Whose Russia Was It Anyway? Wayne Merry, Chief Political Analyst at the Embassy in Moscow (1990-1994), Talks with ACURA

Carden: Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I do want to talk about your now famous dissent cable, but there’s another cable—one I’ve come to think of as the cable before the cable—and this is the one that you refer to in a nearly 300 page oral history conducted by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (ADST) in 2010…

Merry: The ADST does hundreds of oral histories with former members of the foreign service, of which I’m only one. It’s a great resource for students or archivists or people who are interested in anything involving American foreign policy. And they’re all online…

Carden: It’s a great resource. So during that interview, you discussed a cable that you sent regarding the Russian elections that were being held in December of ’93, and you had titled it ‘Russian Election Countdown: A Grim Prognosis.’  In it, you went against the predictions of a lot of people in Washington by predicting that the liberals, the party of Yegor Gaidar which was somewhat misleading called ‘Russia’s Choice,’ were not going to do as well as people had expected. And that prediction didn’t really win you a lot of friends in Washington—but you were right. And you have said that Washington never forgives the bearer of bad news, especially when they’re proven right. So if you don’t mind, could you talk about that cable and what was going on in Russia at the time? You seemed to see things that other people didn’t.

Merry: Well, let me be very clear. At the embassy I was not only a commentator and an analyst, but I was also the supervisor of a team of commentators and analysts. There were almost a dozen in what was called political/internal, and they were very, very talented, hard working people. So I had two jobs. One, I was their editor, and second, I was supposed to be the Embassy’s chief analyst of Internal Russian Political Affairs. I also had the job of being the ambassador’s speechwriter, a job I got under Bob Strauss [Ambassador to Russia 1991-1992], but kept under Tom Pickering [Ambassador to Russia 1993-1996].

I certainly do not wish to claim any kind of, “this was all me,” because in point of fact, much of the legwork that showed up in the things I wrote was done by other people. This was my second tour in Moscow and the thing I disliked about it was that I was a prisoner of my desk, whereas during my first assignment in Moscow 10 years earlier, I was out on the streets and out traveling around the Soviet Union all the time—and I certainly enjoyed that more. 

But our role as I saw it was to tell Washington what Washington did not want to hear. And that’s my view of the role of the political section in any American embassy anywhere. 

I think the mentality that Washington had about Russia in the early 1990s was very similar to what we saw a decade later with our mentality toward Iraq. We sent over a lot of people who didn’t speak a word of Arabic, didn’t know anything about the history of the Iraqi Baath party or anything like that. But they had a program to carry out: the neoconservative program. Well, in the early nineties, Washington had the same basic problem, but with neoliberals.

Now, certainly where I was working in the American Embassy and certainly in the political section and even most certainly in the political internal section, everybody spoke Russian. 

We had a lot of people who had what George Kennan used to call ‘Russian mud’ on our shoes. But most of what Washington was relying on was the work and the reporting of people who did not have Russian mud on their shoes. 

I knew Kennan a little bit when I was in graduate school at Princeton, and he complained about how when he was in the State Department, he had all these people who had read Soviet literature—they’d read everything Lenin had ever published, for instance—but they didn’t understand why you had to stand in line to buy bread because they’d never done it. They had never had Russian mud on their shoes. And he was a firm believer that you needed to have both the textbook and you had to have that feeling. 

And we did, particularly my team did. It was my sixth year in Moscow overall, so I had quite a bit of Russian mud on my shoes. And fundamentally, my job, in my view, and I’ve since been very clear about this, was to tell Washington what it didn’t want to hear. 

And what it didn’t want to hear was that its program was not working and that its clients, the people that it spoke with, like Yegor Gaidar [a liberal, pro-Washington politician, who served as acting and deputy Prime Minister 1992-1994 and finance minister during “shock therapy”], were fine men in many respects, but were out of touch with their own people.

