From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia
506 pages, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30.
America has dispatched a wide variety of diplomats to Moscow over the years, from Joseph E. Davies in the late 1930s, with his tragicomic level of credulity, to George F. Kennan and his far-sighted wisdom after the war. Davies, who took Stalin’s show trials at face value, was later to write of the dictator: “He gives the impression of a strong mind which is composed and wise. His brown eye is exceedingly kindly—and gentle. A child would like to sit in his lap and a dog would sidle up to him.”
With Trump the history of American delusions about Russia has come full circle. But fortunately, we have the legacy of Kennan’s wisdom on containment, still pertinent in our day.
The term of Michael McFaul, Ambassador to Moscow from 2012 to 2014, was more modest but nonetheless worthy. Unlike many U.S. envoys to Russia, the one President Obama sent was someone who knew the country, not just glancingly but well. McFaul began his acquaintance with Russia as an idealistic academic, saw it both before and after communism, and was involved with Moscow democratic activists early in the new regime.
As a White House adviser he was also a powerful intellectual force behind the “reset” program. Thereafter he was a victim of events. As Ambassador, to his immense frustration he was to witness at first hand the crumbling of that policy under Putin and the birth of the venomously anti-Western Kremlin we see today.
At the start of his time in Russia there was something in him of the missionary spirit previously displayed by Americans in early 20th-century China. By the end, 25 years of intensive contact with Russians at many levels, including with Putin himself, had taken care of that. When he left Moscow in 2014 prematurely and of his own volition, an enlightened Russian said of him: “They hated him not because he was an enemy of Russia but because he had become a friend.” What this meant was that McFaul was someone who knew the country and who minded when, after a decade or so of Russia’s emerging into the world with an expanding mindset, it began withering back, snail-like, into the murk and mendacity of Putin’s Russia.
His account of that dismal progress is detailed and persuasive, with two exceptions. He underestimates the continuity in the intelligence/military community’s reaction to the communist debacle. The new book The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia by Mark Galeotti reminds us of how intimate power and criminality had already become by the Gorbachev years, and of how the transfer to the oligarchic mafia state was effected.
To be a “vor v zakone” (thief within the law, or recognized, semi-official crook) was seen in the later Soviet years as an almost dignified position, with its own rights and customs—and in the Russian mafia today the situation is not dissimilar. Add to that Putin’s hankering after neo-Soviet mind controls and the end of communism begins to resemble, like war for Clausewitz, the continuation of Soviet politics by other means.
Under Yeltsin’s presidency efforts were certainly made, including by McFaul himself, to secure a transfer to representative government and a civil society. But as postwar Iraq and the rise of ISIS were to remind us, in nation-building political cultures can only work with what they have inherited. Russia’s legacy included the residue of seventy years of totalitarian lies, a country steeped in cynicism, and a spy sickness already evident in czarist times.
So when with determined optimism McFaul writes that, “Innate, structural forces did not produce Putin”—maybe because my fifty years of on and off engagement with Russia began earlier—I don’t believe him. Not just that, but my guess is that same inherited strand of resignation, chauvinism, “big man” culture, and inferiority complex will help keep him in power for the foreseeable future.
In McFaul’s favor, I recognize that, unlike me, he was close to the anti-Putin demonstrations of 2011-12, knew some of the leaders, and drew optimism from this period. Yet as Chairman of the Russian Booker Prize for Fiction for years before that period, while I was encouraged by the free-thinking I encountered among intellectuals, the rise of Putinism was severely curtailing any hopes I retained of progress. I doubted whether the reformer Boris Nemtsov, later to be murdered outside the Kremlin walls and whom McFaul knew well, ever stood much of a chance in government. Today we all can see that the 2011-12 protests were a false dawn.
Was it partly our own fault? On the “Western guilt” side of the equation—the puritanical self-flagellation we have seen as European and American writers have fought to pin the blame for Russia’s lost promise on ourselves—McFaul, while remaining sober overall, is less clear than some will like. He is right to reject the idea that Russia’s failures came from outside, but again fails to stress how far corruption, ideological and material, was deep in the blood. One lament is that the West ought to have come up with a Marshall Plan to help Russia through its chaotic Yeltsin period, but what the country’s “thieves within the law” would have made of a deluge of Western cash does not bear thinking about. At any rate, McFaul gives no sign of having thought about it.
