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.