to betoo closely associated with me, I’ll refrain fromcalling us the IU mafia, but it does testify to theinfluence of the Midwest and the South onAmerican Russian studies.

This is a good event, and I congratulate BlairRuble and the Kennan Institute because our sub-ject today hasn’t been discussed seriously enoughin the United States, if at all, during the last 15years. This is a good beginning. We should all begrateful to Blair Ruble. I’m happy to be a part ofthe discussion, but I suddenly realize that I’m theonly nondiplomat up here, for better or worse. Itmeans I can either be academic or undiplomatic.I’ll make up my mind as I go along.

15THE FIFTEENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE END OF THE SOVIET UNION

I want to use my 15 minutes to comment verybriefly on three aspects of the topic before ustoday. I just published a book on the subject inMoscow [Pochemu li Ne Stalo Sovetskogo Soiuza?]and in researching it I read a very large amountof Western and Russian literature in search ofother people’s explanations of why the SovietUnion ended. Certainly it is one of the greatexplanatory questions of the 20th century, and Iwant to report briefly on the explanations Ifound there. Second, I want to give you my eval-uation of the quality of those explanations. Andthird, I want to end by commenting on the dis-cussion that’s underway in Russia today on whatthey call the plusy i minusy, the pluses and minus-es, of the end of the Soviet Union, a discussionthat is very much not going on in the UnitedStates, for obvious reasons.

Two prefatory generalizations: In the Americanliterature on the end of the Soviet Union, there isnow a near consensus that it was inevitable. Butthis is a clear case of what social scientists call hind-sight bias or the fallacy of retrospective determin-ism. Consider, for example, what three eminentAmerican scholars said over about a decade aboutwhat the profession of Soviet studies thought atthose different times:

In 1990, the first said that the end of the SovietUnion was “absolutely unthinkable.”

In 1998, the second scholar said of the profes-sion, “Nobody really expresses any surprise thatthe Soviet Union collapsed.”

And in 2002, the third scholar told us, “Theprevailing view in the profession is that the Sovietbreakup was inevitable.”

How did scholars go from the concepts ofunthinkable to inevitable? Was it revelation, was ithindsight bias, or was it—and you people inWashington would know better than I do—polit-ical fashion?

My second generalization is that there is ananalytical bias inherent in the usual formulation ofthe question: why did the Soviet Union collapse?But we should not use the word collapse in askingthe question, because it prejudges the answer byimplying that the system had some inherentdefect, probably an inescapable one. Instead, weshould simply ask, why did the Soviet Union end?In posing that question and in going through theAmerican and Russian literature, I found about 10rather different explanations, all of them equallycertain of their cogency and validity. They can bereduced more generally to six:

1. The system was doomed from the beginningby some inherent genetic defect.

2. The system was overthrown between 1985and 1991 by a popular anti-Soviet revolution,either a democratic revolution from below inRussia or ethnic separationist nationalist revo-lutions in the other 14 ethnic republics, orboth.

3. The system fell victim to an unworkable eco-nomic system that went into final crisis andcollapsed in 1991.

4. The system fell victim to Russia’s long tradi-tion of intelligentsia extremism. Gorbachev’smoderate gradualist reformation—he called itperestroika—inadvertently unleashed this oldtradition, and the extremism of the intelli-gentsia destroyed Gorbachev’s perestroika justas it had destroyed other attempts to reformRussia without catastrophe since AlexanderII. In other words, this explanation sees arecurrent outcome in Russian history. Yourarely find that explanation in the UnitedStates, but it is widespread in Russia.

5. The end of the Soviet Union was a classic caseof the event-making role of special leaders inhistory, in this case Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

6. Na oborot—just the opposite, it was an elite-driven event. It was the Soviet nomenklatura,the high elite that itself ended the SovietUnion.

In my book, I examine these six explanationsat considerable length in the context of Soviethistory and politics, and I rule out the first fouras not plausible. Briefly, here is why.

There are two conceptions of an inherentdoomsday mechanism or fatal defect thatdestroyed the Soviet Union. One is an originalideology or criminality, the school associatedwith, for example, the late Martin Malia. Theproblem with this explanation is that it’s theo-logical, and therefore, not suitable for real his-torical analysis.

The other concept is more serious, the argu-ment that the Soviet Union was an empire, “andall empires end.”The problem with this explana-tion is twofold and empirical. Remember, we’renot talking about Eastern Europe. The Soviet


state did have some characteristics similar tothose of traditional empires, but it also had fun-damental characteristics that were not typical ofempires. Second, the Soviet Union did not end,as almost all traditional empires have, in militarydefeat and colonial rebellion on the periphery.The Soviet Union was ended in peacetime andby the metropolis, the center, by Moscow.Thus, the empire explanation doesn’t fit.

As for popular revolutions from below, in aword, there were none. Not even the semblanceof one, even though it is widely asserted in theliterature. As evidenced by many opinion sur-veys, election results, and even protest bannersat street demonstrations, there was no anti-Soviet revolution in Russia itself. None. Eventhe most radical protesters and oppositionistswanted to reform the system, not abolish it.

