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Once in a great while, a diplomatic memorandum—the outline of a proposed change in policy sent from a foreign service officer to his political masters back in Washington—has momentous impact. The most famous of these is George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” of February 1946, which urged “a long-term patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”
Kennan, who was chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, wrote the 5,000-word memo while debates raged at home over how to deal with the Soviet Union’s turn from wartime ally to Cold War adversary. The memo made a huge dent in this debate when Kennan published a shortened version of it, under the title “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs. (The journal identified the author only as “X,” but word spread that he was Kennan.)
Now a similarly long memo, written nearly 50 years later, in the early days of the post–Cold War era and post-Soviet Russia, raises questions about how the world today might be different if Bill Clinton had heeded it as much as Harry Truman heeded Kennan’s.
The newly discovered memo, written in March 1994 by Wayne Merry, chief of the U.S. Embassy’s internal politics division at the time, didn’t make the same impact as Kennan’s for two reasons. First, Merry did not go public. Second, unlike Kennan’s memo, Merry’s was at odds with U.S. policy and was ignored, then buried, and its author was blackballed, by the policymakers at the time. In fact, it was buried so deeply that it was declassified just last week as the result of a lawsuit filed under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive, a private research firm at George Washington University.
Looking at it today, more than 30 years after the fact, it’s a remarkably prescient document that should prompt several lessons about how to run foreign policy.
Merry’s memo, titled “Whose Russia Is It Anyway: Toward a Policy of Benign Respect,” was written as Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s experiment with democracy and free-market economics was in heightened turmoil. The party of his prime minister, Yegor Gaidar, the architect of his economics policy, had recently lost an election—the result of popular discontent with the policy’s extreme inflation and displacement. Yeltsin mobilized tanks in downtown Moscow to put down an attempted putsch—launched for a variety of motives—in Russia’s Parliament. Yet, to the frustration of specialists in the U.S. Embassy, including Merry, many senior officials back in Washington saw Yeltsin as a still-strong figure and his “shock therapy” economics—which they had been pushing, along with a bevy of academic advisers, many of them from Harvard—as a success.
Merry stressed the urgent need for a course correction:
Democratic forces in Russia are in serious trouble. We are not helping with a misguided over-emphasis on market economics. There is no reason to believe the Russian economy is capable of rapid market reform. There is reason to fear that an intrusive Western effort to alter the economy against the wishes of the Russian people can exhaust the already-diminishing reservoir of goodwill toward America, assist anti-democratic forces, and help recreate an adversarial relationship between Russia and the West.
The West, Merry continued, should focus more on helping Russia develop “workable democratic institutions” and a “non-aggressive external policy.” U.S. interests “are directly tied to the fate of Russian democracy but not to the choices that democracy may make about the distribution of its own wealth” or “the organization of its means of production and finance.”
He went on:
In contemporary American rhetoric, “democracy” and “the market” are treated as almost synonymous terms. … Russians (and most non-Americans) are simply baffled by this vision. … Very, very few Russians impart positive ethical content to market forces, and unfortunately more of these are mafia than economists.
Then came Merry’s harsher indictment of his bosses and their associates:
Sadly, very few of the multitudes of American “advisors” in Russia since the Bolshevik demise acquainted themselves with even the most basic facts of the country whose destiny they propose to shape. As a result, to say that America is wearing out its welcome in Russia is no longer a prediction, it is a descriptive fact. Even the most progressive and sympathetic of Russian officials have lost patience with the endless procession of what they call “assistance tourists” who rarely bother to ask their hosts for an appraisal of Russian needs. … Russians of all political persuasions are also less than charmed by the frequently expressed American attitude that their country is a social-economic laboratory to test academic theories. If there is one thing Russians learned to distrust in 74 years of Socialism, it is economic theory and theorists.
His conclusion:
We are forced to choose: Is our priority in Russia fledgling democracy or market economics? In the years remaining in this century, we cannot have both. … Skeptical as they are of their politicians, Russians for the most part do want their country to be a democracy of some kind. While very few Russians regret the passing of the Cold War or wish to resume an adversarial stance toward the United States, equally few appreciate the missionary zeal or the superior tone which pervade our monologue toward them.
I was the Boston Globe’s Moscow bureau chief from 1992 to 1995, and though I was, of course, unfamiliar with Merry’s memo, reading it now resonates with my memories of that time.
Before going to Moscow, I’d read several accounts of the democratic movements percolating in the final years of the Soviet Union. I was eager to report on how they were faring in the new, explicitly aspiring democratic Russia. Soon after arriving, I called several contacts and asked where I should travel to bear witness. In what cities or towns were mayors or commissioners creating democratic institutions, civic societies, independent parties, or unions?
I heard only long silences on the other end of the telephone. Nobody knew of any such places. It turns out, I soon surmised, no such places existed. Yeltsin and his entourage sincerely wanted to adopt Western freedoms. They permitted the creation of independent newspapers, magazine, and TV stations—several of them as free, and critical of the government, as any media in the West. But the government was still top-down. Yeltsin had no desire to create a party structure or any instrument of power or pressure from the bottom up. Westerners might have helped him understand that such institutions were vital to the forming of a truly democratic society.