They didn’t talk to Russians, they talked to Americans. The events of 1992 and 1993 had alienated a great mass of the Russian population from its government, starting with Yeltsin. Yeltsin still had a fair amount of residual charisma and popularity, but his team were made up of people that most Russians either didn’t know about or didn’t care about, or if they did know about them, didn’t like them. 

A lot of this reflected the events that culminated in the violence of late September and early October of 1993, from the 21st of September onward, when Yeltsin dissolved the legislature, which he had no authority to do, and terminated negotiations on a new constitution, which I thought was totally unnecessary.

I thought that Yeltsin’s dissolution of the legislature was the result of frustration, impatience and bad advice and was a mistake. And it was a mistake because it would inevitably lead to the street violence that took place on Sunday, the 3rd of October, and Monday the 4th, the day of the actual shootout. This was something that almost nobody forgave Yeltsin for bringing to that point. 

And there was going to be a price for that on election day in December. And there was also going to be a price for something else, “shock therapy”, which brought about a collapse of working-class and middle-class living standards in urban Russia. And I don’t exaggerate, I mean, between when the shooting stopped in early October and when the elections took place in the middle of December, if you were blue collar or essentially lower white collar worker in urban Russia, your living standards just went to hell. 

And this was after two years of very, very difficult economic circumstances under Gorbachev. And so here the Russians had just come through all this and they thought, okay, now we’re going to have a new constitution, we’re going to have a new legislature, we’re going to have elections, everything’s going to be fine. 

And they just had the bottom yanked out from their normal living standards. 

Carden: I think that a lot of that is still not really understood in the United States. In the late 1990s, the scholar Stephen F. Cohen wrote in his account of that era, Failed Crusade, that,

 …in evaluating the economic and social consequences of reform in the nineties, Russia’s own scholars reach for analogies: one points to the devastation of the Second World War…still another compares them to the estimated destruction of a medium level nuclear attack…Three out of four people had to grow their own food survive, though Russia is predominantly urban.. millions of children no longer attended school…Male life expectancy plunged to less than 60 years, about what it was at the end of the 19th century.” 

Does that track with what you saw?

Merry: We had, I remember a meeting, a discussion, an argument about this at the embassy with the people who were pushing shock therapy. And a point I made then is one that I look back on and I still think, why didn’t somebody listen to this? I argued that you don’t manufacture a collapse of working and middle class living standards in the run up to a general election. You do it afterwards. I still am appalled that they would deliberately manufacture a collapse of living standards in the weeks leading up to this general election. 

And not too surprisingly, they got their butts kicked. 

I mean, Gaidar’s party came in the low double digits. The person who came in first was [far right leader] Zhirinovsky. I didn’t see that until close to the end. And I figured out afterwards what had happened, basically, whether it was on the far right or on the far left, everybody who got votes were the people who were rejecting the American plan. I mean, if there’s anybody who lost, it was us, it was our program. 

Carden: And the Americans who seemed to be the biggest promoters or even the planners behind shock therapy are pretty clear about what their ultimate aim seemed to be. And here I’m quoting a Harvard historian who wrote that “it was desirable for Russia to keep on disintegrating until nothing remained of its institutional structures.”  Another one said,  “A successful reform program must …aim at destroying [Russia’s] institutions.” 

You mentioned in the 2010 Oral History with ASDT that there was a link with several people associated with the Harvard Institute for International Development, and the main person in the US government overseeing the economic program was Larry Summers, who himself had links to Harvard.

Could you expand on that for people who aren’t familiar with the group that came to be known as ‘the Harvard Boys’?

Merry: Well, keep in mind I was watching this from a distance.

I mean, I kept hearing about various people at Harvard, various people at Treasury, and these people would show up in Moscow, mostly people I’d never heard of, but certainly this was an ideologically-driven program and much of it had to do with what was for a long time called the Washington Consensus, which is a neoliberal program of macroeconomic stabilization which they pushed aggressively. They thought: how can we force this on countries that are coming out of socialism? 

