Whenever the CIA is accused of spinning its intelligence analysis to
fit policy preferences, it replies tartly that it "tells it like it
is." For the most part, it really does. But in the case of Russia,
telling it like it is, and seeing it like it really is, are both very
difficult. This article explores some of these difficulties.

The saddest disappointment of the post-Cold War era has been the
failure of Russia to find and follow the path of political and
economic democracy. In the long run, this disappointment may also be
the most dangerous: Russia is a country that spans ten time zones and
contains thousands of nuclear weapons and other deadly materials
besides.

Most troubling of all the effects of the Russian crisis is its impact
on Russian hearts and minds. When hammer and sickle gave way to
Russia's tricolor in 1991, Russians believed themselves destined for
democracy and a free-market economy, the two key constituents of what
they called simply a "normal society." They also exhibited admiration
for the United States unequaled by any other of America's adversaries
after the great conflicts of this century. Such attitudes are now
hardly perceptible. They have been replaced by hostility toward what
has been foisted on them in the name of democracy and capitalism, and
toward the United States, which most believe to have been in some
degree responsible for the failures and perversions of "reform."

The hostility to reform now ascendant in Russia stimulates forces
that could for generations hence take the country on another detour
into the swamp of authoritarianism, muddled étatism and social
stagnation. Neither Stalin's nor Brezhnev's Soviet Union can be
restored. But some form of weak, irresponsible state authority over a
disordered society could sink roots that would corrupt the capacity
of new generations to truly govern themselves.

At the bottom of this reflection lies a most disturbing thought. What
if the Russians simply cannot make it? What if the post-communist
experience of Russia means that the "self-evident" truths of
Jefferson and Lincoln are not for all people, but only for some? In
its aspirations, Russia has been oriented toward Europe and the
Atlantic world for a thousand years. Its failure at a time of high
promise finally to enter that world would not only be a tragedy for
Russia itself but a deep injury to Euro-Atlantic values. The perils
of nuclear and other junk emanating from Russia are frightening
enough. But the grim possibility at stake in the Russian
experience--that civilized self-government is not for all people--is
more frightening still.

Where is Russia at the moment? The Moscow media pundit Igor
Malashenko recently characterized its present situation as "the dead
end of the beginning", the complete failure of a false start.
Russia's perennial democrat-in-opposition, Grigory Yavlinsky, has
characterized the Yeltsin period and its misfired reforms as the true
end of the Soviet era, citing in particular how it has been dominated
by Soviet nomenklaturchiki of various stripes. Yavlinsky sees the
prospect for a fresh start, grounded on post-communist generations
and ignited by victories for sensible democrats, notably himself, in
upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections.

Whatever else it is, the present moment of fading Yeltsin and aging
Primakov, a kind of interregnum, should be a moment for stock-taking.
We, too, have a bit of an interregnum on our hands.

Aspects of the Russian Crisis

Russia's crisis is widely identified with the financial meltdown of
August and the replacement of the reformist Kiriyenko government by
one whose top figures, Yevgeny Primakov and Yuri Maslyukov, are
Soviet-era functionaries evidently committed to achieving political
stability by not doing much of anything, at least at the time of
writing. These developments are but symptoms of more long-lived
disorders.

The revolution of 1991 was not as revolutionary as it seemed. The
termites had long been chewing away within, even before the wrecking
balls of glasnost and perestroika assailed from without. The Soviet
system collapsed because a large portion of the nomenklatura, those
with hands directly on state property, deserted the CPSU and the
Soviet state to pursue business interests and nationalist political
agendas. This had been going on sub rosa for years; the events of
late 1991 only unveiled and accelerated the process. As a result, the
post-Soviet scene in Russia is dominated by the people, relationships
and habits of the late Soviet era, particularly in the nexus of
property and power. Relatedly, the process left the Russian Communist
Party, the only real party on the scene, an assembly of angry losers:
a Soviet-style intelligentsia at the top, and a vast population of
pensioners and pensioner-like workers at the bottom who were not in a
position to seize property in the name of the market. A substantial
majority of the Russian population is, therefore, now made up of
people who are fearful about their shaky hold on new-found wealth, or
who sit astride assets that do not produce real wealth, or who are
resentful about having no places at the trough. Their understanding
of, and perceived stake in, real political and economic reform is
weak at best.