In the other 14 republics there were, as Iunderstand it, popular ethnic separationistmovements only in the Baltics, part of theCaucasus, and arguably, though some peopledisagree, in western Ukraine. That was it. Theseexceptions constituted perhaps barely 10 per-cent of the entire Soviet territories, peoples,and resources, hardly a fatal loss to the Union.Moreover, we need to remember, though peo-ple often forget, that as late as March 1991 therewas a national referendum with a large turnout.And of the large turnout—the referendum was-n’t held in all the republics—76 percent of thepeople voted in favor of keeping the Union.

Now regarding the economic explanation,there were all sorts of problems, but no largemodern state has ever collapsed because of itseconomy. It didn’t happen in the United Statesduring the Great Depression of the 1930s, and,equally telling, it did not happen in post-SovietRussia in the 1990s, when the economic col-lapse was far greater than anything that had hap-pened in the Soviet Union.

Moreover, and this we need to understand,the economic system that went into crisis in1990–1991, was no longer the Soviet econom-ic system, which had already been significantlydismantled. So if there was an economic causal-ity in the Soviet breakup, it wasn’t the Sovieteconomic system but what had followed it.

Fourth, regarding Russia’s tradition of destruc-tive intelligentsia radicalism, I was drawn to thisexplanation in the beginning simply because somany of my Soviet acquaintances when I lived inRussia in the late 1980s were increasingly radical,

extremist former party intellectuals. They werelike the revolutionary repentant noblemen in the19th century, repentant Communist Party func-tionaries.That transformation certainly happened.But such radicals were a tiny minority of the largeSoviet intelligentsia—almost unrepresentedamong the provincial intelligentsia, indeed dis-liked by the provincial intelligentsia and by theSoviet people at large—and they had little influ-ence or power apart from that given to them bythe two commanding figures of the period,Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

That brings me to the role of leadership, ofevent-making political leaders, and my ownexplanation of the end of the Soviet Union.Jack Matlock adumbrated this argument, but Idon’t know if he’ll go as far as I do. Gorbachev’spolitical role was the primary causal factor inthe Soviet breakup because of the changes heintroduced in the system between 1985 and1989. Without them, none of the other factorscited in the literature would have come intoplay, including Yeltsin’s role. In 1989 Yeltsinemerged, again due to Gorbachev’s reforms, asanother potentially event-making figure, andwhat ensued was an extraordinary situation. Atan extraordinary moment in Russian history,1989 to 1991, two leaders of extraordinarypolitical will appeared on the scene at the verysame time. Many of you may not agree withthis formulation but I believe it is correct:Gorbachev, a leader with an extraordinary willto reform, Yeltsin with an equally strong polit-ical will for power. Bang! The collision thatensued led Yeltsin to the Belavezha Forest, 15years ago on December 8th, to abolishGorbachev’s Soviet state.

For me, that is the essential explanation,but—and it is a very large but—it is not a suffi-cient explanation. We must ask why the still pow-erful high Soviet nomenklatura permitted Yeltsin’sstruggle for power to go so far as to abolish theirown, the nomenklatura’s, state? Why didn’t theystop him? And the answer—as some of youknow—is that at that crucial moment they weretoo busy seizing vast property. They were moreinterested—beginning in late 1989 and growinginto a frenzy by 1991—in privatizing the state’senormous financial and economic assets than indefending or even preserving the state. Nor wasthis primarily the nomenklatura elites of the ethnicrepublics outside Russia. It was first and foremostthe Russian nomenklatura itself.


The other nomenklatura, as we just heard fromAmbassador Collins, were obedient to Moscowto the very end, including Ukraine’s Kravchukand most of the others. I want to be clear: thereare many people in Russia today—historians andother intellectuals—who argue that the Sovietelites destroyed the system because they hadalready become protocapitalist elites. But theywere not the primary factor. They were insteadan enabling factor. They permitted the maincausal factors, first Gorbachev, then as a resultYeltsin, to end the system.

In the minute I have left, this: in Russiatoday, there is a fascinating—if we can be empa-thetic—discussion about what was gained andwhat was lost with the Soviet Union, the plus-es and minuses. In the United States, we don’tdiscuss the question because we see only pluses,though some of the panelists today have hintedthat there may have been a few minuses. InRussia, however, according to recent polls, 60percent of people surveyed still regret the end ofthe Soviet Union. It’s a large percentage. I thinkwe can deconstruct it as follows: many of thosepeople simply regret the loss of the SovietUnion in a sentimental way, much as we allregret our lost youth. Their feelings areexpressed in the famous adage that even Putinhas quoted, “Anyone who does not regret theend of the Soviet Union has no heart; anyonewho thinks it can be reconstructed has nohead.” It is an understandable reaction. But Iwould guess that about 30 percent of that 60percent is bitter because they believe that onlyminuses resulted from the end of the SovietUnion, and that the end of the Soviet Unionwas a result of a malevolent foreign or domesticconspiracy, or both. This belief remains a pow-erful force in Russia, and if things again turnworse in Russia in terms of human lives, it willcertainly become a political factor behind a verywrathful kind of politics.

Finally, I think we American scholars oughtto consider the other regret that one hears inRussia among historians and the intelligentsia:the view that what Russia lost with the SovietUnion was yet another chance to modernize thenation politically and economically throughgradual rather than catastrophic means. That areforming Soviet system was yet another missedopportunity for Russia to modernize without anensuing catastrophe. There are people in Russiawho also believe that if reform of the Soviet

state had continued, the world order todaywould be safer and more benevolent than it nowis. Considering the role that the United Stateshas played in both of these realms, inside Russiaand in its relationship with Russia (in my judg-ment, on balance a detrimental role), I think it’sour obligation to engage our Russian colleaguesin this discussion.