To be fair, much of it actually worked rather well in Poland. But one of the things that people never seem to understand is that Poland is Poland. East Germany didn’t behave like Poland, and certainly Russia was not Poland. But a lot of this was fundamentally driven by personal relationships between a relative handful of people at Harvard and Washington, some of them at the Treasury, some of them in the IMF, and their counterparts in Moscow who were delighted to be treated by all these big shots from Washington as essentially the saviors of Russia, as the builders of the new Russia.

Essentially, when they would go to Cambridge, Massachusetts, they would be treated as heroes. Whereas when they got back to Russia, a lot of people wanted to essentially string ’em up.

Carden: It seems in the Nineties what arose within the US foreign policy establishment was a cult of “civil society” — in other words, this idea that it was our duty and right to pick the winners and losers within other countries’ political systems. 

Strobe Talbott, then serving as the number two man at State was also Clinton’s principal “Russia hand,” and he wrote in his memoirs that,

…we invested a lot of our Bilateral aid program in trying to help Russian NGOs, independent media outlets and local reformers change the bad habits of the past and put in place the institutions of a modern society, economy and political culture.”

Well, that didn’t turn out so well. And in reading your dissent cable, it seemed you knew that that sort of thing was beyond our capabilities. Was there a kind of overemphasis or focus on engaging Russian civil society—on picking the winners and losers of the internal Russian debates in those years? 

Merry: Yeah, and I would also ask: To what end? What I argued then and now is that the interests of the United States were reflected in how Russia would conduct itself as a great power and how it would be able to perform in terms of achieving respectability with its own population. 

Because keep in mind, this was still a very, very iffy period. 

People had been going through extraordinarily challenging periods during which little old ladies were out on the street selling their family heirlooms so that they could raise enough money for their funerals. I remember a number of times I talked with elderly ladies who had no family left, who had no income left. They had a pension that had been turned into dust thanks to inflation–and what they really were trying to get was such and such number of rubles so that the local priests would bury them properly—but inflation would just chew that to nothing. 

Carden: Would I be wrong in assuming that encounters like that, perhaps even multiple encounters like that, played some role in motivating you to write the dissent cable…

Merry: Well, one of the things is, I was, and still am, a very dedicated urban walker. And in my first three years in Moscow, I actually had published some walking tours of historic Moscow for people in the embassy. So I became known as somebody out walking around all it. I didn’t have a car in Moscow. My own form of transport was the metro and my feet. And because of that, I was interacting with ordinary Russians a lot. To the extent I had any free time on a Saturday or a Sunday, I would arbitrarily choose a metro station out in the middle of nowhere that perhaps I’d never been to and just go out there and walk around, and try to get a sense of that place. I mean, one of the things that I disliked during my second Moscow tour, and the fifth, sixth years particularly, was that I was spending so much time, seven days a week, in the office. 

Being in the office meant I wasn’t in Russia. And I hated that. I mean, I really wanted to be out among Russians. I mean, of course, I knew some Russians, but I wanted to have a sense of what the Germans call Fingerspitzengefuhle or ‘fingertip feel.’ And you only get that in a country by having some kind of personal physical interchange. And one of the things is that in the early nineties, getting Russians to talk to you as an American diplomat was not a problem.

That had been a problem 10 years earlier. Now, the problem was getting them to shut up once they started talking to you—you could be there for a while because they all wanted to tell their story. And there were a lot of ’em. And most of those stories were about hardship–sometimes brought on by the Soviet Union. I mean many, many of these conversations were very anti-Soviet. I heard relatively few people who were kind of nostalgic for Soviet power.There were some true believers, I mean, you’re bound to have some of that, but mostly it’s stuff like, when are our leaders going to let us live?  

нормальный this is a key Russian word, normal, which sounds like it just means normal–but to live “normally” in Russia was one of the most radical concepts you’ve ever encountered in your life, because for seven decades, they had been living in a country of experimentation, Marxist Leninist experimentation. 