Russia possesses two important features of democracy: elections and a
more or less free press. But it does not have the essence of
democracy: an assured, law-based process for selecting leaders and
policies, and for protecting rights. The prospects for attaining real
democracy and preserving existing democratic features are uncertain.
Russian politics is based less on principles, programs and parties,
than on personalities and shifting coalitions among clans and their
hold on evanescent money. The results of politics are less mandates
and real power to effect policies than pecking orders and
opportunities for aggrandizement. At the summit sits a president with
vast nominal powers under a skewed constitution, but little real
power to influence the life of the nation--save for starting local
wars.

Power continues to leach out of Moscow into the regions. But there is
no clear sign of stable federalism, as opposed to fragmentation or
worse. Elections are generally freer and fairer than in Belarus or
Kazakhstan. It is more apt to call them free-for-all and
fair-or-foul, since money, manipulation and political violence
continue to play a large role. There is freedom of the press, in that
ideologically diverse media host lively commentary on Russia's
affairs. But Russia's media are controlled by the politico-business
clans who dominate national and regional politics. "Not by accident",
as Stalin would have said, are journalists prominent among the
bankers, tycoons, mafiosi and politicians assassinated since 1991.
Neither vice nor virtue is a sure protection in this turbulence.

The glass of Russian democracy, while not half-full, is assuredly not
empty. Elections occur and matter. The press presents the real stuff
of democratic debate. In the regions, devolution of Muscovite power
spottily shows real local self-government. Polls show that Russians,
for all their alienation, still associate their desire for a normal
society with free thought, free politics and free enterprise. When
they say they want a strong hand in power, most mean the opposite of
Stalin's arbitrary ruthlessness. They want a government that works,
an economy that works, and, underlying it all, law and order. They
want a voice in crafting those things. This is not an exotic agenda.

Russia's economic failure is clearly at the heart of the general
crisis. Finding the root causes and essential nature of this failure
is daunting. That the August crisis of devaluation and default is a
spinoff of a deeper predicament is clear. But what is that
predicament? It is not the collapse of the financial bubble, a bubble
blown out of a brand of snake oil that government and speculators
sold to each other. It is not the budget indiscipline of the Russian
government. Lacking real power to act with fiscal responsibility, it
chose to survive on short-term, high-interest credit and not paying
most of its bills. It had willing and well-credentialed accomplices
who justly deserve to be now holding empty bags. Again, it is not the
absence of real investment in the "real" economy, or the ubiquity of
capital flight. These are all effects, not causes.

The essence of the economic debacle is twofold: the collapse of
production, which has brought gnp down to less than half of 1990
levels; and the impoverishment of the majority of the Russian people,
with something like fifty million now living below what is itself a
ridiculously low poverty line. The unmeasurable effect of the
informal economy and widespread moonlighting in ameliorating these
dismal conditions does not substantially change the picture. They
merely explain how Russians manage to survive. The collapse
impoverished the Russian state beyond the capacity of oil exports and
financial legerdemain to sustain.

Russian politics revolves around the question of who is to blame for
the economic collapse, even more than who might conceivably offer a
path out of it. The root causes lie in a combination of a) the decay
of the Soviet economy for decades even before perestroika, b) the
hugely destabilizing actions of Gorbachev, and c) the misguided and
inadequate policies of the post-1991 reformers. There is plenty of
blame to go around.

