It was March 1994, more than two years after the Soviet Union disintegrated, and the debates within the U.S. Embassy in Moscow were heated. Diplomats in the economic section, backed by the Treasury Department in Washington, argued ardently that radical free-market reforms were the only path for post-Soviet Russia, and that democracy would surely follow. Political advisers believed, equally passionately, that such “shock therapy” would only worsen the devastating dislocation Russians were already suffering with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Russian people, they warned, would end up blaming America — and democracy itself — for their woes.
In the heat of the debate, E. Wayne Merry, the top political analyst in the embassy and one of the most forceful critics of shock therapy, set out a detailed case against it in a long telegram provocatively titled “Whose Russia Is It Anyway? Toward a Policy of Benign Respect.”
In an essay last month about the telegram, Mr. Merry argued that America back then was falling for the old fallacy of trying to understand a foreign country “by looking in the mirror.” The push for free-market reforms in a country without any experience of a market economy or democracy was, he wrote, “an especially virulent case of Washington institutions trying to ram a foreign square peg into an American round hole.”
Mr. Merry, now a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, told me in an interview, “Why did I end up writing those 70 paragraphs? I had for two and a half years been writing about these issues, and was very frustrated that nobody in D.C. was interested in anything other than economic theory coming down from Harvard.” He was so frustrated, he added, “I decided it was my duty as head of Pol/Int” — the political/internal department of the embassy — “to tell Washington what was going on.”
But the senior staff at the embassy kept dithering on how to officially attribute the cable, so out of frustration, he said, Mr. Merry sent it over what is known as the dissent channel, a back channel to the State Department set up during the Vietnam War to allow diplomats who differed with U.S. policy to register their views. The lengthy telegram and a brief rebuttal from the State Department were duly consigned to the sealed bin of official secrets.
But the cable was not forgotten. For years, Russia experts at the National Security Archive, a nonprofit institution that publishes declassified government documents, pursued what came to be known as “Wayne Merry’s long telegram,” a nod to George Kennan’s celebrated 1946 “Long Telegram” that shaped U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union in the Cold War. The Archive finally succeeded in publishing the telegram in December. The full text of the telegram, and its fascinating back story, is available on the Archive’s website.
Revisiting those debates recalls the wrenching transition of the 1990s. Russia was in shambles. Attempts at market reforms had left much of the population destitute and the government at war with itself. In October 1993, several months before Mr. Merry wrote his telegram, President Boris Yeltsin had ordered tanks and troops to roust the contentious Parliament and ruled essentially by decree — with the approval of the Clinton administration.
Those were years when Russia was still open to the West, and Americans were pouring into the country as tourists, students, entrepreneurs and all manner of well-intentioned consultants. Vladimir Putin was an unknown former K.G.B. agent working for the mayor of St. Petersburg, still a long way from power.
Thirty years later, the U.S. relationship with Russia is at its worst since the Cold War. What went awry? Mr. Putin is the main culprit for Russia’s return to authoritarianism, aggression and hostility to the West. But American arrogance and presumptions cannot be dismissed.
I was the Times bureau chief in Moscow through those turbulent times, watching the parade of private and public advisers earnestly trying to graft Western liberal democracy onto the carcass of the Soviet Union. Few had any idea of Russia’s history or society; many made quick fortunes in the chaos. I remember one earnest official of the International Monetary Fund musing that if the fund’s prescription for freeing energy prices was adopted, half the population would freeze to death.
Mr. Merry’s cable was a cri de coeur against this approach. “Even the most progressive and sympathetic of Russian officials have lost patience with the endless procession of what they call ‘assistance tourists’ who rarely bother to ask their hosts for an appraisal of Russian needs,” he said.
American efforts, he wrote, should focus instead on a “nonaggressive Russian external policy and development of workable democratic institutions.”
The cable concluded with a prescient warning: “If the West, with the United States in the front rank, prefers the role of economic missionary to that of true partner, we will assist Russian extremists to undermine the country’s nascent democracy and will encourage a renewal of Russia’s adversarial stance toward the outside world.”
Is that what has happened? Was America’s advocacy of “shock therapy” responsible for the rise of oligarchs and the ascent of Mr. Putin?
Debating “who lost Russia” is notoriously futile. We don’t know, and never will, what other direction history might have taken. Myriad forces were at play. The decision in 1994 to expand NATO, which prompted even more contentious disputes within the U.S. government, arguably had a greater role in turning Russians against the West than misguided advice.
My sense at the time was that the Russians’ resentment of the West and of liberal democracy grew in large part from the souring of their overblown expectations and overly romanticized image of America. The first waves of reformers and advisers came to be associated with the humiliation and poverty that followed the collapse of the Soviet empire; Mr. Putin shared this resentment and learned to exploit it.
Yet it is also true that Russians were listening to Americans in the 1990s. In fact, “we were the only ones Russians were listening to,” said James F. Collins, who served as acting ambassador and ambassador to Moscow in those years. “One can’t minimize the degree to which for a half-dozen years the U.S. was the place with the answers, though admittedly there was some skepticism.”
One reason was that “the Soviet education system taught nothing about how markets worked,” recalled Svetlana Savranskaya, who was a student in Russia in the late 1980s and later spent years trying to wrest Mr. Merry’s cable from the State Department as director of the National Security Archive’s Russia programs. So Russians naturally turned to America, the capitalist North Star, for guidance, many visiting the United States and returning awed by the malls and the energy.
There is little point 30 years on in playing the blame game. But the story of American blithely pushing destructive advice onto alien lands — from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan — cannot be retold too often. Those distant debates are a reminder that Americans exert enormous influence. If we are oblivious to or disdainful of the needs of other people, we are capable of enormous harm — to them, and to our own country’s interests and standing.
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