About a year and a half ago, Mark Ames and I put together a modest book proposal about the history of US meddling in Russian politics.
The story we wanted to tell would have gone back all the way to the start of the Bolshevik Revolution, when America and its western allies militarily intervened in the Russian Civil War on behalf of the proto-Nazi “White” Russians — putting around 15,000 “boots on the ground,” killing and imprisoning Red Army soldiers.
But the core of the story would have focused on the 1990s, when the United States — and particularly the Clinton Administration — intervened in Russia’s domestic affairs to such a profound degree that the word “meddling” doesn’t begin to describe it, at least in the way that people like Rachel Maddow think of “meddling.” It was more of a top-down, colonial relationship between a conquering superpower, and a weak, defeated vassal state. And that’s exactly what Russia was back then: a colonized state.
How totally subservient was Russia to America? Well, consider this: Thanks to recently declassified presidential transcripts, we know that in 1999 Boris Yeltsin called up Bill Clinton to tell him that Vladimir Putin would be his hand-picked presidential successor months before anyone in Russia knew, and all but asked Clinton for his nod of approval.
The shocker in this exchange is that Clinton gives Yeltsin tacit approval to rig an election and put Vladimir Putin in power. I mean, isn’t Russia supposed to be a democracy—and wasn’t Russia’s transformation to democracy supposed to be Clinton’s greatest foreign policy achievement? How can Yeltsin simply anoint his preferred man “the next Russian president in the year 2000”? Well, given that Clinton helped Yeltsin steal the election in 1996, he very well knows how, and he doesn’t mind in the least.
The sad thing is that Yelstin groveling to Clinton and telling him who he was going to install as president, it’s not even all that shocking compared to everything going on at that time.
That’s the thing about today: People don’t remember that all through the 1990s, America meddled in Russia’s politics in just about every way you can imagine: it helped fix elections, flooded the country with untraceable money, secured international aid to help “our guys” stay in power, funded opposition activists, whitewashed horrible human rights abuses...you name it, America did it. Hell, Clinton’s Treasury Department even wrote presidential decrees. They also helped design Russia’s government apparatus and capital markets structures.
It’s hard to imagine a more direct control over a foreign country’s political system — short of a straight-up physical occupation.
As Mark and I wrote:
What today’s foreign policy experts seem to have forgotten is that in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the U.S. government had unparalleled commanding power over Russia. This newly-independent country was deep in debt, begging for aid and loans just to feed its people, and desperate to join the West. The country was at its most vulnerable point since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution — while America, the Cold War victor, was at its geopolitical peak. It was during this brief, freakish moment in history — when the power differential between Washington and Moscow was as extreme as that between colonizer and colonized — that America leveraged its full financial, political, and cultural arsenal to coerce Russia into “transforming” itself according to Washington’s dictates and interests.
America’s interventions made sure that the most extremist neoliberal camp prevailed — and it was a disaster for the Russian people.