The reformers of the Yeltsin period clearly sought to break up the
collapsing structures of the Soviet order so that they could not
possibly stage a political comeback. This was primary. Their
secondary aim was to encourage the emergence of a true market
economy--through elimination of price controls and other regulations,
as strict a monetarism as they could manage, and privatization of
state assets. It is impossible to exaggerate how much this aim rested
on the dogma, embraced by both the reformers and their Western
supporters, that, as the state was removed from the economy, real
market capitalism would arise naturally and rapidly even in the
conditions of Sovietized Russia.

This did not happen. What did happen was a puzzling combination of
some genuine reform, failed reform, perverted reform, no reform and
deep depression. The Russian experience also made glaringly obvious a
truism too often neglected by the reformers and their Western allies:
market capitalism depends on a pervasive environment of congenial
law, business custom and skill, and popularly respected institutions.
These took centuries for the West to evolve; history left Poland and
other Central European states more receptive to them; history left
Russia without them, and with a political culture inimical to their
creation.

The largest part of the Russian economy is what two American
economists, Clifford Gaddy and Barry Ickes, have called the Virtual
Economy. Other experts quarrel with their analysis, but their
metaphor is instructive. The Virtual Economy is, in essence, the
living rubble of the old Soviet economy--i.e., the old state
enterprises--without the Soviet state machinery to hold it together.
It continues to function by using barter and other non-monetary
devices to generate products less valuable than the required inputs,
while pretending to add value. Managers pocket cash revenues and keep
workers pseudo-employed in company-town settings. Given the huge
populations and interests involved, these dinosaurs refuse to commit
suicide through bankruptcy or what the IMF gently calls
"restructuring." Except for private plots and some farms that work
for McDonalds, most of agriculture is sadly mired in this sector.

Beyond the Virtual Economy is what the Russians call wild capitalism,
mistaken by many as a reformed economy. This is where the "new
Russians", working with organized crime and corrupt officialdom,
extract wealth as quickly as possible and send abroad what they don't
ostentatiously consume. The most powerful actors in this sector are
deeply invested in phony banking, controlled media and patronage
politics.

A third portion of the economy is an archipelago of real capitalism,
in which genuine private entrepreneurs assemble capital and put it to
productive work, mostly, but not solely, in small service and
consumer-oriented businesses. This is the smallest part of the
economy, politically and economically the most vulnerable--but also
the most promising.

Sorting out this triadic domain is a mighty challenge for analysis,
policy making and investment. It cannot be done at a distance. Many
enterprises participate in all three sectors. Much of the illusion
about reform in Russia rests on the mistaken beliefs that the first
sector is receding, that the second is really like the third, and
that the third is increasingly dominant. Collusion in this illusion
lies at the heart of the policy failures of reformers and their
Western supporters.

There are other aspects of the Russian economic crisis well deserving
of treatment, which space does not allow: the collapsing physical
infrastructure, calamitous environmental conditions and the public
health disaster. One topic deserving more than a few words is crime
and corruption.

What Did We Know and When Did We Know It?

The criminalization of the Russian state is now a standard theme in
assessment of the Russian crisis by both Russian and American
analysts. It is also a common thread in all eulogies to Galina
Starovoitova, the liberal Duma member recently assassinated in St.
Petersburg. According to the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, Strobe
Talbott, it is an offensive stereotype brandished by Hollywood.
Unfortunately, it is much more than that.

Russian crime and corruption are deeply embedded in the failure of
Russia to advance toward real democracy and capitalism since 1991, as
cause, consequence and symbol of Russian realities. They constitute,
in the perceptive terms of a senior State Department official with
whom I have discussed the topic, an "environmental problem." They are
pervasive in government, politics, business and security affairs;
even foreign relations are affected. They are regional, national and
international, and can threaten America by enabling the proliferation
of weapons and by infiltrating American business and politics.

At the crime end of the spectrum are assassinations, theft,
protection rackets, drug and arms trafficking. At the corruption end
one finds bribery for all manner of state services, privileged
arrangements for export and import without taxes and duties, insider
privatization deals at fire-sale prices, speculation for private
profit with state funds, off-budget commercial operations by
government agencies. Hardly any institutions or public figures are
free from taint, certainly not the police.

