would improve the Russian economy.
In February, I went over to Strobe’s house one night to see his family and talk about Russia. Strobe told me about a recent meeting he’d had with Richard Nixon, in which the former President had urged us to support Yeltsin heavily. The $24 billion assistance package President Bush had announced the previous spring hadn’t done that, because the international financial institutions wouldn’t release the money until Russia had restructured its economy. We needed to do something now.
In early March, Yeltsin and I agreed to meet on April 3 and 4 in Vancouver, Canada. On March 8, Richard Nixon called on me at the White House to urge me personally to support Yeltsin. After a brief visit with Hillary and Chelsea, in which he reminded them that he was raised a Quaker and that his daughters, like Chelsea, had gone to Sidwell Friends School, he got down to business, saying I would be remembered as President more for what I did with Russia than for my economic policy. Later that night, I called Strobe to report on the Nixon conversation and to stress again how important it was that we do something at Vancouver to help Russia, with a high-impact follow-up at the annual G-7 summit in Tokyo in July. All through March, as I got updates from our foreign policy team and Larry Summers and his assistant David Lipton at Treasury, I pushed them to think bigger and do more. Meanwhile, in Moscow, the Duma was reducing Yeltsin’s power and endorsing the fruitless inflationary policies of the Russian Central Bank. On March 20, Yeltsin struck back with a speech announcing a public referendum for April 25 to determine whether he or the Duma ran the country; until then, he said, his presidential decrees would remain in effect, no matter what the Duma did. I watched the speech on one of two television sets in my private dining room off the Oval Office. The other TV was showing the NCAA tournament basketball game between the Arkansas Razorbacks and St. John’s University. I had a dog in both hunts.
My entire foreign policy team and I had a vigorous debate about how I should respond to Yeltsin’s speech. They all cautioned restraint, because Yeltsin was stretching the limits of his constitutional authority, and because he might lose. I disagreed. Yeltsin was in the fight of his life against the old Communists and other reactionaries. He was going to the people with a referendum. And I didn’t care about the risk of losing—I reminded our team that I had lost plenty of times myself. I had no interest in hedging my bets, and instructed Tony Lake to draft a statement of strong support. When he presented it to me, I made it even stronger and gave it to the press. In this case, I went with my gut instincts and placed a bet that Russia would stick with Yeltsin, and stay on the right side of history. My optimism was bolstered by Arkansas’ come-from-behind victory in the ball game.
Finally, in March, I got an assistance program I could support: $1.6 billion in direct aid to help Russia stabilize its economy, including money to provide housing for decommissioned military officers, positive work programs for now underemployed and frequently unpaid nuclear scientists, and more assistance in dismantling nuclear weapons under the recently enacted Nunn-Lugar program; food and medicine for those suffering from shortages; aid to support small business, independent media outlets, nongovernmental organizations, political parties, and labor unions; and an exchange program to bring tens of thousands of students and young professionals to the United States. The aid package was four times what the previous administration had allocated and three times what I had originally recommended. Although a public poll said that 75 percent of the American people were opposed to giving Russia more money, and we were already in a hard fight for the economic plan, I felt we had no choice but to press ahead. America had spent trillions of dollars in defense to win the Cold War; we couldn’t risk reversal over less than $2 billion and a bad poll. To the surprise of my staff, the congressional leaders, including the Republicans, agreed with me. At a meeting I convened to push the plan, Senator Joe Biden, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, strongly endorsed the aid package. Bob Dole came around on the argument that we didn’t want to foul up the post–Cold War era the way the victors in World War I had done. Their shortsightedness contributed mightily to World War II, in which Dole had served so heroically. Newt Gingrich was passionately in favor of helping Russia, saying it was a “great defining moment” for America and we had to do the right thing. As I told Strobe, Newt was trying to “out-Russia” me, which I was only too happy to have him do.
