From Cold War To Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia

by Michael McFaul

We all felt good about getting something concrete done, always a challenge in government work. We also allowed ourselves that day to imagine even deeper cooperation between the United States and Russia on issues beyond arms control.

With new young presidents in the White House and in the Kremlin, the Cold War felt distant. We were signing the first major arms control treaty in decades, working together to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, joined in efforts to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and increasing trade and investment between our two countries. We seemed to have put contentious issues such as NATO expansion and the Iraq War behind us, and were now digging deeper into areas of mutual interest. That year, for instance, Russian and American paratroopers were jumping out of airplanes together in Colorado, conducting joint counterterrorist-training operations, at the same time that American and Russian entrepreneurs were working together to develop Skolkovo, Russia’s aspirational Silicon Valley. We were even discussing the possibilities of cooperating on missile defense. These were breakthroughs unimaginable just two years earlier. Medvedev seemed like a pro-Western modernizer, albeit a cautious one. On that celebratory drive through the cobblestone streets of Prague, the Reset—the bumper sticker for Obama’s Russia policy—appeared to be working.

Better days

my first day of work at the embassy, the Russian state-controlled media accused President Obama of sending me to Russia to foment revolution. On his evening commentary show, Odnako, broadcast on the most popular television network in Russia, Mikhail Leontiev warned his viewers that I was neither a Russia expert nor a traditional diplomat, but a professional revolutionary whose assignment was to finance and organize Russia’s political opposition as it plotted to overthrow the Russian government; to finish Russia’s Unfinished Revolution, the title of one of my books written a decade earlier. This portrayal of my mission to Moscow would haunt me for the rest of my days as ambassador.

Putin propaganda

A new ideological struggle has emerged between Russia and the West, not between communism and capitalism but between democracy and autocracy. Putin also has championed a new set of populist, nationalist, conservative ideas antithetical to the liberal, international order anchored by the United States. Putinism now has admirers in Western democracies, just as communism did during the Cold War. Europe is divided again between East and West; the line has just moved farther east. Russia’s military, economic, cyber, and informational capabilities to project power and ideas have also grown considerably in the last several years. And sometimes, this hot peace has morphed into hot wars, not directly between the United States and Russia but between proxies in Ukraine and Syria. And then there are some acts of Russian aggression that Soviet leaders during the Cold War never dared to attempt, including annexing territory in Ukraine and intervening in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, I again packed my bags and moved to Russia to help support market and democratic reforms there, believing that those changes would help bring our two countries closer together. Beginning on January 21, 2009, I worked for President Obama at the National Security Council, and in 2012, I became his ambassador, animated by the belief that a more cooperative relationship served American national interests. I have spent the greater part of my life trying to deepen relations between Russia and the United States. But in 2014 all these efforts seemed for naught. Heightening my sense of frustration, I was banned by Putin from traveling to Russia—the first U.S. ambassador since George Kennan, in 1952, to be barred entry to the country. What had I personally done wrong? Had I pursued the wrong strategies? Or had I embraced the wrong goals in the first place? This book seeks to answer these big, hard questions about Russian-American relations over the last thirty years, from my perspective as both analyst and participant. The story begins with the first reset in U.S.-Soviet relations, in the Reagan-Gorbachev era, and ends with the last, failed attempt initiated by President Obama. It’s a complex story, shaped by Cold War legacies, punctuated by economic depression and civil wars, and interrupted by popular uprisings and foreign interventions. I will address all of these factors as potential causes of cooperation and confrontation. However, in my...

We settled on the repeal of Jackson-Vanik, an amendment to the 1974 Trade Act that denied the Soviet Union normal trade relations with the United States until the Kremlin allowed Jews to emigrate freely. I would not have predicted back then that this gimmicky debate strategy would spark an enduring interest in the Soviet Union and then Russia, or that I’d actually be part of the government team that lifted Jackson-Vanik three decades later.

In 1983 a hundred million viewers tuned in to ABC to watch The Day After, a made-for-TV movie that graphically depicted nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States.

I no longer believed that engagement between our two countries was enough. I started to consider an alternative theory: only democratic change inside the Soviet Union would allow our two governments and our two societies to come closer together. That possibility seemed very remote in the winter of 1985, but a little less remote after Mikhail Gorbachev emerged on the scene.

Individuals matter. Leadership matters. A different American president might have adopted a more cautious approach to engagement with this communist leader. Reagan, however, dared to be bold.