That said, there were huge failings of the Western imagination. The U.S. and other governments seriously underestimated the damage to the Russian psyche of its sudden and massive loss of territory, status, and self-respect, with the obvious danger of the revanchist mentality which now dominates both the regime and public opinion. I hate to say anything that risks justifying Putin paranoia, but he had reason to be aggrieved at the duplicitous way NATO expansion was handled under President Clinton, and McFaul should have been more candid about this. I am not sure this was a primary reason for Putin’s abrupt turn from West to East in 2012, when, as McFaul shows, his half-crazed fear of Western-inspired regime change was the defining factor. But give a man like Putin an excuse for feeling aggrieved and you will never hear the end of it.
Where McFaul has a sparklingly clean bill of health is in his warnings about Putin himself. On him, he had no illusions. On his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, he is more opaque. Lavrov could be sly, he admits, but also bonhomous. In McFaul’s years and since, Lavrov has complained bitterly and in public about the years in which Russia was ignored or disrespected. Ignoring Russia, to the extent that we did, was never wise, though disrespect for the Putin team was another matter. The truth is that these were never respectable people.
Lavrov is not just his master’s voice but on occasion a fantastical liar, far more so than his most famous predecessor, the dour and bureaucratically prudent Andrei Gromyko (grim Grom he was called), whom I saw in action as a diplomat in Soviet times. For all Lavrov’s veneer of competence and professionalism, when things get rough, whether on the Syrian or Salisbury poisonings, or the murder of the passengers on the Dutch plane shot down by Russia over Ukraine, a startling brutalism emerges: a shameless mendacity, sarcasm, and vicious innuendo more in the tradition of Andrei Vishinski, chief prosecutor at the Moscow trials. Here is a man who said publicly and with a straight face that after rigging the so-called assassination attempt in Salisbury the British went on to rig the Syrian chemical attacks. Putin himself never quite went that far, but Lavrov had no scruples.
Where McFaul is fascinating is on the period of cohabitation between Medvedev as President with Putin as Prime Minister. Previously inclined to believe that their duet was no more than a put-up job, I see now that things were more complex. There was a real rapport between the U.S. Ambassador and the Russian lawyer President, as well as a mutual determination to make the “reset” work, and not just in arms control. Where I remain puzzled is why Putin did not exercise more of the overall political control he undoubtedly retained, notably over the intelligence and military sectors, to restrain his over-eager temporary President from excessive friendliness with the U.S. Ambassador and Obama himself.
Now that Medvedev has reverted to his role as acolyte and inferior, like Zhou Enlai with Mao Zedong, he dutifully repeats his boss’s falsehoods, notably over the invasion of Ukraine, Syria, and the rest. The contrast between the more civilized operator McFaul and Obama dealt with and the little-sir-echo Medvedev has become today is one more reason for gloom about the future.
McFaul’s descriptions of his first and subsequent meetings with Putin are revealing of the depth of Russia’s problems. Fixing the American with a hard stare, in a few harsh words he made clear that he disliked him as a specialist in the organization of “color” (Maidan-type) revolutions. As Ambassador this dislike was to take the form of gross or petty harassment of McFaul himself and his staff, extending even to children and wives. From the day of his arrival the official media denounced him as an agent of regime change and never let up. “Propaganda works,” McFaul observes. And among conspiracy-minded Russians, he might have added, in thrall to their latest “big man,” it works distressingly well.
Another time, in a summit with Obama, McFaul captures very well indeed Putin’s almost pathological resentment against the West. Almost the entire meeting was taken up with the Russian leader’s complaints: “For each vignette of disrespect or confrontation he told the President [Obama] the date, the place and who was at the meeting.” These obsessions convey better than anything the insecurities and dangerous smallness of the man whom Time magazine, with its kooky media perspective, had named its Person of the Year. Small enough to take satisfaction in keeping the leader of the Western world waiting, including the time he turned up 45 minutes late for a session with Obama in Mexico. “This was a guy with a chip on his shoulder,” McFaul observes.
