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teen-nineties as a period of unremitting chaos, in
which Western partners tried to force their advan-
tages, demanding that Russia swallow everything
from the eastward expansion of nato to the inva-
sion of its Slavic allies in the former Yugoslavia.
This is a common narrative, but it ignores some
stubborn facts. The West welcomed Russia into
the G-8 economic alliance. The violence in the
Balkans was the worst in Europe since the end of
the Second World War and without intervention
would likely have dragged on. And Russian secu-
rity concerns were hardly the only issue at stake
with respect to the expansion of nato; Poland,
Czechoslovakia, and other countries in the region
were now sovereign and wanted protection.
“It just felt to me grotesquely unfair, if that word
can be used in geopolitics, that yet again the Cen-
tral Europeans were going to be screwed,” Strobe
Talbott, Bill Clinton’s leading adviser on Russia and
the region, said. “To tell them they had to live in a
security limbo because the Russians would have
hurt feelings and be frightened just didn’t hold wa-
ter.” Nevertheless, American politicians did worry
about how reordering the economic and securi-
ty arrangements of Europe would affect a fallen
power and would-be partner. Clinton and his ad-
visers were aware that reactionary political forces
in Russia—the so-called “red-brown coalition” of
diehard Communists and resurgent nationalists—
viewed the United States as exploitative and tri-
umphalist and hoped to gain control of the state.
In 1996, during a summit meeting in Moscow,
Clinton went for an early-morning run with Talbott
in the Sparrow Hills, near Moscow State Universi-
ty. Clinton had known Talbott since they were stu-
dents at Oxford, and confided his anxiety. He did
not regret the expansion of nato or the decision,
at last, to battle Serbian forces in Bosnia. But he
knew that he was making Yeltsin’s political life ex-
cruciatingly difficult.
“We keep telling ol’ Boris, ‘O.K., now, here’s what
you’ve got to do next—here’s some more shit for
your face,’ ” Clinton told Talbott as they ran. “And
that makes it real hard for him, given what he’s up
against and who he’s dealing with.”
Earlier that year, Yeltsin had summoned Talbott.
“I don’t like it when the U.S. flaunts its superiority,”
he told him. “Russia’s difficulties are only tempo-
rary, and not only because we have nuclear weap-
ons but also because of our economy, our culture,
our spiritual strength. All that amounts to a legiti-
mate, undeniable basis for equal treatment. Rus-
sia will rise again! I repeat: Russia will rise again.”
When the 1996 election season began, Yeltsin
was polling in the single digits. Much of the country
held him responsible for economic measures that
seemed to help only those close to Kremlin power.
For millions, reform—including the “shock thera-
py” pushed by Western advisers and politicians—
meant a collapse in basic services, hyperinflation,
corruption, kleptocratic privatization, and an eco-
nomic downturn as severe as the Great Depres-
sion. Most Russians blamed not the corrosion of
the old system but, rather, the corruptions of the
new. Demokratiya (democracy) was popularly re-
ferred to as dermokratiya (shit-ocracy). Yeltsin,
benefitting from the support of both the oligarchs
and the International Monetary Fund, managed to
eke out a victory against his Communist oppo-
nent, but he continued to drink heavily, despite a
history of heart attacks, and, in his final years in
power, was often a sorry, inebriated spectacle.
On New Year’s Eve, 1999, Yeltsin appeared on
national television sitting in front of a Christmas
tree. Looking blocky and moribund, he said that he
was resigning. “I am sorry that many of our dreams
failed to come true,” he said. “I am sorry that I did
not live up to the hopes of people who believed
that we could, with a single effort, a single strong
push, jump out of the gray, stagnant, totalitarian
past and into a bright, wealthy, civilized future. I
used to believe that myself.”
A man who had resisted a coup eight years
earlier no longer had the endurance for office or
the political imagination to advance the cause. “I
have done all I could,” he said. “A new generation
is coming.” With that, he appointed as his succes-
sor Vladimir Putin, a relatively obscure intelligence
agent who had been accelerated through the
ranks because he had proved himself disciplined,
shrewd, and, above all, loyal to his bosses.
One of Putin’s first
decrees was to protect
Yeltsin from future
prosecution.
One of Putin’s first decrees was to protect
Yeltsin from future prosecution. Then he set out
to stabilize the country and put it on a course of
traditional Russian autocracy. “As Yeltsin started
to withdraw, the old system reconsolidated, and
Putin finalized this regression,” Andrei Kozyrev,
the foreign minister between 1990 and 1996,
said. “The fundamental problem was an inability
to complete the economic and political reforms,
and so we slipped back into confrontation with the
West and nato.”
Putins World
Putin’s resentment of the West, and his corre-
sponding ambition to establish an anti-Western
conservatism, is rooted in his experience of de-
cline and fall—not of Communist ideology, which
was never a central concern of his generation, but,
rather, of Russian power and pride. Putin, who was
born in 1952, grew up in Leningrad, where, during
the Second World War, Nazi troops imposed a
nine-hundred-day siege that starved the city. His
father was badly wounded in the war. Putin joined
the K.G.B. in 1975, when he was twenty-three, and
was eventually sent to East Germany.
Posted in one of the grayest of the Soviet satel-
lites, Putin entirely missed the sense of awakening
and opportunity that accompanied perestroika,
and experienced only the state’s growing feck-
lessness. At the very moment the Berlin Wall was
breached, in November, 1989, he was in the base-
ment of a Soviet diplomatic compound in Dresden
feeding top-secret documents into a furnace. As
crowds of Germans threatened to break into the
building, officers called Moscow for assistance,
but, in Putin’s words, “Moscow was silent.”
Putin returned to Russia, where the sense of
post-imperial decline persisted. The West no
longer feared Soviet power; Eastern and Central
Europe were beyond Moscow’s control; and the
fifteen republics of the Soviet Union were all going
their own way. An empire shaped by Catherine the
Great and Joseph Stalin was dissolving.
In Moscow, Western reporters could arrange
visits to crumbling nuclear-weapons sites, once
secret underground bunkers, and half-empty pris-
on camps. The most forbidding commissars of the
Soviet Union—leaders of the K.G.B., the Army, and
the Communist Party—failed in an attempt to pull
off a counter-revolutionary coup d’état, in August,
1991, and were locked away in a notorious prison
called the Sailor’s Rest. Other high-ranking loyal-
ists, refusing the judgment of the new order, ad-
ministered justice for themselves. The head of the
Ministry of Internal Affairs, knowing that he was
about to be arrested, wrote a note (“I lived honest-
ly all my life”), shot his wife, shoved the barrel of a
revolver into his mouth, and pulled the trigger.
For Westerners caught up in post-Cold War tri-
umphalism, it was easier to take note of the new
liberties than of the new anxieties, which were
profound for millions of Russians. The fall of the
imperial state meant the loss of two million square
miles of territory, a parcel larger than India. Tens of
millions of ethnic Russians now found themselves
“abroad.” Amid newfound freedoms of expression,
travel, religion, and association, there was also a
palpable sense of disorientation, humiliation, and
drift.
In speeches and interviews, Putin rarely men-
tions any sense of liberation after the fall of Com-
munism and the Soviet Union; he recalls the nine-
Putin revealed his distrust for an open system
almost immediately. He saw a state that had be-
come barely functional, and he set about restoring
its authority the only way he knew how: manually,
TRUMP, PUTIN, AND THE NEW COLD WAR
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