American efforts to ensure Boris Yeltsin’s win in 1996 are an instructive example.

National Review
Michael Brendan Dougherty

Whenever commentators, journalists, and politicians begin to talk about Vladimir Putin as a genius, as the frightening man who had the cunning to drive most of America’s governing class into hysterics by intervening in an election, I start to think of Dick Morris and how consequential his work must have seemed in the months before he was busted by the media for using an escort service.

Back in 1996, Morris acted as the middleman between President Bill Clinton and the team of American political consultants deployed to Moscow to make sure that, by hook or crook, Boris Yeltsin won the upcoming Russian election. Polls showed Russians favoring the Communist Gennadi Zyuganov, and Yeltsin in the single digits. Bill Clinton, Prime Minister John Major, Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and a number of emerging Russian oligarchs were going to make sure their man won Russia’s first “free and fair” election in the post-Soviet era. The free choice of Russians and the fairness of the election hardly factored into it.

There is much debate about how much these Americans actually helped Yeltsin win. Some Americans bragged about their efforts, which were later memorialized in a comic film. Some Russians dismissed them as harebrained narcissists who were safely locked away from anything real in the campaign. But what wasn’t in doubt was that America’s endorsement of Yeltsin, which came in the form of a giant cash infusion, helped the incumbent at a crucial moment, and allowed Russian oligarchs to coordinate their efforts as well. Reliable numbers are impossible to know, but it may have been the world’s most expensively bought election.

The U.S. lobbied hard for the IMF to infuse billions into Russia that year. This loan was given on a basis that AEI’s Nicholas Eberstadt then deemed “so implausible and absurd that only a Western government official, or an international civil servant, could possibly believe them.”

IMF loan money that wasn’t directly stolen or traded for favors was used to prop up Russia’s bond market, leading to a profitable bubble for those in the know. Meanwhile, Vladimir Olegovich Potanin of Onexim bank also worked to make sure Yeltsin would win. He and a select few other banks proposed a “loans for shares” program, in which they would lend the government $2 billion to fix a hole in the budget and they would get a chance to buy shares in the country’s leading exporting vehicles. The idea was that once the Communist Zyuganov was defeated, markets would surely rise again, allowing the government to buy back the shares before selling them again at market value. But, of course, the government never did buy back those shares. It instead allowed state-owned assets to go to the favored bankers at three or ten cents on the dollar. Peter Conradi’s excellent book Who Lost Russia relays that under campaign-finance rules, each candidate could receive a maximum of just over $3 million in private contributions. The Yeltsin campaign was estimated to have spent as much as $2 billion.

Even before I come to the point, I can already anticipate readers shouting “whataboutism” at their computer screens. Yes, I do wonder how people who read the above and ready themselves to accuse me of moral equivalence would react if it were revealed tomorrow that Donald Trump had a secret team of Kremlin-directed Russian political consultants working with him throughout the campaign. No matter how ineffective or isolated other campaigners claimed they were, it certainly would raise eyebrows, wouldn’t it?

But that’s actually not the interesting question to ask. In no way should Americans accept Russian election meddling just because we have done the same to Russia. The great-power game is often won by doing things to your rivals that you would never allow them to do to you.

No, the interesting thing to ask is whether Russians have just made the same mistake Clinton did in 1996.

It is possible that the oligarchs and straightforward election fraud would have done enough to elect Boris Yeltsin without the American-encouraged IMF loans, or the team of American spin doctors. It’s also possible that allowing a Communist to return to power in Moscow and then immediately fall on his face, as happened in other post-Soviet republics, might have worked out better in the long run.

But what is undoubted is that U.S. intervention in that Russian election, and America’s repeatedly stated preference for Yeltsin, associated the U.S. with all the enormities of Yeltsin-era Russia. Strobe Talbot recalled with regret that our actions made us “enablers” of Russian corruption. The United States used its resources in a genuine belief that it was saving Russia from backsliding into Communism. What emerged was an oligarchy, a humiliating decrease in living standards for the vast majority of Russians, and a rapid decrease in Russian life-spans. Our interventions in 1996 made us a party to all of it.