Crime and corruption lead naturally to the offensive stereotype noted
by Talbott, because they are so extensive and dramatic. Most
businessmen, however, regard organized crime and contract killing as
less of a problem than is capricious corruption in government. A
viable legal and tax system could legitimate and regulate many now
dubious activities, such as private security services and tax-exempt
organizations. But they are undeniably a huge part of the Russian
political and economic crisis, undermining the state, deterring
investment, spurring capital flight and alienating society.

This raises a touchy question: long a visible, ubiquitous and
powerful threat to reform, should the extent of Russian crime and
corruption not have warned American policymakers that Russian reforms
were not on track? A recent article in the New York Times raised this
question obliquely by reporting allegations that the Clinton
administration ignored or discouraged intelligence about corruption
in the Yeltsin regime. I can shed some light on this matter by
recollecting what I observed from the sidelines, tracking the topic
and the struggles of intelligence analysts to report it.

To start with, any analyst worth his salt should have been alert to
the threat to reforms posed by Russian crime and corruption. What
first-year Russian history student does not remember the following
apocryphal exchange: Czar Nicholas I tells his son, "You and I are
the only ones in Russia who do not steal"--and the son replies, "Yes,
father, but that's because we own everything." Here one begins to
understand the shaky status of private property in Russia since the
Mongols. All students of Soviet history heard such aphorisms as "blat
vishe Stalina" (corrupt influence is higher than Stalin) or "Soviet
power is built on matye, blatye and tuftye" (profanity, corruption
and falsification). Arguably the most important development in the
history of Russian organized crime occurred in the late Stalin years:
the "Bitches' War", in which old-time vory v zakonye ("thieves under
their own law", who refused any dealings with the state) battled the
"bitches" (new-type crooks who found collaboration with state
authorities, in running the gulag for example, quite acceptable). The
"bitches" came out ahead. Soviet totalitarianism did not eliminate
crime and corruption; rather it made the nomenklatura the greatest
mafia of all.

Crime and corruption grew visibly after Stalin, especially in the
late Brezhnev years. The scandals of Boris the Gypsy, Galina
Brezhneva's diamonds and her MVD general husband Churbanov (who later
went to jail) played a significant role in Yuri Andropov's rise and
were widely reported in the West. In 1985, based on work by two
superb CIA analysts, the National Intelligence Council produced the
first and only comprehensive National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on
the internal condition of the Soviet system (since entirely
declassified). It identified growing crime and corruption as a major
pathology threatening the Soviet system. Konstantin Simis and Arkadii
Vaksberg wrote books that spelled it all out.

Toward the very end of the Gorbachev era, in May 1991, I vividly
recall the eminent Russian sociologist, Vladimir Shlapentokh, warning
a conference of intelligence community analysts that the
criminalization of Russian society was the most profound trend we had
to assess.

For me personally--and for a number of younger analysts more
influential than me in later years--an important learning experience
was the "Saga of the KGB Money." In mid-spring 1992, early in the
Yeltsin regime, a retired colleague visited me to report that the
international detective firm for which he now worked had been hired
by the Yeltsin-Gaidar government to find vast sums essentially stolen
by the KGB on behalf of itself and the CPSU and deposited abroad in
bank accounts and front companies. Might not U.S. intelligence help
to recover this money for the benefit of Russian reforms?

Our specialists on the KGB had, indeed, observed such activity since
the late 1980s. Subsequent evidence reveals that it stemmed from
top-level CPSU instructions in the mid-1980s. Using semi-private
cooperatives, the KGB sold cheaply acquired Soviet commodities abroad
at world prices, putting the proceeds into disguised foreign accounts
and front companies, including, according to many public sources, the
later notorious Nordex case. Initially the KGB objective was simply
commercial cover. But the program evolved into operating businesses
for off-budget revenues, and from there into avenues for squirreling
away funds for the safe retirement or political comeback of embattled
communist leaders. Lines of business came to include money
laundering, arms and drug trafficking, and other plainly criminal
activities. Before long, intelligence, business, politics and crime
blurred indistinguishably into each other.