RUBLE: I’d like to thank Steve for the kindwords, but in fact they should be directed towardJoe Dresen, who pulled this program together. Iwant to mention Joe’s role in this.

I want to begin the discussion, and thenhopefully we’ll have time for questions from thefloor. But I’m struck as I listen to the paneliststhat, leaving aside for a moment the reality onthe ground in Russia and Ukraine and theCaucasus and Central Asia, we heard, really, adiscussion about the conceptual limitations ofdealing with historic events, the conceptuallimitations on policymakers and on academics.These intellectual limitations are inevitablebecause in both diplomacy and in social scienceresearch you’re looking for the most probableoutcomes based on what came before, and trulyhistoric events are by definition low-probabilityevents, so you’re not looking for the low-prob-ability event.

At the same time, I think one can make acredible argument that at the moment of the endof the Soviet Union, when changes were comingevery day and a day was a week, a week was amonth, a month was a year, in fact the intellectu-al response and the diplomatic response were per-haps closer and more flexible and more responsiveto what was going on than what happened whenwe slowly moved into not just cleanup diploma-cy but relations as normal.

When we get into ’93, ’94, and ’95, presum-ably we are beginning to deal with a world that ismore predictable. Yet one can agree or disagreewith the policy of hoping that there would be aSoviet Union of 12 states voluntarily united by acommon agreement that [they were] movingtoward more freedom. One can agree or disagreewith that, but that’s at least a credible policyresponse. But the confusion really sets in muchlater, and the confusion seems to set in over mis-understanding, I guess, because people weremoving along so quickly. If Steve is right, if it wasreally about elites beginning to grab property in1989, we didn’t necessarily pick up on that.


But I would like to ask each of the speakersvery briefly, looking back, what in hindsightshould we have picked up on that we didn’tpick up on? Did we really privilege the nuclearquestion too much? Or, in fact, are all theproblems that have come since really minor incomparison to what would have happened hadwe not really borne down on the nuclear issue?So looking back, starting with a point of viewthat at the time we weren’t going to get it rightanyway, when we began to have time to stepback and think, what should we have picked upthat we didn’t?

MATLOCK: Well, if I would look at the timethat I’m talking about, which is up to the failedcoup in 1991 (others have more experiencewith the later time), I would say that the firstBush administration should have realized earli-er than it did that the Cold War was essentiallyover. This was something we felt in our guts inthe embassy, but could not get the idea acrossto Washington until Bush and Gorbachev metin Malta in December.

A lot of problems were still out there.Europe was still divided and whatnot, but nev-ertheless there was an entirely different spirit inthe diplomacy. We no longer had a “zero-sum”attitude and were looking for win-win ways tosettle these problems. This was very clear to usin Moscow by January 1989. It was not clear tothe incoming Bush administration. I think therewas an exchange fairly early on when at onepoint [National Security Adviser Brent]Scowcroft said on one of the Sunday interviewprograms that the Cold War was not over. AndThe New York Times did an editorial [stating that]the Cold War was over.

Well, you know one could make a logicalargument for Scowcroft’s attitude. Looking onlyat the past, of course, one could easily have con-cluded that the Cold War was still in progress.Europe was still divided. There were many prob-lems. We didn’t have the START agreementsyet, and so on and so on. But as I said, I thinkwe had moved by the end of 1988 to a situationwhere both sides recognized what the problemswere. American and Soviet diplomats werenegotiating off the same agenda, and we werelooking not to defeat each other but [for] wayswe could solve common problems. That was anentirely different spirit from the zero-sum gamethat marked the Cold War.

One of the proposals I made in February 1989was that we expand our agenda to much moreactive economic consultation and cooperation.This was rejected as premature. I know [Secretaryof State] Jim Baker thought that the Soviets justwanted to act as spoilers in the international eco-nomic organization. I suppose we could have hadthe most influence if we had paid attention not tothe theories that we had but to their reality, andtrying to help them cooperatively to move to that.I think that may have been a missed opportunity.

Also, I would say, reinforcing Jim Collins’scomment about the difficulties in moving bureau-cracy, that I have an example that may be com-paratively minor in the overall set of things, but itwas quite striking. One of the first recommenda-tions I made in early 1989 in the new Bushadministration was that we establish four to sixconsulates very rapidly, because we had anembassy in Moscow, we had a consulate generalin Leningrad, we had an advanced party to set upa consulate general in Kyiv, and that was all. Ispoke to the secretary of state, and he said,“Sounds good to me, why don’t you take it upwith the president?”They both agreed. The pres-ident turned to Scowcroft and said, “Will any-body object to this?”

And he said, “Well, the FBI will want extrapersonnel to watch the Soviet missions.”

[President Bush and Secretary Baker] said,“We can live with that. Go ahead and do it.”

So I go back to State thinking that, well, atleast within a year we’ll have some new con-sulates. Three months later, I ask the deputy sec-retary for management what he was doing.

He said, “Oh, yes, we’re going to put it in the’92 budget.”

