PBS: Think Tank: Transcript for "The New Russia"

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The New Russia

Ben Wattenberg: Hello, I¹m Ben Wattenberg. For many decades the United States and the Soviet Union were two nuclear-tipped Cold War adversaries. When the Cold War ended, the Soviet Union broke apart. Economic chaos reigned in Russia. Mikhail Gorbachev was replaced by Boris Yeltsin, who was succeeded by Vladimir Putin. The tragedy of 9/11 shook up the global chessboard. And today, there is a very new situation in Russia, partly hopeful, partly grim, and a very new relationship between America and Russia.

To find out about it, we are joined by Leon Aron, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, frequent commentator for Voice of America, and author of Boris Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life. And Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution, deputy secretary of State in the Clinton Administration, former Washington bureau chief of Time magazine, and author of The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy. The topic before the house: The New Russia. This week on Think Tank.

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Ben Wattenberg: Welcome Strobe Talbott and Leon Aron to Think Tank. It seems to me as an outsider, you two are old Russia hands, which is the title of your book by the way, Strobe, and a very interesting one it is. There seems to me to be to an outsider today two wholly different stories that we¹re getting about Russia. On the one hand we hear about economic growth. We hear about oil boom. We hear about, on the one hand, new captains of industry; on the other hand, the same people are described as robber barons and oligarchs. Of an AIDS epidemic, of a terrible health crisis, of decreasing adult longevity, of a crime wave. It¹s very hard to unscramble it. And yet, this is obviously one of the pivotal countries in the world, certainly to the United States.

Strobe Talbott: It¹s like an old line that¹s used in another context. It depends on what you¹re comparing Russia to. If you¹re comparing it to what we¹d like it to be, it¹s a mess. If you¹re comparing it to a lot of countries in the West, it¹s a mess. If you¹re comparing to what it was as recently as ten, fifteen years ago, or what it could have been if things had gone really bad over the last fifteen years, it¹s doing pretty well.

Leon Aron: There¹s no doubt that it¹s moving in the right direction. That there¹s absolutely no doubt that we¹reŠDecember 1999 parliamentary elections deprived the communists, which were not east European communists, this is Russian reactionary Bolsheviks, of the plurality in the national Parliament, allowing Putin to put in all those excellent, great reforms, particularly economic reforms.

Strobe Talbott: This movement in a basically favorable direction, including from the standpoint of American interests has been going on for some time. In your opening comments Ben, you took us back to Gorbachev, which I think is absolutely right. Russia, even before it was an independent country, when it was part of the old Soviet Union, began to absorb the basic fact that the old Soviet communist system stunk. It was bad for the world and bad for the Russian people, bad for the other people of the former Soviet Union, and they began to dismantle it. Now the problem is that dismantling a rotten old structure is a lot easier than it is to build an effective new modern structure and what we see now is that they¹re going through the painful, long, rebuilding process.

Ben Wattenberg: And the argument is made that theŠwhat are they called it?-- the shock therapy?--didn¹t work and now you¹re saying it did work.

Strobe Talbott: Well, the phrase shock therapy, which has a lot of baggage associated with it, means among other things that you take a kind of a battering ram to the old structure and knock it down as quickly as you can. Yeltsin, Guidar, people like that got a lot of criticism for using shock therapy in the early nineties. I think that while they made a lot mistakes and there are a lot of negative consequences, basically they did the right thing. Had they tried to dismantle the old system brick by brick, it would have taken much longer and the old Soviet Communist Party apparatus would have been able to cling to power for a lot longer.

Ben Wattenberg: Leon, we¹ll come to the politics in a moment, but I wonder if you could discourse on the health situations specifically. We hearŠI follow demographicsŠthat there is nascent major AIDS crisis coming on in the Soviet Union. Is that accurate?

Strobe Talbott: In Russia.

Ben Wattenberg: In Russia. Sorry.

Leon Aron: When I hear about this I always wonder where were those people during the Glasnost years, where the Soviet press started actually publishing facts. I still remember the speech by the health minister of the Soviet Union who said that a third of Russian hospitals did not have running water, and another third did not have hot water. In other words, they had to boil it.

Ben Wattenberg: So, I mean, what you¹re saying is not necessarily that there is no health crisis; you¹re just saying it¹s been going on for a long time?

