Nations, friends and foes, spy on each other. They always have; they always will. And if things had gone differently in the New Russia–the way everyone assumed they would when Boris Yeltsin buried the communists in 1996–last week’s spy-versus-spy games in Washington could have been dismissed with business-as-usual regret. But things haven’t turned out that way. Russian espionage in the United States is at cold-war levels–and so now are the decibel levels. A day after the FBI nabbed Gusev, the Boris Yeltsin the United States had come to know and love–the one who got up on a tank to stand down a coup in 1991–was nowhere to be seen. Instead, a bloated and bellicose Russian president had traveled to Beijing so the two countries could make a crude point to Bill Clinton: you are not the only kid on the block with a nuclear button in his pocket.
For the United States, the biggest dangers as the year 2000 arrives are supposed to be homegrown–guns in schools, not nuclear-tipped missiles thousands of miles away. The dangers from abroad are supposed to be different now, diminished: “rogue” nations like Iraq or North Korea that must be contained lest they do something crazy. Yeltsin’s blunt outburst last week, and the cuddling with China, a rising power with which Washington’s relations are perpetually tense, brought those assumptions into question.
Yeltsin had objected vehemently to Clinton’s most pointed criticism yet of Russia’s bloody war in the breakaway region of Chechnya. The president, in what White House officials insisted later was a slip of the tongue, had said Russia “will pay a heavy price for its actions in Chechnya.” In his response, Yeltsin seemed to be channeling Nikita (“We will bury you”) Khrushchev. “It seems he has forgotten,” Yeltsin said of his erstwhile friend “Bill,” “that Russia has a full arsenal of nuclear weapons.” Jiang Zemin, the communist leader in Beijing, had thrown his arms around Yeltsin and backed the Russian’s ruthless stomping of Chechnya 100 percent. Coincidentally, the very next day the United States indicted Los Alamos lab scientist Wen Ho Lee on 59 counts of illegally removing highly classified data. Lee was not charged with espionage, but the indictment alleged he had stripped sensitive data from Los Alamos computers “with the intent to secure an advantage for a foreign power.”
The blast-from-the-past, tit-for-tat quality to the atmospherics last week was unmistakable. The question for a flush, content America was: would they last? The answer, as Clinton administration officials were quick to argue, is probably no. If the government proves that Lee was somehow part of a broader and damaging Chinese espionage campaign, relations with Beijing will suffer. But for the moment Washington has just invited China into the World Trade Organization, part of a quietly successful attempt to stabilize relations after the disastrous bombing of Beijing’s Belgrade embassy last spring. And Russia, for all of Yeltsin’s blustering, is a nation in increasingly desperate straits, a “great power” only by dint of its (rapidly aging ) nuclear arsenal. “My idea of a cold-war mood,” said one senior Clinton administration official last week, “is a near-nuclear confrontation over access to Berlin. The good old days had moments that really do not compare to what we are experiencing now.”
It was a fair point. But it was not entirely reassuring. The Boris Yeltsin era, as the grim Russian operation in Chechnya demonstrates, is not ending the way anyone in Washington had expected. Capitalism and democracy prevailed in Russia’s 1996 election, and back then anything seemed possible. Moscow’s newly privatized economy was poised for growth. Clinton habitually referred to the United States and Russia as “partners.” The administration wanted to pursue an ambitious arms-control agenda–getting one pending treaty ratified, then moving on to deeper cuts in each nation’s arsenal.
That moment now seems very long ago. Clinton undercut his rhetorical boosterism in Russia by insisting on the expansion of NATO, the West’s military alliance. No matter how much administration officials like Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott tried to soothe fears that the expansion was aimed at Moscow, for many Russians the message was unmistakable: you say we’re your partners, but you’re treating us like enemies. Russia’s economic collapse, though driven by mistakes and corruption at home, fueled still further mistrust. To many Russians, Western-style economic reform had been no different from what they’d seen in the past: well-connected Kremlin cronies got rich, and everyone else got fleeced.
Moscow, like the United States, is now in the midst of a political year. Elections for Parliament will be held Dec. 19, followed by a six-month sprint to see who succeeds Yeltsin as president. Given the recent history between the United States and Russia, it’s no surprise that Moscow is now defiantly deaf to Washington’s Chechnya complaints. Three months ago it appeared that Yeltsin’s enemies were going to win the next presidential election. In the Kremlin, the idea that Yeltsin and his inner circle might be held accountable by a successor regime for any alleged corruption became a major concern. Today Moscow cynics believe the war in Chechnya, coming just three years after Russia’s last engagement there ended in a defeat, was a desperate measure to create a vehicle on which a pro-Yeltsin candidate could ride to power.
If that was the calculation, it has worked brilliantly. Three months into the war, a frustrated population strongly backs Yeltsin’s latest prime minister, Vladimir Putin, and the ruthless campaign he has prosecuted. Last week Moscow seemed on the brink of retaking the capital, Grozny. On Tuesday Russian commandos and paratroopers stormed into the key rebel stronghold of Urus-Martan after a 10-hour artillery assault. Witnesses described “trenches full of dead Chechen fighters.”
For the United States, how to deal with Russia’s behavior in Chechnya is the issue of the moment. Critics of the Clinton administration, including Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush, have said all aid to Moscow should be cut off if the barbarism doesn’t end. But administration officials are uneasy with that approach. For one thing, it would further enflame Moscow at a time when other, arguably more important parts of the U.S.-Russian agenda are already troubled–in particular, the arms-control deals that Washington dearly wants enacted.
By the end of last week, both sides had lowered their voices. Putin said Russia had no desire to be isolated, and Clinton officials privately reiterated that they want another pending IMF loan to proceed. But the bigger problem for the United States, and the world, is that Chechnya is a bloody symptom of Moscow’s deeper ills. Russia is a fiercely proud former empire in the midst of a historic decline. If Boris Yeltsin’s political heirs do not somehow arrest that decline–with some creative assistance from the West–chaos beckons. That’s what may await Bill Clinton’s successor. It won’t be the cold war. But it will be very, very dangerous.