This was 1989 I’m talking about. I said,“We’ve got 11 time zones in this country. It’sbeginning to fall apart. I need them now.”

He said, “Look, Jack, I’ve got to openBratislava and Leipzig first, and I don’t have fundsto do any more in the Soviet Union for the nextthree years.”

Of course, when ’92 came, we had to open 14embassies to what we already had, so we had todo it with very little preparation.

The sluggishness of the bureaucracy: I had thesecretary of state and the president saying “do it,”and you couldn’t get it done.

MERRY: Two points. First, I think the prioritygiven to the nuclear issue was entirely appropri-


ate. What we were seeking to do was ensure thatthere be secure custodianship for this enormousarsenal. Basically, we defined secure custodian-ship as being single custodianship, and that real-ly involved getting nuclear weapons out of threecountries, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus,and into Russian custodianship. If we hadflubbed that, the consequences would have beenso enormous that I can’t imagine that therewould have been a retrospective view thatmaybe we shouldn’t have given it so much pri-ority. I don’t have any quibbles about that.

Where I think we really did move too quick-ly was in according the legitimacy of the UnitedStates to all 15 republics. Some people will beshocked to hear me say that I think accordingdiplomatic recognition gives legitimacy, but inthese cases the word of the United States actuallydid do that. But we were treating all 15 as if theywere all as legitimate and prepared for independ-ence as the three Baltic states, and that objective-ly was not true. I think we should have establisheda much more provisional relationship, particular-ly with the Central Asian states, and that weshould have created a series of much more stren-uous benchmarks that I think might have helpedto deal with the very real issue that Jack addressed,which was that Gorbachev was trying to bringreform into these Union republics, and the end ofthe Soviet Union helped enshrine a bunch of oldnomenklatura types in power, some of them stillthere. If we had not moved so quickly to give thelegitimacy of American recognition to all 15, Ithink we could perhaps have had a more positiveimpact on that process.

MILES: I don’t have any big picture or com-ment from the Leningrad consulate general, butwhen Steve was talking, I was reminded of aquote that we’ll find in the French ambassador[Maurice] Paleologue’s memoirs written duringthat time of World War I on the eve of theRevolution. It’s from the French philosopher[Joseph-Marie] de Maistre. Something like,“Woe to bad governments! Triple woe to badgovernments which desire to mend their ways!”

COLLINS: I think it’s important to re-emphasizeone thing, and here I go back to the coup. Therewas no inevitability that that coup could not suc-ceed. It didn’t, and it was pretty ineptly done. Butas one who woke up at seven o’clock in themorning on the 19th of August to be told that

Gorbachev was under [military] control in thesouth and these guys were in charge and the mil-itary showed up in town, etc., it was not exactlypersuasive that this was all going to go Yeltsin’sway. Now I think, in that sense, that all of this dis-cussion about “Could the Soviet Union havestayed on?” has to be thought out very carefully. Itmight not have gone on forever, but I have alwaysbelieved that it was fully possible that the SovietUnion could still have been with us 15 years fromthe day of the coup. It would have been a differ-ent place. We would have had different characters.But the fact of the matter was that these institu-tions were not dead, and what Gorbachev wasreally up against by the time the coup happenedwas that he was beginning to touch things thatreally mattered to people. Glasnost and so on wasall fine, but when he started to move real poweraround, like ownership of assets, this was gettingto be trouble, and it brought a very strong reac-tion. My first point is that historical inevitabilityis never a good idea from the point of view of theday before you know what happens, and it cer-tainly wasn’t in those days.

In terms of the nuclear issue, I agree withWayne. I think there’s absolutely no questionthat no matter what else we were able to accom-plish or not accomplish, to have neglected thatissue would have been catastrophic, because itwas perfectly clear to me, and to some of thecolleagues in the audience who were involved innegotiating this business and trying to harnessthe resources to get a handle on it, that the par-ties directly involved, the Ukrainian leadership,the Russian leadership, Kazakhstan, were notgoing to do this by themselves. They simplywould never have gotten this done. And had welet it go on and fester, I’m convinced you wouldhave four nuclear powers, or three at least, inthat part of the world. We might have tacticalnuclear weapons and all kinds of other thingsscattered around that would be extremely upset-ting. So I think that there was no question thatfor the United States—and we were probablythe only ones who could do it—[play] the roleof catalyst, [be] basically the goad and negotiatorto make sure that we got through that prob-lem—[that] was problem number one.

If I had an issue that I thought took up somuch time that was absolutely wasted effort, itwould be the God-knows-how-many dozensof hours of negotiating over CFE[Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty] levels


that went on beyond the Soviet collapse. This,frankly, was nonsense. Getting the Soviettroops out of East Europe—this was a perfect-ly good Cold War counting mechanism tomake sure everybody sort of knew what theother had. It was totally ridiculous to spend thetime the diplomats did on it after the SovietUnion collapsed. But I can’t tell you how manyhours were spent. It’s more than I ever care tothink about. Thanks.