When Yeltsin and I got together on April 3, the meeting began a little awkwardly, with Yeltsin explaining that he had to walk a fine line between receiving U.S. assistance to help Russia’s transition to democracy and looking as if he was under America’s thumb. When we got to the details of our aid package, he said he liked it but needed more for housing for the military people he was bringing home from the Baltic states, many of whom were actually living in tents. After we resolved that issue, Yeltsin abruptly went on the offensive, demanding that I repeal the Jackson-Vanik amendment, a 1974 law tying U.S. trade to free immigration from Russia, and end the observance of Captive Nations Week, which highlighted Soviet domination of countries like Poland and Hungary that were now free. Both these laws were largely symbolic, without real impact on our relations, and I couldn’t expend the political capital to change them and at the same time succeed in getting real help to Russia. After the first session, my people worried that I’d let Yeltsin harangue me the way Khrushchev had hectored Kennedy in their famous meeting in Vienna in 1961. They didn’t want me to look weak. I wasn’t worried about that, because the historical analogy was flawed. Yeltsin wasn’t trying to make me look bad as Khrushchev had done to Kennedy; he was trying to make himself look good against enemies at home who were trying to do him in. In the week before our summit, they had tried to impeach him in the Duma. They had failed, but the motion got a lot of votes. I could take a little bombastic posturing if it helped to keep Russia on the right road.
In the afternoon, we agreed on a way to institutionalize our cooperation, with a commission headed by Vice President Gore and Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. The idea was developed by Strobe and Georgi Mamedov, the Russian deputy foreign minister, and it worked better than any of us could have imagined, thanks largely to the consistent and concentrated efforts made over the years by Al Gore and his Russian counterparts in working through a host of difficult, contentious problems. On Sunday, April 4, we met in a more formal setting to discuss security issues, with Yeltsin and his advisors sitting across the table from me and mine. As before, Yeltsin began aggressively, demanding that we change our arms control positions and open American markets to Russian products like satellite rocket launchers without requiring export controls that would prohibit Russian sales of military technology to America’s adversaries like Iran and Iraq. With the help of our hard-nosed expert, Lynn Davis, I hung tough on export controls and rebuffed the arms control demands by referring them to our staffs for further study.
The atmosphere brightened when we moved on to economics. I described the economics package as “cooperation,” not “assistance,” then asked Lloyd Bentsen to outline the proposals we would make to the G-7 in Tokyo. Yeltsin became alarmed when he realized that we couldn’t get him any money before the April 25 referendum. Though I couldn’t give Boris the $500 million check he wanted, at the press conference following our final session I made it plain that a lot of money was coming, because the United States supported Russia’s democracy, its reforms, and its leader. I left Vancouver with more confidence in Yeltsin and a better understanding of the magnitude of his challenges and his visceral determination to overcome them. And I liked him. He was a big bear of a man, full of apparent contradictions. He had grown up in primitive conditions that made my childhood look like a Rockefeller’s, and he could be crude, but he had a fine mind capable of grasping the subtleties of a situation. He would attack one minute and embrace the next. He seemed by turns coldly calculating and genuinely emotional, petty and generous, mad at the world and full of fun. Once when we were walking through my hotel together, a Russian journalist asked him if he was happy with our meeting. He responded quickly, “Happy? One cannot be happy outside the presence of a beautiful woman. But I am satisfied.” As everyone knows, Yeltsin had a fondness for vodka, but, by and large, in all our dealings he was alert, well prepared, and effective in representing his country. Compared with the realistic alternatives, Russia was lucky to have him at the helm. He loved his country, loathed communism, and wanted Russia to be both great and good. Whenever anyone made a snide remark about Yeltsin’s drinking, I was reminded of what Lincoln allegedly said when Washington snobs made the same criticism of General Grant, by far his most aggressive and successful commander in the Civil War: “Find out what he drinks, and give it to the other generals.”
When I got back to Washington, I increased the aid package again, proposing $2.5 billion for all the former Soviet states, with two-thirds going to Russia. On April 25, a large majority of Russian voters supported Yeltsin, his policies, and his desire for a new Duma. After a little more than one hundred days in office, we had made great strides in bolstering Yeltsin and Russian democracy. Unfortunately, the same could not be said about our efforts to end the slaughter and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. In 1989, as the Soviet Union crumbled and communism’s demise in Europe accelerated, the question of what political philosophy would replace it was being answered in different ways in different countries. The westernmost part of the former Soviet empire plainly preferred democracy, a cause championed for decades by immigrants to the United States from Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the Baltic states. In Russia, Yeltsin and other democrats were fighting a rear-guard action against Communists and ultra-