Tanya Krasnopevtsova, however, did not. She wasn’t even a member of the Communist Party—an amazing achievement for the Soviet Union’s leading expert on Zimbabwe at the time. As I departed the institute, she followed me down the corridor and out the door. We walked around Patriarch’s Pond in one of Moscow’s oldest and most charming neighborhoods, at first chatting cautiously, and only about Zimbabwe. We kept moving; Tanya was worried that we might be followed. But as she became more comfortable, both with our surroundings—did the KGB hang listening devices from the trees? we joked—and with me, she started to tell me what her government was really doing in Africa. It wasn’t just supporting equality and showing solidarity, but running guns, sending money, and plotting a Communist Party coup in South Africa. The African National Congress (ANC), she told me, was infiltrated by Communist Party members loyal to Moscow, who had plans to nationalize all private property, abolish markets, establish one-party rule, and run South Africa just like their comrades ran the Soviet Union. I pushed back. I didn’t believe it. But Tanya spoke passionately and convincingly. She hated the communists, and despised the Soviet regime. During my last stint in Moscow in 1985, I had met critics of the regime, and some people who desperately wanted to leave the USSR. But Tanya had a different spark to her. She wanted to change the country, not flee.

Putin made much less of an impression on me than his boss. He was careful, unenthusiastic, diminutive—an apparatchik. I could not tell from this meeting or our subsequent encounters with him if he supported or detested NDI’s work. He said little, but promised that his team would organize an orderly, successful workshop—and delivered. He handed me off to his trusted deputy, Igor Sechin, who ran the logistics to perfection—much more efficiently than his counterparts in the Moscow city government. (As a reward for his years of loyalty to Putin, Sechin would later become the CEO of Russia’s largest oil company, Rosneft.) Why was Putin organizing democracy-promotion seminars at which his sworn American enemy could lecture his people on how to run their government? It was well known at that time that Putin used to work for the KGB, and maybe still did. After all, is there really such a thing as a former KGB officer? The question we chewed on in our NDI delegation later that day was this: had Putin and his comrades flipped to the side of the white hats like Sobchak, or had the KGB inserted Putin into Sobchak’s office to keep tabs on this dangerous democrat? I concluded at the time, wrongly, that it didn’t matter. To paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., the arc of Russian history was at last bending toward justice, freedom, and democracy. That put the KGB on the wrong side of history. Putin’s only chance to survive was to join the democrats, or so I believed at the time.

First impression of Putin

Kto vinovat?—Who is to blame?—is a classic Russian question.

obstacles to democratic consolidation were now codified in the new constitution, including, first and foremost, strong presidential rule. The new document, which Yeltsin was now free to redraft as he and his aides saw fit, spelled out the basic rights guaranteed to all Russian citizens and established a new system of government, which included the office of the president, a prime minister and government, and a bicameral parliament consisting of a lower house, the State Duma, and an upper house, the Federation Council. Despite those positive developments, the enhanced powers of the president loomed largest in the new draft. The president was to be elected directly by the people for a fixed term of four years, and impeachment procedures were described—that was the good news. The bad news was that the new constitution gave the president more authority to issue decrees, greater control in selecting the prime minister and the government, and the ability to directly appoint the foreign minister, defense minister, minister of the interior, and head of the Federal Security Service (FSB, the successor to the KGB)—together, the so-called power ministries.12 Many analysts, including myself, described the new system as “superpresidential.” But we differed in our assessments of just how authoritarian Russia had become. Some of my closest academic friends, Russians and Americans, argued that Russian democracy died during Yeltsin’s military attack on the parliament. The new constitution,...

Yeltsin in the wake of 1993 set the conditions for the rise of Putin

At the same time, the way Yeltsin achieved victory did not feel virtuous. He had run a negative campaign, stoking voters’ fears about the perils of communist restoration. He had used state resources to win—not exactly in keeping with “free and fair.” And allegations of electoral fraud dampened the celebration about Russian democracy’s resilience. More generally, the Russian political system still lacked many attributes of a consolidated, liberal democracy. This vote had been, more than anything, a referendum on communism, not an affirmation of democracy or Yeltsin and his policies. My mixed feelings about the vote were captured by two different headlines for the same exact op-ed. The title of my piece in the Moscow Times was “A Victory for Optimists.” The title of the same piece in the Washington Post was “Russia: Still a Long Way to Go.”13 The task moving forward, then, was to strengthen the institutions that make democracy endure: political parties, civil society, and an independent judiciary.

1996 elections

Unfortunately, the negative effects on U.S.-Russia relations from the NATO military operation against Serbia lingered for decades. Yeltsin eventually made peace with Clinton; he felt betrayed by the NATO war against Serbia, but also understood that Russia’s long-term interests were best served by maintaining close relations with the United States and the West. But not everyone in the Russian government agreed with the Russian president. For the siloviki—Russian military and intelligence officials—the NATO campaign in Serbia confirmed their theory about American imperial intentions. In their view, little had changed since the Cold War era, except that Russia was much weaker in 1999 and therefore lacked the means to counter American military aggression. The proper response, therefore, was not to kiss and make up, as the naive, aging Yeltsin opted to do, but to rebuild Russian military forces. One of the intelligence officers who held this view was Vladimir Putin. The following year, he became president.

Kosovo made Putin anti NATO

Putin displayed little charisma, championed no clear set of ideas, had no political party behind him, and had never run for office. What did Yeltsin see in him that I didn’t?

Back in 1999