And one of the things that I remember from the early Nineties is that whenever you would have a demonstration, and there were a lot of demonstrations, one of the slogans that people would print up on billboards was “NO MORE EXPERIMENTS.”

People understood that they had been used for experimentation, socioeconomic, political, cultural experimentation in the Soviet period—and they hated it. 

What they wanted to do was to get away from the radical and back to the normal. And then what happened is they got a whole bunch of people from not just Washington and Cambridge, but also from Brussels and Frankfurt and a whole bunch of other places who fundamentally thought, oh this is wonderful, this is the biggest experiment I’m ever going to have a chance to conduct. Most of the Westerns coming over to Russia saw themselves as engaging in social experimentation. 

Carden: In the cable you clearly indicate that the results of treating this enormous society as something on which to experiment was going to result in an inevitable backlash. So I wonder what you thought as Putin (i.e. backlash incarnate) arrived on the scene in the late Nineties. 

He’s now been in power for 25 years. It seems to me that you would have every right to take some kind of satisfaction and say, Hey, I told you so— though I’m sure you didn’t. Yet it seems to me that in 1994 you accurately predicted the future trajectory of the US Russian relationship…

Merry: That the trajectory was negative was obvious. And I was not the only person in the embassy who thought so. Some of the American journalists who had experience there also thought we were kind of cruising for bruising, that we had these friendships between people in Washington and in Moscow, but they were really kind of devoid of the reality that was Russia. 

And then of course, came the biggest of all the issues, NATO expansion. When Bill Burns [now CIA Director] was US ambassador in Moscow, the Bush administration was getting ready for the Bucharest NATO summit in 2008, where it planned to extend an invitation to join NATO to Ukraine and Georgia. Burns sent this very, very strong message to Condoleezza Rice and President Bush saying, this is not a good idea. 

The problem with NATO expansion was understood by people like Kennan, and by people like Bill Perry, for whom I worked in the Pentagon, and who actually has said that he strongly considered resigning a Secretary of Defense over NATO expansion.

Carden: With regard to the cable itself, did you know that–I guess it must have been Svetlana and Tom Blanton–did you know that they were working on getting this released? Were you surprised? 

Merry: Oh, I was very surprised. 

Carden: And are you surprised by the reaction? I mean, people are comparing it now to the Long Telegram and stuff like that? 

Merry: Well, let me just say about that, about 20 years ago after I left the Foreign Service, I filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for my own dissent message and was refused. And a couple years later, I did an appeal and was refused, actually fairly rudely. I think I was aware that the staff of the House Foreign Affairs Committee had also done a FOIA and they’d all been refused. So as far as I was concerned, that was the end of it. 

So in late October this year, I’m going through my emails and there I have a message from Svetlana saying, we’ve met, but we haven’t really talked. I’m sending you a copy of your message. And I was utterly astonished. And it was only considerably later that we had a chance to get together and chat a bit. 

And it turned out that they weren’t actually, the people of the National Security Archive, had not asked for anything concerning me. It wasn’t about my “long telegram” or me—they were getting material on a big FOIA that went to court for several years over documents that had been with Strobe Talbot during his time as Deputy Secretary of State. I mean, I was simply ancillary to it. And the people at the National Security Archive couldn’t have treated me better.

But what I have found somewhat embarrassing are the comparisons with Kennan—I have never made that comparison. Partly because I did know the man both when I was a graduate student and then later at the embassy. Occasionally he would visit. And I’m afraid that people are going to assume that I’m the one who’s pushing this comparison. 

In fact, I try to avoid that comparison. I just feel it’s completely different. Circumstances are completely different. Now, the one regret that I do have is that I did not accept Ambassador Pickering’s offer to send a message in as a front channel message clearly marked as only my work. The reason I opted for the dissent channel was kind of contextual. The drafting of this message had been going on for months. The arguments about it within the embassy, particularly with the Economic Counselor and Treasury attache, had been going on for weeks. We were in this meeting in the secure conference room chaired by the Ambassador. Ambassador Pickering had always been very good to me, very, very good to me. I make no complaint there at all, and I should have taken up his offer. I should have. 