What sums were involved? Some in the U.S. intelligence community
estimated about $20 billion. But there was a wide range of
uncertainty: one private analysis I learned about later estimated
$4-6 billion; Russian press speculations ran to $100 billion. By all
reckonings the amounts were very substantial.

Could U.S. intelligence help find the money? Specialists in
collection disciplines informed me that we could indeed help,
although at some risk to our sources, should, for example, court
cases expose them. It would be rather similar to tracking money in
pursuit of drug traffickers.

But should the U.S. government render such help to Russia? For a
policy decision, the late Ed Hewitt, then running Soviet affairs on
the National Security Council, assembled officials from State,
Treasury, Defense and the intelligence community. The answer was no.
Some worried about risk to intelligence sources. But the main
rationale was the following: capital flight is capital flight. We can
no more help Russia retrieve such money than we can help Brazil or
Argentina. If they get the economic fundamentals right, the money
will return. I cannot remember whether anybody put it so explicitly,
but the implication was clear: it doesn't matter who has the money or
how it was acquired, even if by theft; so long as it is private, it
will return to do good things if there is a market.

About a year later, my retired colleague updated me on subsequent
developments. On its own, his company located substantial funds
expatriated by the KGB. It informed its client and suggested
approaches for recovering the funds. By that time, however, the
Russian government no longer seemed interested. Obviously, top
officials and organizations had found ways to access the funds that
did not require, indeed would be disrupted by, official efforts to
repatriate them. When some while later I read an interview in which
Pavel Borodin, the long-time quartermaster of Yeltsin's Kremlin,
proudly reported that he managed several hundred private companies to
bring in off-budget revenues, I had a feeling I knew where he got his
start-up capital. I also felt I knew more about the suicide of
Central Committee money handler Nikolai Kruchina after the aborted
August 1991 coup. He obviously feared the most severe punishment at
the hands of the post-communist regime.

Lessons to Learn

This tale conveys several lessons: The great Russian rip-off began
not under Yeltsin but under Gorbachev. It set the course for what
accelerated after him. This should put into perspective the clamor of
Russia's communists about corrupt reformers and comprador
capitalists: are they outraged by the crimes committed by their
former (and some present) associates, or by their failure to get a
share of the loot? It should also give pause to those who pine for
the lost opportunities of perestroika. While Gorbachev pondered the
"500 Day Plan", his minions were already plundering Russia.

When the KGB was energetically moving money west and south, Primakov
was a very influential adviser to Gorbachev on security and
intelligence affairs, and Maslyukov was head of Gosplan. Did they not
know what was going on? Later heading the svr, Primakov inherited
control over the funds. Yet, reportedly, he urged closing down the
Supreme Soviet investigation into what happened to them. It would now
be a nice gesture, at least, to include a fresh look into this matter
among the current Russian government's anti-corruption measures.

Washington's part in purveying in Russia the dogma that markets will
triumph over all, that the ownership and source of wealth matter not,
so long as it is (or seems) private, began not in the Clinton
administration but under President Bush. I confess some chagrin for
not making more of a fuss at the time. If the KGB's theft of Russia's
money in 1985-91 was capital flight, then so was the smuggling of
Nazi gold in 1945. The crime spree that began under Gorbachev and the
dogmas about Russian economic reform that began in Washington under
Bush had a similar fate: they both escalated to do more damage under
their successors.

The burden of the foregoing is that American intelligence analysts
and policymakers should have known about the Russian crime and
corruption problem as a threat to reform and as a challenge to our
grasp of Russian realities. Indeed, a fine analysis was done by the
State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research in April 1992.
But subsequently, neither American intelligence analysis nor American
policymakers adequately appreciated the crime and corruption problem.
Why was this?