COHEN: I’m not sure I fully understand thequestion. I guess it would depend on the fol-lowing: What would you have done differently?It would depend on what, looking back, onethinks the best outcome would have been. Ifyou take the view—it’s not a view widely heldin the United States—that it would have beenbetter for everyone if a voluntarily reformingSoviet Union had continued to exist, then thelong pause, as I think it was called, between thetime President Reagan and Jack left office andthe first President Bush thought it over, flabber-gasted me. I was asked to come to Camp Davidin November 1989, on the eve of [the U.S.-Soviet summit at] Malta. Malta is usually citedby Anatoly Chernyaev and others, includingJack, as the end of the Cold War. I was invitedto Camp David just before that historic event todebate an eminent colleague known for theview that Gorbachev was actually a threat to theWest in 1989. My role was to make the oppositeargument: that the U.S. should meet Gorbachevhalfway in order to end the Cold War. What wasinteresting was not what I had to say but that theBush administration—the president and almostall of his top people were at the meeting—wasprofoundly divided over this historic opportuni-ty, even at this late date. Gorbachev had been inpower for four years, during which he had dis-mantled the Communist Party dictatorship, butleading members of the administration stillthought he was a threat to U.S. national securi-ty, though it was not the opinion of PresidentBush himself.

If the question is, “Would you have wantedto see Gorbachev succeed as a reformer, hold-ing the Union together in a democratic and vol-untary way?” then the U.S. should have helpedhim with money, for example when he went toLondon for the G-7 meeting in July 1991. I’vetalked with some of the coup makers and withGorbachev’s people. Most of them believe that

if he had come home with a serious financialcommitment by the West, the coup makersnever would have moved against him in August.But in order to have given Gorbachev such largesums of money, the will to make that commit-ment to him would have had to continue andbuild on Reagan’s policy toward Gorbachev andnot been interrupted by this long pause in 1989.On the other hand, if you’re happy the SovietUnion ended, things worked out just fine. Butif you think things would have been better, atleast in Russia and some of the other formerrepublics, and maybe in world affairs, if theSoviet Union had not ended, then you mustask, what in the world was the first Bush admin-istration thinking about during its first 11months in office?

MATLOCK: I can answer that. Bush was wor-ried about the right wing of the RepublicanParty, and as usual American foreign policy isdriven primarily by domestic politics.

QUESTION AND ANSWER PERIODWITH THE AUDIENCE

Question: I am a retired Russian ambassador,[and a] current guest scholar at the UnitedStates Institute of Peace. Let me say that it’s asubtle pleasure to attend such an intellectualbanquet. As many of you know, the most pop-ular Russian question is, who is to blame? It isa very popular and at the same time uselessquestion because usually the consequences, thelessons, are not drawn, even when the answersare correct. The consolation is that it’s not onlyour prerogative. If I may make my counts, Ibelieve that the Soviet Union was 80 percentdoomed when Gorbachev came to power. Itwas doomed, as Merry said, by misrule of theSoviet rulers from Stalin to Chernenko. And topull out the Soviet Union from this situation,we needed a genius, or better, a couple ofthem. But the 90 million–member CommunistParty produced two leaders, Gorbachev andYeltsin, and the tremendous fighting betweenthem, and the divided house perishes. Still, Iremain an admirer of Gorbachev because, par-aphrasing Marx, he tried to storm the heavens.The responsibility for all of what happened isentirely ours, but did the United States helpGorbachev’s huge and unprecedented project?


My answer is no. Could they have done it? Myanswer is yes. In the Soviet Union and inRussia there was a tremendously good disposi-tion toward the United States. Unfortunately,what we are seeing now, when Russia and theUnited States again are a problem to eachother, has its legs, as we say, growing from thisperiod as well.

QUESTION: I was in Russia in the spring of’92, and stayed away from Moscow and stayedaway from the embassy; let my Russian hostsshow me their country. I have to say I was outvisiting Novgorod and down the Volga, etc., etc.One of the things that was clear is that theRussians were shipping all kinds of things downthe river from Nizhnii Novgorod, heavy arma-ments and tanks and armed personnel carriers,and who knows what all. So I’m not quite surethat we really did get a handle on all of thoseweapons as early as has been suggested.

But the real question I want to ask is thisone: in my roaming around that area of Russia,I saw no sign of democracy being created or afree market evolving whatsoever. When I gotback, I read Steve Cohen’s analyses from thatperiod and found them to be the most accuratefrom my perspective because they emphasizedcontinuity rather than change. So the real ques-tion I wanted to ask you is whether the peoplein the embassy really believed that you werebuilding democracy and free markets duringthis period. Were there any other alternativesthat might have been considered, or is that theonly consideration that we as Americans whotruly believe in all of those things could havecountenanced in those days?

MATLOCK: Others can answer regarding thematter of free markets and building democracy,because that didn’t come up in serious fashionuntil after the Soviet Union collapsed. When Iwas there, we were trying to end the Cold War,to prevent a nuclear confrontation, and wethought that to do so we needed to press theSoviet Union to open up, to be more responsi-ble to its people (you can call it democratizationor whatnot) and, in effect, lift the Iron Curtainand of course control the arms, which were athreat. Yes, that was what we were concentratingon. The matter of democracy and markets camelater, in my experience.