But frankly, I was kind of feeling that here. He was essentially overriding one of his senior counselors and the representative of the Treasury department almost on my behalf. So I really kind of felt that, partly I felt tired. I just felt tired of the arguments and the dissent channel is a mechanism that is entirely within my discretion. I can send in anything in the dissent channel. They couldn’t refuse it. So I did. And that was a mistake because it meant that only seven or eight people in Washington saw the message. The one who did see it, who eventually came back to me, was the Deputy Secretary Strobe Talbott.

So it’s one of these things that in a sense, my finally getting this thing back 30 years later, is an eye onto an accident related to the broader work of the National Security Archive. And a FOIA request that I understand was in courts for several years. This was a big, big struggle for them. 

Carden: Yeah, they do invaluable work. I do want to look at something that you wrote that caught my eye in the last section of your dissent cable having to do with Russia’s near abroad. And the problems that you felt were likely to occur, did in fact occur.

In paragraph 56 of the cable you wrote:

…the key issue for stability within the former Soviet domain is the status and well being of the 25 million ethnic Russians beyond the borders of the Federation. The key country is Ukraine, home to about half of them. 

Now, when I read that, it struck me that Vladimir Putin and [Foreign Minister] Sergei Lavrov have never ever made a secret of the fact that that is their policy and that Russia was going to step in and protect ethnic Russian minorities who live outside of their borders, and the people who were pushing NATO expansion and encouraging Georgia and Ukraine to come on board kept telling us that, well, what can Russia do about it anyway? They’re not going to react.  And that has always seemed very, very foolish. And here you lay it out in 1994, fully 20 years before the Ukrainian Civil War unfolded in April of 2014. So I was wondering from the vantage point of 2013-2014, what were you thinking? Did you see the catastrophe slowly unfolding?

Merry:  Well, during my first assignment in Moscow, the first three years I spent in Moscow in the early eighties, my portfolio was nationalities policy, of which, of course, Ukraine was top of the list. And I spent a lot of time traveling around the Soviet Union and getting a sense of the difference among the various nationalities. I’ve been to a lot of places most folks couldn’t find on a map. But I found it absolutely fascinating. And one of the things that was always clear to me was that the lines on the map that had been drawn in Stalin’s time were deliberately drawn to be clumsy. They were deliberately intended to bolster the central government’s power, give it a reason, even, to intervene, to prevent locals, whether in Central Asia or in Caucasus, or any of the Baltic states, from developing their own identities. This was very intentional. 

When I got back for my second tour, one of the first places I went to, even before I arrived in Moscow, were Yalta and Kiev. And you could see the extent to which Ukraine was coming away from Russia politically—it was right there. It was on the street. I mean, the extent to which Ukrainians were finding their sense of their identity separate from the Soviet Union was just blatant. And people Washington just didn’t want, didn’t want to see it, didn’t want to see it, didn’t want to hear. 

I think I talk about this in my oral history, but that fall after I’m in Moscow, I heard from a reliable source that there was this dispute going on in Washington between George Kolt, who was the senior Soviet guy at the CIA and Ed Hewitt, who was the senior Soviet guy at the White House. On the question of that [Ukraine pulling away from the USSR], George had sent a memo saying that Ukraine might become independent within five years. And Hewitt ridiculed this, he evidently was ridiculing George too. The two of them evidently didn’t get along, but the argument was, could Ukraine become independent within five years, whereas the embassy and our consulate in Kiev had been telling them, this is going to happen within five weeks. This argument was going on late in October when there’s going to be a referendum at the end of November. And there’s no question the Ukrainians are going to opt for independence—but how could these people, these two most senior experts on the Soviet Union in Washington, be having an argument about what could happen over the horizon when it’s happening right down the road. 

