Trying To Keep Russia On Track.(interview with Clinton's deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott)(Brief Article)(Interview)

Deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott served as point man for Russia policy during the Clinton era. A former Time magazine columnist and author of several books on arms control, Talbott has been both praised and castigated for his performance. Last week, as he prepared to leave for Yale, where he will head a new think tank on globalization, Talbott talked with NEWSWEEK's Andrew Nagorski. Excerpts:

NAGORSKI: There was a lot of hope for Russian democracy when your team came into office. Now most of that hope has evaporated or at least dimmed. What went wrong?

TALBOTT: I don't accept the premise of your question. Russia has gone through a lot of trauma, several near disasters. But Russia has also undergone a transformation of a fundamentally positive kind. Fifteen, 10 years ago, it was a system based on dictatorial principles with a hostile ideology towards the rest of the world. Russia today is a democracy. Not a pure democracy, not a pretty democracy. Nonetheless, there has been significant movement in the right direction. A lot has gone wrong, a lot has gone right, a lot is very ambiguous.

Under Yeltsin, what went right?

Yeltsin dismantled the Soviet command economy, defanged the Communist Party, adopted a posture towards the other states of the former Soviet Union of basically letting them go their own way. He also developed a relationship with the United States that allowed us to work some extremely tough issues together. There are no nuclear weapons outside of Russia in the former Soviet Union today, no Russian troops in the Baltic states. There's an institutionalized cooperative relationship between NATO and Russia. Russian troops are working on peacekeeping in the Balkans with American and NATO troops.

And on the negative side?

I don't think he or his leadership ever came up with the right answer to the problem of what ratio of shock to therapy to have. I don't think that the United States and the international financial institutions ever came up with the perfect recipe for them either. He never came to grips with the problem of the oligarchs. There was a kind of Faustian pact between Yeltsin and the oligarchs on the eve of his re-election in 1996 that put much too much power and wealth in the hands of too few people. I don't think he ever came to grips with the security services and their role in Russian life. And finally, he led Russia into two wars in Chechnya.