MERRY: We weren’t building anything. If it wasgoing to be built, it was going to be done by theRussians. What we were confronted with was agroup of leaders who came in and said that’sexactly what they wanted to do. Now were theyrational or right or sensible? I think in hindsightthey were overly ambitious. But I would simplysay that this was no more imposed by the UnitedStates as an idea than a lot of the other develop-ments. The real problem was that we were toldor given a laundry list of aspirations by theincoming new rulers of the Russian Federationwhich was pretty staggering, and they wantedhelp in trying to do it. Now did we manage torespond adequately? I’d say certainly it’s a verymixed record. But I can’t quite accept the prem-ise that it was we who were trying to build thedemocracy. The problem we had was that thesefolks were trying to do it. We were providingwhat we could, and by 1992 we were providingmighty little in that regard. Most of the thingsthat were, if you want call it democracy build-ing, didn’t really get underway until after theFreedom Support Act, and that was then a yearat least after that.

You’re really talking about what the Yeltsinpeople and the people there were able to doabout building a democracy in those first twoyears. The answer was more than we might havethought but a lot less than was necessary.

QUESTION: I’m a scholar in residence here atthe Wilson Center. I think I can anticipate youranswers because so many of you talked about thedynamic of unpredictability, about the end orthe collapse of the Soviet Union. But I won-dered if you all could reflect on the controversythat Senator [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan, afounder of the Wilson Center, brought up,which is to say the alleged failure by the CIA topredict the collapse.

QUESTION: A follow-up on Mr. Cohen’spoint about if only Gorbachev had gotten thisfinancial commitment in July of 1991. In termsof bureaucratic inertia, would the Sovietbureaucracy, having these Western funds, beenable to apply them productively, or would theyhave just disappeared into private hands?

QUESTION: Wayne Merry alluded to theimportance of the social environment, and


demography, and health, for example. And hereferred to a proposal by George Soros to help dosomething about that. There was an earlier pro-posal in 1992 by Jeffery Sachs, and I speak not ofthe shock therapy issue but in fact of a proposalfor a large sum of money to be devoted to theeconomic transition in the face of the assumptionof Soviet and Russian debts by the RussianFederation. A third of that was to have been spenton something called a social fund. [Sachs] was notpersuasive. If I recall, Stephen Cohen, you hadsome critical remarks to make at the time aboutthat very matter. Is that something that we shouldthink about again? I guess my persuasion is thatwe should have thought about it.

QUESTION: I’m retired from the Departmentof State, INR [Bureau of Intelligence andResearch], and I’d like to sketch a hypothesisand ask the panelists to comment on it.Gorbachev, it seems to me, was a convincedcommunist who wanted to reform the USSRinto a communist state that would not rely onstate terror or the apparatus of propaganda. Andwhen he dismantled the apparatus of propagan-da and did away with state terror, the systemcollapsed, because it had been held togethersimply by fear and by myth.

MATLOCK: I don’t think I have much to addto what I said before. The fact is that our gov-ernment understood very well what was hap-pening, and one could not predict from one dayto the other how long this would go. But as Isaid, I sent my first message in June 1990 rec-ommending that the United States governmentprepare for the contingency that the SovietUnion could break up. The reasons the CIAnever made that a prediction [are that] (1) noteverybody in the CIA agreed that that was thecase, although I think most by then were per-suaded, and (2) the last thing we wanted was aformal determination of that sort or predictionby the CIA. It would have leaked immediately,particularly if it had been conveyed to Congressor to senators such as Senator Moynihan, andthe leak would have stopped the whole reformprocess. There would have been a coup againstGorbachev, and it would have succeeded. I thinkthere is a principle in science that under somecircumstances simply by observing somethingyou actually affect the outcome. Intelligence

assessments, when they are known, [are] partic-ularly [subject to] something like that.

A second conclusion would have been thatwe wanted it to happen and we didn’t want it tohappen. Everybody would have thought, well,they are predicting it, they’re going to try tomake it happen. We were doing what little wecould to keep it from happening.

But if it means that our government didn’tunderstand what was going on, that’s incorrect. Ithink we did, and we even had news before thecoup occurred that there would probably be acoup, and even of the people in it. We tried towarn Gorbachev without naming the people,and he didn’t take it seriously. So on the whole, Ithink we did understand what was going on. Buteven if you knew there was going to be a coup,you couldn’t be sure whether it would succeed ornot. Though in my last press conference, whichwas on the record in Moscow in early August1991, I was asked the question, and I said thatthere could well be attempts to reverse the coursethat Gorbachev had taken, but if they happenedI thought they would fail. It was never quoted inthe U.S. press, although I was on the record.

COLLINS: Just a very short answer to yourquestion on the CIA. All I can tell you is thatoutgoing DCM [Deputy Chief of Mission]Collins in the late summer of 1990 got his brief-ings, and I was told that there was some proba-bility that one Baltic state might get a degree ofautonomy within five years.

MERRY: To be fair to people, what we haveare intelligence agencies, not wisdom agencies.If these agencies had predicted the breakup ofthe Soviet Union, they might very well havebeen wrong, as Jim pointed out, and we weretogether during those historic days in August1991. That putsch wasn’t necessarily going tofail. I mean, they may have been wrong. In theweeks before I went out to Moscow in 1991, asenior figure in the U.S. government who wasbriefing me told me basically that Gorbachevhad taken reforms as far as they could go andwe were now in for a protracted era of stagna-tion in the Soviet Union. Other people toldme that they were expecting dramatic eventswithin weeks, if not days, after my arrival inMoscow. Yes, government is a big place.Generally speaking, if you’re making predic-tions rather than projections, you’re a lucky


individual if you get it right, and you’re evenluckier if somebody remembers.