One source of trouble was what we call "politicization", the warping
of intelligence analysis to fit political agendas. Risen's New York
Times article alluded to above charged that the Clinton
administration's Russia hands did not want to hear about Russian
crime and corruption, especially that involving top figures, because
this whole theme would complicate ongoing policies and tarnish the
images of those Russian and American officials who were partners in
reform and a new strategic relationship.

Risen's article cites unnamed policy making officials as objecting
that reporting about the corruption of high Russian figures was
vague; that it contained no "smoking gun"; and that it implied that
the United States should not deal with reportedly tainted figures.
These objections constitute, in my judgment, admission to the charge,
affirming that policymakers did resist this information and also
resisted explaining why they did so. But such rebuttals were and are
entirely beside the point. This analysis aimed not to support
prosecution of, or estrangement from, the foreign officials being
analyzed, but to inform American decisionmakers about their interests
and the context in which they had to operate. The recipients
evidently did not want to hear this. Their disdain for analysis about
corruption of Russian politics and their Russian partners did,
indeed, have a chilling effect on treatment of these topics,
especially during the critical years 1993-96. Friends in the foreign
service tell me that the same syndrome crimped reporting, especially
on economic reform, by our embassy in Moscow. But there were other
culprits than "customer sales resistance" at work.

Intelligence analysis brought its own vulnerabilities to the table,
first in the form of a post-Cold War agenda that has become ever more
operational (i.e., supportive of daily business) rather than focusing
on understanding the big picture; and second, a management code that
prizes above all serving--which can easily degenerate into
pleasing--the customer. Our policymakers did not much want, and our
intelligence analysts had little incentive to provide, a big-picture,
long-term assessment of Russian realities. They mainly wanted to get
through the next Gore-Chernomyrdin meeting, or the next quarrel about
Russian missile dealings with Iran.

Another difficulty was the tendency of a large bureaucracy to
pigeon-hole a topic with many aspects into one, typically
turf-conscious, organization. Needed, but lacking, was a multifaceted
team effort bringing together perspectives on Kremlin politics,
Russian business, privatization, banking, economic reform,
intelligence, foreign relations and weapons proliferation. Meanwhile,
the downtown customer community was fragmented by differing agendas,
such as managing our diplomacy with Moscow, supporting economic
reform, stopping proliferation and thwarting international organized
crime. The challenge to intelligence posed by Russian crime and
corruption was in these respects similar to other topics on the
post-Cold War agenda, such as weapons proliferation.

Nevertheless, efforts to paint the big picture still occurred. When
they did, intellectual blinders were as important as political
inhibitions in complicating the task. In particular, economic dogma
was at work. Analysts with impressive credentials in economics but
little appreciation for Russian history would say such things as,
"Russia's robber barons will ultimately go legit, just like ours
did." In doing so, they overlooked the fact that our robber barons
operated in a culture of law that eventually regulated or dismantled
the monopolies early industrialization allowed. American robber
barons, unlike the Russian, actually built productive enterprises.

Again, some opined (as Anatoly Chubais did in a recent interview)
that criminal protection rackets meet an objective economic need for
security that is unmet by the state. This claim reminds one of a
scene in the movie GoodFellas, where the local Don is described as
providing police protection to people who cannot go to the police.
While it may be sound economics, this claim is socially perverse; it
says something damning about both the situation and about those who
make it. And yet again, some analysts noted that corruption and officially
tolerated crime are the rule in most parts of the world, and the
at the United States, as an island of cleanliness, is very much the
exception--thus ignoring both our own corruption and what John Donne
said about islands. And, of course, they neglected the fact that
Russia is not Sicily, Colombia or the Philippines, but a nation of
ten time zones with twenty thousand nuclear weapons. It matters
whether any country is ruled by tyrants or thieves; but in the case
of Russia it matters more, much more.