Leon Wattenberg: Well, it has very long roots and, in fact, we are now partly shocked because we see that which has been concealed from you.

Ben Wattenberg: Is Russia a modern country?

Strobe Talbott: No. But it recognizes it, if you can speak, you know, collectively about a giant complicated country. It recognizes it and is determined to be a modern country. That¹s the key thing. But just picking up on what you and Leon were just talking about. The health crisis is a little bit like the problem of crime and corruption. We are so aware of it now, partly because the Russians themselves are talking about it. This is, you know, the legacy of Glasnost or openness.

Ben Wattenberg: Right. Let¹s go on. You had Nine-Eleven, the great tragedy, and suddenly it seemed as if Vladimir Putin turned his country from a somewhat ambivalent course, a little bit to the east, a little bit to the west, solidly to the west, solidly as a major ally of the United States. Is that accurate?

Strobe Talbott: Well, I think that, first of all, he had a very specific Chechnya-related motivation for doing this. He saw instantly on September eleventh that the attack by international terrorists on the United States meant that if he played his cards right he could get the United States to sort of embrace him as a fellow opponent of terrorism. And that is exactly what happened between him and President Bush. And you¹ll notice that there has been very little criticism coming out of official Washington of Russia¹s ongoing campaign against Chechnya.

Ben Wattenberg: When you say anti-terrorist it¹s also sort of anti-Muslim?

Strobe Talbott: Yes.

Ben Wattenberg: You use in your book that phrase, which I hadn¹t seen before, the greenŠ?

Strobe Talbott: The green menace.

Ben Wattenberg: The green menace.

Strobe Talbott: Yes.

Ben Wattenberg: Meaning the Muslim world?

Strobe Talbott: Yes. And we can talk about Chechnya, but I think that that has to be understood as part of Putin¹s motivation. However, I think the larger motivation is that Putin is a pragmatic, realistic enough guy and a young enough guy to know that if he¹s going to succeed as the president of Russia, and Russia¹s going to succeed, to make it as a modern country, it has to be integrated into the West, it has to be able to attract Western technology and investment. And so he saw in September eleventh an opportunity to accelerate this alignment with the West by Russia that had been underway since Gorbachev.

Leon Aron: Ben, what surprises me is our surprise. I mean, for ten years this country has been undergoing a revolutionary change.

Ben Wattenberg: This country meaning Russia?

Leon Aron: Meaning RussiaŠRussia. It de-bolshivized, meaning the Communist Party is gone and the country is ruled through elections. It demilitarized, the largest demilitarization in world history. I mean, it cut defense spending by eight-five percent starting in 1992, from at least thirty percent of the GDP to under five percent, and finally it privatized. So the three pillars of the old country are gone and, therefore, it¹s a different country and, therefore, it has a different foreign policy. It¹s like a von Clausewitz, you know, war is a continuation of politics by other means. Foreign policy is continuation of domestic politics. This is a different country and, therefore, it pursues a different form of politics.

Ben Wattenberg: Is what Putin¹s doing, this sort of pro-Western, pro-American stance, is this dangerous for him in the SovietŠexcuse me, in Russia?

Strobe Talbott: Not now, but it could be. Right now his popularity is high enough. His political support in the Parliament is broad enough that he¹s got a quite a bit of room to maneuver. If, however, he should get, which is to say Russia should get into serious economic difficulty, I mean, beyond what is systemic over there, then I think some of the steps that he has made, acquiescing in the end of ABM Treaty, allowing American troops to deploy in former Soviet republics, that could then become part of a political problem for him.

Leon Aron: I think there has been a basic shift, Ben, in the national consensus. That is, what the country¹s about, what it should be, and how it should behave, and Putin is essentiallyŠyes, he¹s a bit out. He¹s a bit upfront. He¹s a bit out on a limb there, but not by far. What gives me a cause for optimism is again with facts we can prove that the country has changed, that the public opinion has changed and that Putin expressed it daringly and yet he expressed, perhaps, the outer edge of the national consensus.

Ben Wattenberg: Right, tell me about the oil situation. I mean, the fact that one says, well, Russia¹s now going to be on our side or aggressively on a pro-Western, pro-AmericanŠ If they played their oil card, that is a monumental shift potentially against the green menace that you talked about.