We may judge this time by the high intentions of the U.S. government. But many Russians judge it by the results for Russian lives. And understandably many of them have adopted a conspiratorial view of affairs, seeing the hand of international finance or the U.S. State Department in every Russian frustration. In a darkened political culture, wet with paranoia, propaganda finds a hospitable environment for rapid growth. Anti-Americanism and a very old attitude of anger at international finance grow natively in Russia now. Putin is advantaged by this environment at home, and he’s had luck reduplicating it abroad.

It may feel good to have sown more discord and paranoia into America’s political culture, but at what price? So far Trump’s concessions to Russia are entirely rhetorical and theoretical. He wants peace, but the sanctions regime is still in place. He wants to have a good relationship with Putin, but he’s encouraged European countries to invest more in NATO. America’s Democratic party is now becoming as implacably anti-Moscow as conservative Republicans were during the Cold War. The American Left indulges Bircher-like conspiracy theories, giving Russia credit for decades-long plots and schemes to upend the liberal world order. Russia associates many of the Yeltsin-era evils with American-led shock therapy, and manipulation of its prostrate nation. Should the Trump era be marked by surprise reversals of fortune, should America’s mortality rates continue climbing, should there be another economic crash, what will Americans want to do to Russia if Moscow can plausibly be named as one guilty party in our misgovernment?

I imagine it will be a damned sight worse than Facebook memes and leaked emails.

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This is the first time I realized that this is what collapsed Long Term Capital Management in 1998, about $5 billion in capital just evaporated.

It sounds like it condensed again in a cold environment somewhere.

I'm of two minds about this. I'm all for building relationships, and generally being something of a good neighbor can be a great way to do that. But the US has made the mistake in Latin America of associating with personalities that the voting public associates with all kinds of negatives. I don't just mean the various police states of decades ago. I mean well intentioned policy initiatives to stabilize currencies, build economies, save the environment and preserve antiquities. Many of the best things the US has succeeded in doing (that don't involve disaster relief, anyway) have been done through the OAS, the IMF and occasionally even the UN. At the same time the distrust of America down there isn't limited to motives either; they question our knowledge, our competence and our common sense, too.

I don't see it the same way myself. I see it as a natural consequence of the mistakes we've made or fostered and I'm cynical enough to believe that bad memories can overwhelm an equal number of good memories. After all, good memories in this context still highlight both the unequal relationship between us and them and the difference between what the US and their countries are actually capable of doing. But it does raise the question of whether there's really all that much good we can do ourselves by trying to do good for others. After all, Citoyen Genet was every bit as passionately well-intentioned as he was irritating a representative of France and the French Revolution.

I guess what I'm doing is wondering whether the best revenge would be to interfere in their elections in the future or to do our best to isolate them as much as we can internationally. I confess to having no moral compunctions about screwing with Putin and his crowd. But the more we can force the Russians to look inward, the more difficult it will be for them to avoid confronting the problems in their lives created by their own government. I don't know whether Putin would sink or swim in such an environment, but I do know he would be miserable and I suspect he would be too busy to spend as much time screwing with our elections as he would like to.

It's ridiculous to think they won't try to meddle in our elections.

What's criminal is to let them like obama did.

Did the (cue ominous music) Russians do election or campaign meddling? The other day a lady called Rush to make that distinction. The media and libs are screaming the Russians interfered with the election, but technically it was the campaign. There's a big difference, but what do I know...

Anyone in this country has rights, 1st Amendment among them. If Ruskies or anybody else wants to come here and post ads, send e-mails, go to meetings and rallies, participate in the elective process, except vote hopefully, what’s to stop them?

With the information about Clinton in 1998 perhaps we need to find out the rest of the story, which might be what folks are so anxious not get out.

So you’re saying a Democrat, left of center, is not above trying to influence a foreign election?

I’m shocked!

Seems like there’s an old adage “Be careful what you ask for. You might just get it.”