My real expertise was on East Germany, andtwo and a half years before the Wall came down,I made a firm prediction in the State Departmentthat the GDR would cease to exist within fiveyears. Everybody told me I was nuts. If I hadbeen wrong, that would have been confirmed.But in retrospect, it made no impact on U.S. pol-icy whatsoever.

COHEN: We now have to be elliptical becausewe are pressed for time. When I said that had theG-7 committed money to Gorbachev in Londonin July [1991], all I wanted to say was that thereprobably would have been no coup in August.The plotters would not have touched him if hehad come home with such a commitment.Therefore, because so many people think that thecoup was the final precipitating factor in the endof the Soviet Union, you have to think about that“what if.” Would the Soviet elite have stolen thatmoney? Some of it, but not as much as was stolenby the Russian elite in the 1990s. The pere-stroishchiki, the men who made and led perestroi-ka, were not thieves. They may have been com-munists, but calling Gorbachev a typical commu-nist is like calling Luther a typical pope. Aboutthat the evidence is abundantly clear.

On the question of whether or not the SovietUnion could have existed without force is alegitimate and serious question. But there wereother factors that held the Union together.There was a common education, socialization inthe army, millions of intermarriages among theSoviet peoples, a shared sense of victory in thewar and other historical accomplishments, andmore. You have to take many factors intoaccount, not just the coercive ones.

I want to say one more thing, because it grievesme, and someone mentioned my critical writingsin the 1990s. I don’t take seriously—I hopeAmbassador Collins will forgive me—theAmerican attempt at so-called democracy-build-ing in Russia in the 1990s. Maybe it’s because Igrew up in Kentucky, where we knew the differ-ence between thoroughbreds and other horses,but ever since the United States supported Yeltsin’suse of tanks against an elected parliament inOctober 1993, and then endorsed the constitutionthat you all now lament because it so empowersPutin, a peudo-democratic constitution thatYeltsin shoved through in a falsified referendum in

December 1993, the United States has had noright to use the word democratization in regard toRussia. Those U.S.-backed events ended it. Therewas never again a free and fair Russian election.Why remember that today? Not to say that someof us were right and some of us were wrong backthen, but to remember that when Washington andthe U.S. media bash Putin for having createdwhatever evil is unfolding in Russia today, theyhave forgotten the 1990s and the American sup-port for the origins of Putinism in Yeltsinism.

So let us understand what’s going on. Afriend of mine whom you would all admirebecause he’s so pro-American said to me, “AfterYeltsin, Putin was inevitable.” He didn’t meanPutin personally, but Putinism. I believe he iscorrect. I don’t believe in inevitability, but it wasa logical consequence. So let us keep things inperspective, remember that we did not play apositive role in the 1990s, and understand thatwe, and Russia, are paying the price today.

QUESTION: Thank you. I am from Odesa,Ukraine, and I am here as a Fulbright scholarwith the Kennan Institute. One impression that Igot from today’s discussion is that indeed it wouldmake sense perhaps to throw an annual partyhere in Washington. D.C., where everyone whomisses the Soviet Union for whatever reasoncould come and talk to each other and exchangetheir ideas. That probably wouldn’t be a massivegathering, but a substantial number of peoplewould turn out.

Second thing, very short: from the point ofview of a Ukrainian who is from a Russian-speaking, Russian-dominated area of Ukraine—however being consciously Ukrainian—I think itwas a very important development for Ukraine toget this historic opportunity to move on as anation-state. I definitely believe that the wholeargument that what might have gone wrong—and many things did go wrong in various post-Soviet republics—is some kind of argument infavor of concluding that the better solution wasfor the Soviet Union to still exist—I don’t buythis logic. It is just not fair to me.

Finally, my question. Quite unexpectedly,Blair, for you maybe, I would like to go back toRussia. Drawing on what you said in your pre-sentations, your vast experience in dealing withthe Soviet Union, then Russia, how could thelessons of what happened 15, 20 years ago beapplied in U.S. dealings with present-day Russia?


Do you think there is any value there, any lessonthere, any kind of experience that you got backthen that could be applied in Washington’s deal-ings with present-day Russia, which seems to bequite a challenge?

MILES: The only obvious thing would be thatwe did, at that time, stay in touch with as manydifferent people as we could, with members ofthe democratic reform movement, with opposi-tion people, with dissidents, even when it wasmaybe pushing the envelope a little bit at thattime to do it. I think the United States govern-ment has generally been out in front of otherdiplomatic establishments in doing that, nomatter the society. I’ve done it in many differentcountries, including some pretty nasty ones, farnastier than Putin’s Russia, so I know that weare doing that in Russia today. We do have theseconsulates and the American Corners aroundRussia so that we do stay in touch, and I justthink it’s very, very important to have somecontact between the American diplomats and allmanner of people who live in that country. Younever know what’s going to happen. You reallycannot predict the future. You never knowwhere future leaders are going to come from. Tothe degree you can, it’s very useful to try toinfluence those people.

