So Talbott was less than thrilled when he heard the first results of the Russian elections and the success of the less radiant side of the Russian character. He was in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, with Vice President Al Gore when the news started to come through. Talbott says that he was “obviously concerned” about the showing of the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, but that he was “never close to despair.”
Why not? Because Talbott believes that Russia is following a road–albeit a bumpy one–that will lead to political and economic reform. For some in Washington, the elections were proof that the bear still had bloody claws. Talbott, for his part. rejects the idea that “totalitarianism and authoritarianism are genetically coded into the Russian soul.” In an interview before leaving with Gore, Talbott anticipated a time when Russia and its neighbors will have evolved into “a community of truly modern, democratic states at peace with each other, with themselves and with the rest of the world.” The elections, he admitted after the ballot, were “a pretty big pothole–but it’s the same road.”
By midweek, after a period when the administration seemed devastated by the results, this was the official line. Clinton said that there was no evidence to anticipate a “big new dangerous direction in Russian policy”; a senior administration official called the elections “a very positive development…for the evolution of democracy in Russia.”
And yet there is little point pretending that things are now as they once were: those whose policies of economic and political reform were so favored by the administration have been snubbed. Jeffrey Sachs, a Harvard economist who has been working with the Russian government, angrily warns against “falling into a serious delusion in thinking that life can go on as before.” The West, says Sachs, will make a “colossal blunder” if it thinks that everything is fine. For too long, he argues, the West has reacted to bad news in Russia by sitting on its hands. This year, says Sachs, the World Bank and international Monetary Fund have disbursed no more than $2.1 billion in aid to Russia; given the size of its problems, hardly worth counting.
If support–moral, political and economic–is to flow from America to the beleaguered forces of reform in Russia, Talbott will have to direct it. He insists that he is not starry-eyed about the place. He remembers, at the age of 16, being summoned by the headmaster at Hotchkiss School to a prayer for deliverance during the Cuban missile crisis. But Talbott also had a teacher at Hotchkiss called Clinton Ely who gave him a lifelong love of Russian language and literature. Talbott’s Yale thesis was on 19th-century Russian lyric poetry; his thesis at Oxford (where he became, as he remains, one of Clinton’s very closest friends) was on Vladimir Mayakovsky. He is a writer himself, and not just of long books on arms control and foreign relations–his specialty during a career at Time magazine. In a poem published in The New Yorker in 1987, Talbott contrasted the dark side of Soviet society–a toast where the “hosts turn on their guest like a firing squad”–with the elegant, imaginative “microclimate” of the widow of a Tashkent composer.
Despite all protestations to the contrary (“We are not hopelessly naive,” said a close colleague of Talbott this week), it is this romantic streak that will now be tested. For Talbott, the years since 1985 have been a vindication of those who saw the greatness in the Russian soul. Young people in Russia, he thinks, are optimistic, and “Boris Yeltsin…sees the future with the eyes of a young man.”
In fact. according to some Washington analysts, the poor showing of the reformers is explained partly because the young didn’t vote. And although nothing will be said publicly, there is disappointment in the administration that Yeltsin failed to lift a finger to help the reformers. In the new conditions a romantic attachment to Yeltsin and Russian youth will not be enough. in two areas, Talbott is now going to have to persuade constituencies to accept what they don’t want.
The first sell involves economics. All sides in the elections–even the reformers of Russia’s Choice–stressed that the country needed a “social safety net” if economic restructuring was not to be hopelessly unpopular politically. Sachs claims that the wages of as many as 5 million Russians are in arrears: Stephen Sestanovich, of Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, says that old industrial plants, which will go bust under free-market conditions. often provided services such as laundries and child care.
Treasury officials–a delegation was in Moscow last week–agree with Sachs that the West must do something to help mitigate the pain of economic reform. In Moscow, Gore criticized the IMF for ignoring the social consequences of economic change. So Talbott’s first postelection duty will be to convince both other industrial countries and Congress that Russia needs more money, not less. At a time of budget cuts and a distaste for any foreign aid, this will be the most demanding domestic political task he has yet faced.
Second, Talbott must reassure Russia’s neighbors that America will protect them from any new nationalism in Moscow. Hitherto, the most common criticism of the administration is that its policy amounts–in the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski, national-security adviser to Jimmy Carter–to a “Russocentric obsession which is troubling.” Talbott’s critics say he forgets that, long term, a strong and independent Ukraine is in America’s interest. They note that in the fall Talbott won an administration tussle on offering early membership of NATO to the countries of Eastern Europe–something Russia did not want and that Talbott helped water down.
Talbott has heard the charge of his Russocentrism many times; he says it “truly is not so.” In his eyes, the essential element for the security of Ukraine and other neighbors of Russia is political and economic renewal in Russia itself; so what appears to be an obsession with Russian reform is also a subtle policy for its neighbors. Too subtle to be grasped, perhaps. At a NATO summit in January, the East Europeans, quoting Zhirinovsky’s threats, will be pressing their noses to the window of a party to which they have not been invited: somehow, Talbott and Clinton have to give them more than the leftover wine and a stale canape.
All this adds up to a test of a quality that Talbott has never before faced. If things go well, the sky is the limit. It is not hard to hear Talbott spoken of as a future secretary of state. He insists that he wants to return to journalism. Yet he was always too close to power to be dismissed as a mere wordsmith: his writings on arms control in the 1980s were so well informed that it was hard to think of him as a spectator rather than a player. He enjoys his new role.
And yet romantics run the risk of disappointments far more wounding than those who see only the dark side of life. Mayakovsky, who had once been the revolution’s ardent poet laureate, ended up in despair, killing himself at 36. During the next year Talbott’s faith in the shining nation on the steppe will be tested as never before.
