Lying Together

Lying Together
What Russia needs most from America is the one thing Bill Clinton can't offer: honesty.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Saturday, August 26, 2000 12:01 a.m. EDT

Anger runs high this week at Russia's President Vladimir Putin, whose administration's first instinct was to lie about the wreck of the submarine Kursk and to reject, proudly but cruelly, the West's initial offers of help in trying to reach the 118 submariners who died aboard. In these days of post-Soviet reform, where did Mr. Putin get the idea that lies and bombast are still an acceptable way to run Russia?

The sorry truth is that America helped send him that message. Since 1993, it's not just Russian officials who have shown themselves deeply committed to lying about their country. Mr. Clinton and his administration have also made a habit of serving up lies about Russia--not just to Americans, but to the Russians themselves. Big luscious lies: that Russia is a land where the wiring mostly works and contracts get honored, a place equipped to play a solid role in the world economy and a valuable part in global politics. These are lies more abstract and less immediately poignant than those shrouding the sinking of the Kursk. But they are also lies that in this new post-Soviet world may turn out to have harmed many more lives than the recent tragedy in the Barents Sea.

Not that Russians themselves lack verve in telling lies. Generations of communist rule left the country warped in ways that will take a long time to fix. But Americans have no such excuse. Except perhaps that in 1992 and again in 1996, we elected a president who can't always find the line between what he wants and what the world allows.

In the case of Russia, Kremlin fiction has for years now mixed with Mr. Clinton's fantasy life to produce a weird mesh of unrealities. Bill Clinton began with a youthful crush on Russia, and as president hired as his chief Russia adviser the soulful but not always realistic Strobe Talbott. Then Mr. Clinton just kind of winged it, on the assumption that if he and Al Gore--heedless of facts--treated Russia like a trustworthy, truthful old chum, that's what it would become. With motorcade escort, Moscow was a fun place to pose for photo-ops at summits, dine under the Kremlin's crystal chandeliers and then go out on the town and play the sax.

Thus did Mr. Clinton create a cosmos in which the highly exclusive Group of Seven industrialized nations, the G-7, came to include Russia as sole newcomer of the 1990s to what we now call the G-8. Mainly at America's behest, the International Monetary Fund during the mid-1990s chipped in billions in loans--which then served as a sort of U.S.-backed Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

Then, at a summit in 1997, Mr. Clinton and then-President Boris Yeltsin struck a deal that Russia would be admitted to the Paris Club of creditor nations. To transform Russia from one of the world's biggest net debtors to net creditor needed such bookkeeping feats as valuing old Soviet loans to former satellite nations not at current, hugely devalued ruble exchange rates, but at the old Soviet ruble-dollar rate--which by then prevailed in no universe other than the imagination of the U.S. Treasury. Russia was labeled fit and open for business. Heeding the Clinton call, foreign investors piled in.

The upshot, of course, was Russia's 1998 ruble crash and default, the swiped billions in IMF bailout funds, and the continuing misery of average Russians--who had it driven home that they can count on no one in power, Russian or American.

On the political and military fronts, it was much the same fiction that treating Russia as a responsible partner will make it so. In ugly ultranationalist terms, Russia opposed Western interests in Eastern Europe. Mr. Clinton looked for ways to give the Kremlin a sense of restored clout in nations only recently released from its grip. When Russia sold technology for nuclear bombs to Iran, the U.S. said pretty please don't do that but kept shoveling in aid. Mr. Yeltsin launched a brutal war against the breakaway Muslim Republic of Chechnya, bombing the capital into rubble, killing tens of thousands and then, while sitting next to Mr. Clinton at a summit in 1996, denying that there were any Russian military operations in Chechnya. Asked what he thought about this lie, Mr. Clinton's bland evasion was: "We once had a civil war in our country."

The pity of all this is that the one true prize America has to offer ordinary Russians as they struggle to build a viable modern nation is neither money nor misplaced trust nor a chance to strut in the unearned finery of the G-8. What Russia most needs is honesty.

If there is one thing the Russians have long had in oversupply, it is lies. What they have not had, since the collapse of the Soviet Union and advent of Messrs. Clinton and Gore, is the refreshing help of a U.S. administration with enough respect for Russians to stop patronizing them with charitable fictions and try dealing in truths. Having lost billions in taxpayer dollars dumped into Russia just two years ago, Mr. Clinton was right back in there this spring offering more. This kind of eager tolerance by the U.S. does not breed respect in Russia; it begets resentment and contempt. This sort of stuff, piled deep over the past decade, has been America's contribution to President Putin's notion that he could lie with impunity about a lost nuclear-powered submarine and its crew.

Back in the mid-1990s, I was one of the reporters covering the former Soviet Union for this newspaper. An eye-opening moment came in 1993, when I flew to the newly independent Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan, to write about its new currency. In the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek, I met an ethnic Russian, stranded outside his country by the Soviet crackup. He invited me and my interpreter, Vadim, back to his kitchen for the proverbial late-night Russian talk over vodka.

When we got there, he tore into the what he saw as the Western mindset. He said he had no respect for Americans, whom he saw as a bunch of ignorant patronizing do-gooders. "You Americans think you can just come here and understand the great Russian soul," he mocked. I was tired to the bone, missing my old haunts in friendlier places, like China, and I had had enough. "Frankly," I told him, and at that point it was straight truth, "I don't have the least interest in the great Russian soul. I'm just here to do a story about your money."

I waited for him to kick me out of his kitchen. Instead, he looked at me for a minute, poured some more vodka, and from there it turned into a decent evening. "At least you are honest," he said.

It can bring a lot of relief.

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board and a former Moscow bureau chief for the Journal. Her column appears Thursdays in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America" and Saturdays on OpinionJournal.com.