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collapsed on Christmas Day, 1991, a wave of euphoria washed over the West. Barely two years had elapsed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and suddenly, thewas over. The decadeslong nuclear stand-off between the superpowers ended, in the immortal words of the poet T.S. Eliot, “not with a bang but a whimper.” Those eventful 24 months upended the Cold War theories concocted by foreign policy experts about the need for détente and permanent “peaceful coexistence” with Russian communism.
The Moscow democracy conference was a good introduction to the paradoxes of the former U.S.S.R. The political order and economy were collapsing, but powerful state forces still existed, uneasily side-by-side with the struggling democracies. The KGB’s successor, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, continued to probe our secrets and attempted to recruit agents just as aggressively as the KGB at the height of the Cold War.
I saw firsthand the misery of the Russian and Ukrainian people in the post-Soviet era. Livelihoods were upended as salaries at state-owned enterprises first went unpaid for months and then often ended altogether. A large barter economy emerged, with factories trading output with one another for supplies and raw materials, while workers were paid in products they were free to barter or sell in lieu of cash salaries. Hyperinflation soon compounded the misery.
No wonder many ex-Soviet citizens longed for the good old days of the Brezhnev era when the shops were well-supplied, the state paid salaries on time, internal repression was not too harsh, and there was order in the streets. America’s preoccupation with the nuclear problem blinded it to the complexities of helping Russia and its former dominions evolve into market economies modeled after the U.S. and Western Europe. Instead of a comprehensive Marshall-style plan to reinvigorate the economies of the former Soviet republics, the West used aid as leverage on the surrender of nuclear weapons to Moscow and later conditioned it on economic reforms or anticorruption measures.
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