In the end, these failings did not, I believe, have a direct impact
on U.S. policy. Rather, they represented some participation by U.S.
intelligence analysis in a general pattern of overlooking the darker
sides of Russian realities with respect to the Yeltsin regime, the
reform team, the consequences of the monetarist dogma, the real
nature of privatization, the fiscal and financial environment, and
flaws in elections. Where these realities impinged dangerously on
pressing U.S. security concerns, such as Russian nuclear technology
and weapons dealings with Iran, there was greater willingness to
accept and act on bad news. But even here, failure to face the
Byzantine disorder of Moscow politics and institutions probably
impeded our ability to get the desired results.

The Anatomy of Complicity

Dimitri Simes has given a vivid commentary in these pages on American complicity in Russia's crisis (Winter 1998/99). My dosing thoughts aim at some structuring of the problem for continuing debate.

The first culprit is, of course, the dogma of monetarism, its associated postulates and especially its oversights. It is clearly inadequate and often wrong for Russian conditions. Although its adherents frequently say the right things, they actually pay too little attention to the social, cultural, legal and institutional setting required for economic reform, and to the gaps between reality and pretense in various aspects of reform. Their healthy opposition to etatism slides into an unhealthy neglect of the need for a viable state in Russia, and, indeed, in most societies in need of major economic and political reform.

The second culprit is a cynical Washington habit of prettifying policies and glossing over their risks, failures and negative side effects. Much of Washington's action and rhetoric on Russia has been aimed at preserving the image of a foreign policy success, even as the image became more tarnished. The debacle of the past several months has elicited major "course corrections" from Secretary Albright, Deputy Secretary Talbott and others about Russia policy. But one combs through them line by line without finding any hint of an admission that past policies may have been flawed. Perhaps complete candor on a complex policy cannot be expected of any administration. But the lack of candor has serious costs. It magnifies the impact of failure when it occurs and multiplies the difficulties of recovery. Systematic misrepresentation of what our policies, our recommendations, our political support were producing has also contributed much to expunging popular respect and admiration for America among the Russian people, a tragic loss of a major political asset.

Finally, we must face the semi five issue of cronyism. The emergence of crony politico-capitalism in Russia has been accompanied and facilitated by inadequately transparent relationships among actors in Moscow, Washington, Wall Street and Cambridge, among other places. Some of this has been at least minimally illuminated - for example, the dubious activities of Harvard's Institute for International Development. George Soros' remarkable revelations about his lobbying for Russian bailout money during the summer of 1998 shed a bit of light on another aspect of this general phenomenon. How can one distinguish between suspicious dealings that ought to be stopped and the efforts of public and influential private figures legitimately but discreetly trying to influence sensitive matters? Why do I sense that when Chubais boasted last summer that "we conned" (my kinuli) the IMF into the latest pledge of credits, "we" did not refer just to Russians? If this is merely chumminess among a few top Russians and Americans who share belief in the monetarist dogma, it is bad enough. The larger concern is, as it were, "environmental." Our foreign policy, security and business dealings with Russia involve the gravest of stakes, enormous sums of money, and interaction among guileful, aggrandizing and, in some cases, ruthless players. These dealings have gone so deeply into a thicket of insider relationships that some bush hogging is called for. Without more transparency, there is too much room for the wasteful, the dangerous and the sinister.

Not all of America's relationship to Russia's crisis is complicit in its causes. Although to a far less extent than the Russian population, we too have been victimized by its results. A lot of U.S. taxpayer dollars now rest in overseas accounts, rather than being at work fueling Russia's recovery, as supposedly intended.

We have also been doing constructive work in service of American and Russian interests through such programs as Nunn-Lugar and efforts to safeguard nuclear materials. So far, congressional funding of these programs has not suffered from the deepening Russian crisis; but this is not guaranteed for the future. Correcting failures, protecting successes and keeping open opportunities for our policy toward Russia require a thorough stock-taking. Now is the time for it.

Fritz W. Ermarth retired from the CIA in October 1998 after a career that included chairmanship of the National Intelligence Council and two tours on the National Security Council staff. This article was reviewed by CIA's Publications Review Board to prevent disclosure of classified information and cleared; clearance does not constitute endorsement of assertions or judgments in the article.