Instead, as Merry’s memo charges, the advisers simply helped Yeltsin’s people tear apart their economies. Over the next several years (this was only beginning by the time I left), a nascent middle-class emerged, but many more people saw their savings vanish, their industries torn down, their communities ripped apart. Billboards were erected along Moscow’s main streets, many of them bearing slogans in English. Several of my new Russian friends, even those who spoke perfect English and desired a more Western lifestyle, told me they felt as if their city had been invaded.
Merry was not allowed to send his memo to Washington as an official embassy statement. (“It would give Larry Summers a heart attack,” he was told, Summers being the Treasury Department official most wedded to the shock-therapy policy.) Instead, he filed it on the “dissent channel,” a forum that embassies created during the Vietnam War that let any foreign service officer express his personal view to higher-ups.
State Department higher-ups are required to reply to such missives. Merry’s was dealt with by Jim Steinberg, director of the policy planning staff, who wrote that he found the memo “stimulating” but disputed its critique that the U.S. should emphasize democracy-building over free markets. “There have been free markets without democracy,” Steinberg wrote, “but there have never been democracies without free markets.” True, he went on, because the Soviet Union never had a real economy, but only political authorities making decisions about production and distribution, Russia must first depoliticize markets. However, he argued, “the critical steps” toward this had been taken under Mikhail Gorbachev and were “accelerated”—in fact, were “largely completed”—under Yeltsin and Gaidar.
Steinberg didn’t send his response until a few months after Merry left the Moscow embassy. Merry never saw the response—didn’t know it existed—until recently, when the National Security Archive obtained it, along with Merry’s memo, and showed him a copy.
In a phone conversation with Merry this past Saturday, he told me that Steinberg’s main argument—which most of his Washington colleagues shared—was simply wrong. Gorbachev had taken only tiny steps toward depoliticizing the economy, and they were limited to imports of consumer products; he’d not even attempted any progress in manufacturing or wealth distribution. Yeltsin and Gaidar went a little further in those realms, but the process was not remotely “completed.”
In other words, at the time Merry wrote his memo and Steinberg wrote his reply, the U.S. policy of pushing free markets, on the assumption that Russian politics were ready for them, was still wildly premature. Not only that, Merry warned, persisting in this policy would spawn a backlash. It will “assist Russian extremists to undermine the country’s nascent democracy and will encourage a renewal of Russia’s adversarial stance toward the outside world.”
One cannot draw a straight line from Merry’s critique to the rise of Vladimir Putin, the shutdown of Russian free speech, the revival of oppression, and the invasion of Ukraine. All those things might have happened regardless of U.S. policy. The crushing weight of a thousand years of Russian history can’t be lifted so easily.
I asked Merry if the world would look different today had his advice been taken 31 years ago. He paused and replied, “If we’d been less know-it-all, less ‘we’re from Harvard, so we know how to run your country and you don’t,’ do I think our relations could have developed differently? Yes, I do.”
Washington’s views were so blinkered by the free-market dogma that, as Russians cast their ballots in the election, Vice President Al Gore and Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott flew to Moscow, expecting to throw a party at the embassy celebrating Gaidar’s victory. Gaidar lost badly; Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the most crudely right-wing candidate, won by a wide margin.
“I had told everyone in Strobe’s circle ahead of time that Gaidar was going to get his butt kicked,” Merry recalls. “These people didn’t pass on the word. Strobe and Gore were shocked. They said nobody told them there was any chance this would happen.” In a phone call with Clinton, which Merry listened in on, these top officials even discussed whether they should simply tell Yeltsin to cancel the election results.
Merry was not rewarded for his prescience. After his three years were up in the embassy, he discovered that he was “persona non grata” at the State Department. Merry told me that, even when Secretary of Defense William Perry asked the State Department to loan Merry to the Pentagon so he could work in a special Russia-policy office, Talbott blocked the move. The transfer went through only after Perry appealed the denial to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who approved it. Not long after that job ended, Merry retired from the foreign service.
There are several lessons to the Wayne Merry saga. First, policymakers should not look in a mirror while analyzing other countries; many foreigners do not think, act, or hold the same values or interests as Americans, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Second, while Washington politicians might have broader strategic visions than the specialists toiling on the ground in faraway lands, the specialists’ advice should at least be taken seriously; the strategic vision might be rooted more in dogma than in wisdom; it should at least be reexamined.
Third, informed, well-reasoned criticism from the inside should be encouraged, not brushed aside or punished. The “dissent channel,” through which Merry sent his memo, was set up with this lesson in mind, in the wake of the Vietnam War, to help avoid similar colossal mistakes. But the channel soon became a stigma. Merry recalls being told, early in his career, “If you use it, you will never be promoted again.” Outlets for dissent need to be a natural part of the process, like minority views in intelligence estimates.
These lessons are all the more important now, as the world is a lot more complicated than it was in 1994 and as Donald Trump prepares to reenter the White House.
As we learned from his first term in office, Trump thinks he knows everything about everything; he doesn’t read; he demands that even policy memos be no longer than a page or two; he tends to dismiss those who dispute his assumptions.
We are in a lot of trouble.
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