Strobe Talbott: Which is one reason that they¹re playing it, of course. I suspect that when George Bush, who knows a thing or two about oil himself, and Putin get together privately, there¹s a lot more conversation about energy geopolitics than they let on in public, and we see some hints of that in public. Now, the challenge here though for Putin is working with the political establishment in Russia to create a legal and regulatory environment so that western companies are prepared to come in there and invest and put their technology into the exportation of Russian oil. Right now it is, you know, it¹s the badlands. It is really, really tough and dangerous for Western corporations to operate there and for Russian capital to remain. That¹s got to change or they¹re simply not going to be able toŠ

Ben Wattenberg: Because of the anarchy that still reigns.

Leon Aron: Although, as I¹m sure Strobe knows, there are some very interesting reforms. I mean, Russian corporate tax, twenty-four percent, is one of the lowest in the world, certainly lowest in Europe. The income tax is thirteen percent. There have major legislation aimed at de-bureaucratization of the state management of private businesses, the various commissions and so on. The top oil companies now have a contingent, for example, one of the oil companies I know about keeps seventy employees from Price Coopers Waterhouse, the top agency in Moscow, and those same companies want to globalize and want to be traded and sell their shares on the world market. By the way, let me remind you that in the 1980s, in the early 1980s, the consensus was the Soviet Union is going to be a net importer of oil. Then the oil industry was privatized, and they¹ve grown fifteen percent in the last two years, supposed to grow another fourteen percent, and this February they caught up with Saudi Arabia on a monthly basis.

Ben Wattenberg: As the number one oil producer?

Leon Aron: That¹s correct. That¹s correct.

Ben Wattenberg: What does it mean in the next ten, twenty years, thirty years from now when you say, look, Russia is a member of our team, a member of the Western team, and particularly allied closely to the United States of America, which Tocqueville predicted a hundred and eighty years ago. What does that tell us about our world?

Strobe Talbott: I just wish it were the most important and most decisive thing going on, because there¹s some other trends obviously that are pretty dangerous, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, ballistic missiles to other countries, including so-called rogue states, non-state actors butŠ

Ben Wattenberg: But the Russians play a role in that, every single one of those.

Strobe Talbott: Yes, and I was going to say, Russia is part of the problem not part of the solution, at least in the near term, especially with regard to Iran. Nonetheless, Ben, I think the thrust of your question is absolutely right. All of us can remember what it was like during the Cuban missile crisis, when the planet went to the brink of nuclear holocaust because of the dispute between the United States and the Soviet Union. When all hell broke loose in New York and in Pennsylvania and Washington on September eleventh, we had a lot of things that we were afraid of. President Bush had a lot of concerns on his mind, but he did not worry either that Russia was behind this attack on the United States or that it would be anywhere other than with the United States in dealing with the problem and that¹s a huge deal. That¹s a big improvement in our lives and our children¹s. Now what we have to do is two things. First of all, I don¹t think either Leon or I would subscribe to sort of a determinist¹s view of history and that this positive direction that Russia¹s moving in is forever automatically. Russia could still go bad.

Ben Wattenberg: They¹re right now signing an agreement with Iraq.

Strobe Talbott: Let¹s come back to that in a second. The point is here that we have to use such influence as we have which is never going to be decisive, but is nonetheless going to be important to help Russia stay on the right track. The second thing is we need to get Russia to be less ambiguous in a lot of its behavior and work with us to deal with problems in other parts of the world and these new agenda issues. That may beŠI¹ll leave it to you whether that¹s a segue into Iraq, because it¹s not clear yet that Russia will be with us in doing what may be necessary in Iraq.

.Leon Aron: It seems to me that the Iraq issueŠit seems to me that a little bit is tactical, a little bit is posturing. In fact, precisely because of this potential public opinion backlash, what I think Putin is doing is--while, in fact, doing considerably more even than Yeltsin, who of course until then was the best President or the best leader of the Russian State we ever had in Russia--, he¹s doing more on the ground, but he couches them in such terms and provides counterweights to it. In other words, not to be accused of kowtowing to the United States all the time. Iraq, I think, is the issue of money and it¹s the issue of symbol. Don¹t take us for granted. Let¹sŠand you know, Russia is owed seven or eight billion dollars by Iraq but thatŠ

Ben Wattenberg: Yeah, but that could be assumed by the new government of Iraq. The United States could underwrite that.

