Books: Moscow Without Tears

“Sober but sick,” said Bill Clinton on catching sight of Russian President Boris Yeltsin at the Cologne G-8 summit in 1999. Clinton was a shrewd judge of his counterpart’s state. By the end of Clinton’s presidency, writes Strobe Talbott in his excellent new book, The Russia Hand (Random House; 478 pages), the American had met Yeltsin almost as many times as Clinton’s nine predecessors combined had met their Russian equals.

Was all the contact worth it? At the time, many didn’t think so. In the last years of Yeltsin’s rule, he had become an always ailing, often drunk figure at the head of a corrupt state and chaotic economy. Why suck up to such a man? Talbott–a former editor at TIME who was a key policymaker on Russia throughout the Clinton years, ending up as Deputy Secretary of State–makes a convincing case for taking Yeltsin seriously. In his telling, Clinton’s Russian policy was motivated above all by realism. Clinton and his team knew that Yeltsin wasn’t perfect, and at times they may have let their hopes “get out in front of reality,” as Clinton said to Talbott. But they had a practical optimism about Russia’s prospects, even if they expected–in an image that Talbott liked to use when in office–that Russia would experience many bumps along an upward-sloping curve.

They were right, as the Administration of George W. Bush implicitly acknowledged in 2001, when Bush sought a strategic partnership with Vladimir Putin, Yeltsin’s successor. Talbott’s book is a useful reminder of a larger truth: Clinton had his successes. In the 1990s, American policy was bound to be messy, as the world escaped the shadow of the cold war. Often, the best option was to hope that things would turn out better one day and do what little one could to help them along. Clinton’s team managed to do that with Russia. That’s worth raising a glass to. Yeltsin certainly did. –By Michael Elliott