I represent the Open World exchange pro-gram, largely with Russia but with other coun-tries as well, including Ukraine. We don’t try tocoerce anyone into any particular form ofthinking or way of thinking, but quite franklywe do try to influence these young leaders in apositive manner and to develop positive feelingstoward the United States as they visit us. That’swhy Congress appropriates the money for theprogram, and that’s what we do.

MERRY: I would add that diplomacy in interna-tional relations is about people. It’s not aboutmodels. We have a tendency of trying to put peo-ple into stereotypical boxes and understandingthem within conceptual frameworks that don’tgive them enough credit. For years, the UnitedStates didn’t give Gorbachev enough credit; wedidn’t give Yeltsin enough credit. I suspect insome ways that we don’t actually even give Putinso much credit. But personal contacts are veryimportant. Who knows the benefits that mayhave come to the United States because DickMiles was plying drink on Vladimir Putin when

he was a junior official in the Leningrad city gov-ernment? And the reason we don’t do interna-tional relations over the Internet, as Ross Perotonce proposed, is because the human factor isextremely important. And I would say that ifthere is any lesson from that period, it is thatyou’re not going to even begin to be able to pre-dict the unforeseeable, let alone deal with it, ifyou don’t really have your people out and aboutand actively in touch. The biggest mistake thatthe Foreign Service—and I don’t say this just forthe Foreign Service, but for the United Statesgovernment—has been making in recent yearshas been pulling its people back into fortresses.The people I worked with, worked for, as well asthe people who worked under my supervision inthose days, were getting out, even taking somepersonal risks, but getting out and doing the jobthe taxpayers were paying us to do.

MATLOCK: I agree emphatically with thosecomments. I would just say that I think one ofthe most useful lessons we should have takenfrom our diplomacy in ending the Cold War isthat you talk to your adversaries; you don’t lookfor excuses not to. And one of the big differencesbetween the Reagan administration and our cur-rent administration is that many of the sameforces that today say we shouldn’t talk to thiscountry or we can’t talk to that country, etc.,were the same ones that [at] every small excuse[would] say, “You really can’t deal with the SovietUnion. We’re just somehow endorsing them ifwe talk to them.”

Reagan turned them down every time. Hesaid, “No, we’ve got to talk to them. We’re onthe same planet. We’ve got to deal with theseproblems.”

And he knew that you don’t do that by say-ing you’re going to force a regime change. Whois going to deal with you if that is your goal?[laughter] It sort of boggles the mind. [laughter]That’s not a lesson necessarily for dealing withRussia. Actually, we’ve kept communicationwith Russia, but our general foreign policy, Ithink, has definitely suffered from failure to fol-low that principle. That was a very strong prin-ciple in my day.

COLLINS: In response to my Ukrainian col-league, I for one have absolutely no regret aboutthe demise of the Soviet Union. In fact, I thinkit is probably one of the great transforming


moments that is giving new opportunities to awhole host of different peoples across a very bigpiece of the Earth. That said, I think it’s also truethat we now face a long period in which it isgoing to take resources and people and somecommitment on the part of not just theAmerican government and the American peo-ple, but all of us.

Two things with Russia: one is to ensure thatwe don’t isolate that country or try to force itinto itself. In my experience, Russia is least ableto cope with the world when it feels it’s isolatedand under siege. So keeping the world open tothe Russian people and Russian involvement isgoing to be critical.

The other thing is simply to underscorewhat Dick and Wayne and others have said.This is not just the business of government anylonger. Russia is, with fits and starts, trying tojoin in a variety of ways the broadest under-standing of the international community, andit’s going to take time. I have said to a numberof people recently that much of what’s goingon today reminds me of the debates in Britainbefore World War I, when a little country bythe name of Germany was beginning to asserta role in the world economy and in the colo-nial effort to establish colonies, etc. It’s veryinstructive to go back and read a bit about how

Germany was described and how peoplethought about this. Well, Russia finds itself inmuch the same position as many of the othercountries in that part of the world. They arenew players on the world stage. The world ishaving just as big a time getting used to theirpresence as they are getting used to the ideathat the world is now a part of their lives. So it’sgoing to take at least a generation for thatprocess to play out, and we need to have a cer-tain amount of patience and empathy with thepeople trying to make it happen.

COHEN: Jack Matlock made an importantpoint: We did not win the Cold War, but whenideology later persuaded us that we had, thatkind of triumphalism helped lead us into Iraq.

Finally, the man whose name this institutebears, George Kennan, wrote in 1950 that whenthe Soviet communist system eventually ended,we should keep our noses out of Russia’s inter-nal affairs and let Russians sort out their ownfuture. We did not follow that advice after 1991.We should begin doing so now.

RUBLE: I will point out that we will soon becoming up on the 15th anniversary of 1993, sowe’ll have more to talk about as we move for-ward. Thank you.


The Fifteenth Anniversary ofthe End of the Soviet Union: Recollections and PerspectivesConference Proceedings

Edited by Markian Dobczansky

O C C A S I O N A L P A P E R # 2 9 9 KENNAN INSTITUTE

Woodrow Wilson International Center for ScholarsOne Woodrow Wilson Plaza

1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NWWashington, DC 20004-3027

Tel. (202) 691-4100 Fax (202) 691-4247

www.wilsoncenter.org/kennan ISBN 1-933549-34-3

the fifteenth anniversary of the end of the soviet union

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