Leon Aron: Precisely, precisely. ButŠ as far as the future is concerned, again Ben, I¹m a firm believer in a people¹s ability, a large people, and large peoples have sometimes very messy histories, but provided that the majority public opinion is in the end what rules the country, and in Russia it did. It¹s not exactly direct.

Ben Wattenberg: Why is itŠI was just sort of reflecting here. You said that it has a messy history, and of course, every country has a messy history, but everybody who talks about the Soviet Union, and has studied it the way you have Strobe and you have Leon, and others, and Churchill as well, really puts it sort of aside as something other worldly.

Strobe Talbott: It¹s certainly got something to do with sheer size, and Leon stressed the pointŠ

Ben Wattenberg: Ten time zones.

Strobe Talbott: Yes, eleven I think. Eleven.

Ben Wattenberg: Eleven time zones.

Strobe Talbott: Even now, even after the end of the Soviet Union, it¹s the only country on the face of the earth that straddles two continents. It stretches all the way from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. That means a number of things. Among other things it means inherent strength. There¹s a lot of talk about Russia being weak. I got an e-mail from an otherwise sensible person the other day who called Russia today a nuclear-armed Bangladesh. I mean that¹s, with no disrespect to Bangladesh, that¹s an absurdity because of the sheer size of a place. I think that¹s part of it. Also, how did it get to be so large? Well, it got to be so large in part on the principle that the best defense is a good offense, and expansion, which meant a view in Soviet history, Russian history before that, that the only way to make Russia feel secure was for everybody else to be insecure.

Ben Wattenberg: And who would have believed that now people are talking that Russia would become part of NATO. Is that something that might happen?

Strobe Talbott: Not for a very long time. I mean there¹s been a lot of oversimplification of that. I mean, some people are saying it¹s virtually an ally of the United States today. It ain¹t so, and it isn¹t going to happen for a long time, but it is now a genuine partner of NATO, and that in itself would have been unimaginable. Maybe Leon and you, Ben, are more prescient than I am, or certainly than I was, but when I was schlepping around the Soviet Union in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties, if somebody had come up to me and said, guess what, you know, within fifteen years one of the big non-issues--non-issues, never mind issues--between Russia and the United States is going to be that Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia are about to be allies of NATO and in the same alliance. I mean, you and I went to the Baltic States together in 1986 Ben, which was when they were just beginning to open the doorŠ

Ben Wattenberg: To a conference in Riga.

Strobe Talbott: Right, and it was considered to be a big and unusual deal that we were even allowed to go there, but Moscow allowed us to go there and now that country and it¹s two Baltic neighbors are about to be allies of the United States.

Ben Wattenberg: And I remember this talk, this speech, whatever it was I did, an analysis of global public opinion. It was not only broadcast in Riga, it was broadcast nationwide, and it was not edited. I mean it was the beginning of Glasnost then. You¹re certainly right, no one at that time would have said, you know, well, one of these days Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia are going to be members of NATO andŠ

Leon Aron: Which isŠwhich isŠwhy don¹t we look back every now and then and in order to appreciate what Russia has become?

Ben Wattenberg: Strobe, you mentioned before the phrase, ³the green menace²--green being the color of Islam.

Strobe Talbott: Islam. Not my phrase by the way. It¹s one that you hear Russian¹s use occasionally.

Ben Wattenberg: Right. They are, in the sense that a common adversary yields an alliance; the Russians more so than the United States are anti-Islam. I don¹t want to exactly use that word, but they have had a longstanding dispute with the Muslim world. Is thatŠI mean, am I saying it right?