And those in the consulate in Kiev, and we in the embassy in Moscow, have been telling Washington with increasing intensity that this is coming…as I have said many times, Ukraine is the widest country in Europe, not just geographically, but in terms of political culture. 

The western part of Ukraine is essentially part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and people need to understand that. I remember when, in the summer of 1991, and the Soviet Union is just beginning to fall apart, there was this argument going on in Kiev among some of the ultra-nationalists as to whether or not they should get rid of the Donbas, whether they should essentially slice off the eastern third of the Soviet Ukraine and give that to Russia so that the new independent Ukrainian state would shift not just geographically, but in terms of political culture toward Europe. 

Obviously they didn’t do that because it would’ve meant giving up a third of their GDP, coal and steel, and all that kind of stuff. You don’t give up a third of your account, but the fact that they discussed it very openly was extraordinary… 

Carden: Solzhenitsyn described the decision by Leonid Kravchuck to accept the Soviet borders of Ukraine as a “poisoned chalice”… 

Merry: Unfortunately, I think that is true. I also think that perception on the part of the Russians of an absence of respect, which I think is exaggerated, is entirely unappreciated in most of Washington. The people who have made policy in Washington over the last 30 odd years, are the first to go, oh, well, Soviet Union’s gone. We won. Forget about ’em.Then there are those who say, well, wait a minute, they’ve got all these nuclear weapons and all this other stuff, maybe we ought to find means of treating them with at least a modicum of courtesy and respect. And then there are those who felt, look, in the  21st century with China resuming its place as a genuine great power it’s in our interest to be a buddy buddy with Russia rather than pushing Russia into China’s arms, which is now what has happened.

I think you have to appreciate that in Washington and certainly in American academic culture, there’s a huge part of the intelligentsia who are just fundamentally hostile to Russia. And partly it comes from their cultural identity. Partly it comes from where they immigrated from. I don’t know how many times over the decades I’ve had people say, have you ever been to such and such a place in Ukraine? And nine times out of ten, I actually had been. But usually that place is where their grandparents were abused, and the memory…I mean, it never ceases to amaze me that among a number of Jews and Poles I have met—whose countries and whose families suffered much, much more at the hands of the Germans—they resent the Russians much, much more. 

And I didn’t quite get it, people from families who ultimately survived because of something the Soviet Union did, albeit unintentionally–that helped them survive by actually defeating Nazi Germany–do not get anything like a sense of regard or appreciation or recognition. Whereas the Germans somehow seem to have…I mean,  I just don’t get it. 

Carden: Any concluding remarks? 

Merry: Well, one, I appreciate the interest which the declassification and release of my descent channel is getting. Again, I wish that I had not employed the dissent channel, so that it would at least have had some public circulation 30 years ago when it would’ve been more relevant. I do think that part of the issue we now face is the same we did then, I mean look, I am appalled at what has happened in Russian politics and Russian policy in recent years. I mean, genuinely appalled. I was wrong in February, 2022. I did not see this happening and the day after the invasion, I sat down and I wrote a one page mea culpa message, which I sent to two of my bosses saying, I should have seen this coming and I missed it. I really, really screwed up and did not see this coming. So I appear to have been a rather good company in terms of missing it. But I think we are now in a situation where we have to worry about what else we are missing.

A situation like the war in Ukraine can get incredibly out of hand— and we’re not talking to each other. I don’t know what the new administration is going to do. I assume it will name an ambassador to Moscow, and I assume it will seek to have some kind of a dialogue. But I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was in junior high school, was in algebra class, and my algebra teacher, Ms. Johnson, basically decided we’re not going to get any mathematics done today. One of the girls in the class was hysterical, we were all upset, worried, but Ms. Johnson, in trying to talk us through this said, the important thing is that they’re talking, 

The two sides are talking to each other. That’s what’s important, and I’m wondering if today we can say the same.