Maybe There Just Weren't Enough Good Russians

E. Wayne Merry, a senior associate at the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, was chief domestic political analyst at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow 1991-94
 

Ten years ago this Sunday the Soviet Communist leadership stopped shooting itself in the foot and aimed for the heart. To the world's amazement, "people power" faced down state terror in the most unlikely of places, Moscow.

The United States was caught completely off guard. Before leaving for duty in Moscow, I had been told in Washington to expect a fairly boring tour. All the really important changes had already occurred: Mikhail Gorbachev had pushed the system as far as it could go; there would be years of consolidation and drift.

It wasn't boring early on Aug. 19, 1991, when a Moscow policeman stopped me near the embassy gate to relay what he had just heard on the radio: Gorbachev overthrown by an "extraordinary committee" of the Soviet leader's closest associates. The policeman added, "I am afraid. Very." That fear permeated the forces deployed by the coup plotters during the next three days--police, KGB and military--reflecting the timidity and guilt at the apex of this desperate effort to preserve the crumbling edifice of Soviet power. Within hours, we told Washington that the navy and air force were standing aside, while the ground units sent into Moscow were confused and deeply troubled that they might be ordered to fire on their countrymen. We assessed the coup as very uncertain.

Then-President Bush used an impromptu press conference in Maine to condemn the putsch, saying, "Coups can fail." Those words sent the right message to the conspirators and to Gorbachev. Boris Yeltsin and his supporters then knew the United States was not a party to the coup and not prepared to be. Bush also put the brakes on some allied governments prepared to welcome a return of Cold War "stability."

It was just as well that the West sat on its hands, for the conspirators quickly showed themselves as inept as they were shallow. Unable to effectively command the forces they had deployed, the drama ended as farce.

The next days were unalloyed triumph for Russians who had fought, not for a Soviet restoration, but for the resurrection of Russia from a system they also considered to be an evil empire. As the Soviet statues came down and the tricolor flags replaced the hammer and sickle, most Russians hoped to live at last in a "normal" country. Their admiration and friendship for the U.S. were sky-high.

A decade later, the hopes have turned to ashes. Most of the fault is Russian: failures of leadership plus a lack of understanding of the rule of law and basic economics and of the need for compromise. Perhaps, as one leading reformer told me at the time, there simply were not enough good people for all the pressing tasks of transformation.

The Russian side was not short of vision but after decades of Soviet mismanagement, nobody knew what to do.

Sadly, many Western "experts" were quite certain they did know and relished a vast social laboratory for their theories. Like Soviet central planners before them, there were no qualms about experimenting on human beings, though one might have thought U.S. policymakers would have asked whether a country not yet familiar with double-entry bookkeeping was a good candidate for post-Keynesian economics.

There was much Western rhetoric about a post-Cold War partnership with Russia, but the United States just could not resist achieving its maximum Cold War agenda--and expanding it--while Russia was weak.

In this respect, America proved quite unexceptional as a great power as it carved out traditional spheres of influence to Russia's west and south and then professed outrage when Moscow found common purpose with the likes of China and Iran.

The "Cold Peace" that Yeltsin warned of is now reality, while Russia is led by a man who believes restoring great power status is more important than dealing with the health and demographic crises threatening the integrity of the Russian nation.

Ten years after those optimistic summer days, the irony is bitter. Then, Russia was largely cut off from the outside world, but Russians sensed sympathy and solidarity from the West. Now, Russia is more open and engaged with the world than at any time in its history but feels increasingly isolated and under siege.

The saddest refrain is always "what might have been."