Strobe Talbott: I¹d put it a little bit differently. I think that Russians have historically felt vulnerable. Now they¹ve felt that vulnerability from all directions, but particularly from the south, which is to say the soft underbelly of the old Russian empire, the USSR, and now Russia itself, and from the east, from China. One reason I think that Vladimir Putin is relatively relaxed about the expansion of NATO is he knows that the Russia faces zero threat from the West. As he thinks about the long term, he has to worry about China, where the population is growing, where there¹s economic dynamism and China¹s cheek-by-jowl with the Russian Far East in Siberia, which are economically moribund and where the population is falling. That¹s a big worry. And the other thing to worry about is radical Islam which is not only squeezing up against Russia in neighboring countries but also, as he sees in Chechnya, has a lot of appeal inside of Russia itself.

BenWattenberg: Leon, what do you make of the fact that Russia is still playing the game with the three axis of evil nations--North Korea, Iran, and Iraq--at a time when we¹re sitting here saying, hey, things are just going onŠ

Leon Aron: Well, againŠ

Ben WAttenberg: Are we doing that to have to cards to play?

Leon Aron: I think so. Don¹t forget that Putin started this flirtation with North Korea with an explicit, or at least seemed to me explicit, purpose of playing a mediator. I¹m the one--one of you, but I can talk to them and I¹m, you know, I can speak and they come to see me and so and so forth. I think this isŠin diplomacy it¹s always good if you can pull it off without aggravating your relationship with both sidesŠit¹s not a bad thing to have. Then Iran is a monetary issue. Iraq is a monetary issue. The problem with Iran is, of course, the money is in the nuclear plant and that is a very, very serious issue, and if Putin overplays it both domestically and with the United States, I think Russia could be in trouble. Another thing you could add to this also, long-term, as Strobe correctly pointed out, Russia is literally stuffing China with weapons. I mean, and that seemed to me so shortsighted and soŠ

Ben Wattenberg: Because some day they may be turned on Russia?

Leon Aron: Precisely.

Strobe Talbott: Well, speaking of shortsighted, go back to Iran, which Leon was just talking about. It is a fact that Iran, and God knows what kind of regime they will have when this happens, is going to reach the day sooner than it would have otherwise of having nuclear-armed ballistic missiles as a result of Russian assistance to those programs, and those missiles are going to be within range of Moscow and Russian cities a lot more than they will be within range of the United States.

Leon Aron: Correct.

Ben Wattenberg: Well, on that sober note. I don¹t want to end on a sober note. I want you to repeat something that you wrote in your book, Strobe, about what didn¹t happen.

Strobe Talbott: Well one of the things I¹ve tried to convey in the book is how it looked and felt at the time that we were going through these various crises, and I remember and I¹m sure you do too, Ben. In December of 1993, Russia had a parliamentary election and out of nowhere came this total maniacal whacko, Vladimir Zuronovsky, who was, you know, an anti-Semite, an expansionist, basically a neo-fascist, and there was a lot of conventional wisdom that Russia was about to go brown, as in brown shirts. Two years later, December of 1995, the Communist scored very, very well in those elections, and there was a lot of conventional wisdom that Yeltsin was going to be swept aside, he was going to be replaced by Ganady Zugonov,, the head of the Communist Party, and Russia was going to go back to being a communist country. Well, that didn¹t happen. There were other worries along the way and, that is, that Yeltsin might pull the plug on democracy altogether and simply not hold an election.

Ben Wattenberg: Well, what about this free press thing? WhyŠjust let me interrupt. Why don¹t you give me a fastŠ?

Strobe Talbott: The press was a lot freer under Yeltsin than it is under Putin and that was one of the reasons to be very cautious before we proclaimed Putin to be a Jeffersonian Democrat.

Ben Wattenberg: All right. Now continue your list of whatŠ

Strobe Talbott: Well, I think that¹s a pretty good list. It didn¹t go brown, didn¹t go fascist. They didn¹t go red in the sense that the Communists didn¹t take over, and I think Leon you probably agree that the Communist Party or the Russian Federation are pretty much a spent force. There are a lot of people who are in it, but they¹re mostly older people. It didn¹t go black, with black being the color of anarchy. It didn¹t dissolve into anarchy and it didn¹t go completely off the rails on democracy. Those are four big things that didn¹t go wrong that certainly could have.

Ben Wattenberg: Okay, on that more optimistic note, let me thank you Leon Aron and Strobe Talbott. And thank you. Please remember to write to us at Think Tank. For Think Tank, I¹m Ben Wattenberg.

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