McFaul rightly underlines the importance of the strategic shift that occurred once Putin returned to power: “Putin blamed America for everything bad in the world and in Russia,” and an obedient media flooded the air with a “barrage of lies,” later hugely amplified on the internet. Weirdly, and with surreal, Gogolian levels of hypocrisy, Putin’s Russia was proclaiming itself spiritually superior to a decadent West, while running a foreign policy based on deceit and cynicism for the benefit of a mafia state.
Relations galloped downhill all through the Ambassador’s two-year tenure in Moscow. The 2011-12 disturbances had embedded themselves in Putin’s psyche and together with the Maidan revolution would never be dislodged. The KGB man’s barroom verity that the United States was behind both, and that next in line was Red Square, lies behind everything he does today.
There are plenty of instructive vignettes in From Cold War to Hot Peace, one of which recounts the attempt by the brand new U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to get on instant terms with the wily old dog Lavrov, by means of a man-to-man, official-free meeting. The result was that Kerry was hung out to dry by Lavrov in a later press conference. I once saw Edmund Muskie make exactly the same mistake with the even older dog, Gromyko, in 1980, and as I write President Trump, God help us, is doing it with Putin too.
That McFaul’s brief and ill-starred stay in Moscow was ended prematurely and at his own request was perhaps for the best: The invasion of Ukraine happened the day he came home. His old hopes for a “reset” he now saw as “illusory and unworkable at least for the foreseeable future.” His sensible recommendations for future policy are not to lunge the other way into across-the-board hostility, but for selective containment plus selective engagement, bolstered where necessary by sanctions and isolation, together with a boosting of NATO’s power. Missing from his discussion, but necessary it seems to me as sanctions bite and Putin gets nowhere with the economy, is a reprise of the old debate on whether a thin or fat Russia (then the USSR) is more dangerous. Personally I am unsure.
Looking back, McFaul asks if it was wrong of the U.S. government to contribute to Russian aggressive defensiveness by its overtly democratizing objectives in Russia. McFaul dismisses the accusation, and so do I. Resentment and paranoia are there all right, though mostly for reasons the Russians have only themselves to blame. Defending himself against charges of naivety, McFaul recalls his prediction of a strong man emerging if reform failed, which in my opinion it was destined to do. Whether this proves to be a return to history or an interregnum he sees as too early to judge. Meanwhile, he claims to remain optimistic, as you feel he must.
McFaul’s analysis of Russia’s changing psychology under Putin is well done, but he could have taken it further. Some thirty years after the end of communism it is bad enough for the country to find itself viewed as a gangsterish state with a GDP half that of the United Kingdom and a population more than double, but that is not the full measure of the country’s tragedy. To that must be added its dwarfing by its formerly indigent eastern neighbor. To think that Chinese students in Moscow University were called “little lemons” (small and bitter) during my time there as a postgraduate in 1962. I don’t think the Russians call them that now, and not for reasons of political correctness.
Little wonder the country to which McFaul has devoted much of his life has relapsed into dangerously atavistic states of mind, whether delusions of grandeur-to-come as a mythological Eurasian colossus, or a mystical Dostoyevskian world spirit. To read of the fascistic lucubrations of the pro-Putin guru Alexander Dugin, or of the postmodern games of Vladislav Surkov, a Kremlin strategist and political playboy for whom truth is definitively dead and cynicism a rightly controlling force, is to understand the seriousness of Russia’s malady. These dark and increasingly powerful forces have been wonderfully portrayed in Black Wind White Snow by Charles Clover, or more recently Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin by a Frenchman, Michel Eltchaninoff.
In any new “reset” in U.S. relations we shall need people like McFaul, who know Russia and Russians. Just how ill-fated the first version was from the word go is symbolized by the mistake over the translation: The word selected by Mrs. Clinton’s team (not McFaul) meant overloaded, an apt description, it turns out, of the West’s post-communist hopes.
While Putin is in power trust, as well as truth, has no meaning. A situation in which Russia is lost in a self-generated cloud of lies and the United States is led by an ignorant braggart lost in his own puerile low cunning leaves little room for hope. All I can add is that to find a way out of the new Hot Peace with Russia we must begin by recognizing that we are in one.