To Viktor, with Love: How Gore botched Russia policy - Brief Article

Al Gore can claim, with some justice, that he's had more hands-on foreign-policy experience than George W. Bush. The problem is, the key experience-his leading role in Russia policy-was a disaster: Gore built a close relationship with Viktor Chernomyrdin, who is not only that country's longest-serving prime minister, but also one of the richest civil servants of our time. You see, Chernomyrdin is one of the dozen or so leading criminals in Russia.

At this point, the half-smart foreign-policy think-tank people will murmur that it's a rough world, no omelet without breaking eggs, etc., etc. And yes, if the people Gore sponsored had made their personal fortunes in the process of creating a post-Communist Russian renaissance, we could cut them some slack on the ethics questions. But that's not what happened: Gore's friends robbed Russia of everything they could steal, in the middle of the worst depression experienced by any country in the 20th century. Oh, and they robbed us blind as well-which helped cause the global financial crisis (nearly a meltdown) of 1998.

Russia has 150 million people, most of them poor, and they got a lot poorer under the administration of Gore's friend Chernomyrdin. The complicity of the U.S. government in this process might come back to haunt us: America had an enormous fund of goodwill among the Russian people at the end of the Cold War; they saw us as the good guys who treated defeated enemies fairly. They don't think that now.

Gore's apologists-both the official ones, such as Leon Fuerth, his foreign-policy adviser, and the semi-official ones, such as David Hoffman, the Moscow correspondent of the Washington Post-offer self-contradictory defenses of Gore's complicity with the Russian mega-criminal class. The first is: What choice did we have? Hoffman quotes Fuerth: "Is the idea supposed to be that we should have boycotted the government of Russia for five years, because that was Chernomyrdin's time in office-or deal with him?"

This defense is a false choice. Of course the United States has to "deal with" the governments with which it has diplomatic relations; but if the official counterparts are notorious criminals such as Chernomyrdin, the dealings should be correct, practical, and cool. Gore went far beyond that, making Chernomyrdin a partner in a sort of Renaissance-Weekend-meets-world-government arrangement called the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission. This wasn't some low-profile "back channel" operation: Gore and Chernomyrdin appeared together in venues such as the Charlie Rose show, mooning over each other like 16-year-olds.

One of the trumpeted successes of this relationship was a 1993 deal to recycle Russian bombs through the U.S. reactor-fuel market. The deal turned out to be a dud. One element of this swords-for-ploughshares swap was a U.S. government sale of uranium-enrichment plants. But-because the deal turned out to be a money-loser for the new uranium company-the management announced in June that it would have to cancel the uranium-purchase contract with the Russians, and sign a new one that would lead to the shutdown of a uranium plant in Ohio.

The Gore apologists' response would be, "Who could have foreseen that?" The answer is, everyone else in the uranium industry-since you can forecast uranium demand and contract expirations fairly accurately. Unfortunately, Gore and his associates figured that spin would turn into reality; not the most rational way to make policy.

That brings us to the next defense of Gore, in which his handlers and apologists argue that he knew all along that corruption was a problem in Russia. Says Fuerth: "Anyone who deals with Russia at all understands there is a problem that is widespread. It was on the commission agenda." But Gore asserts that he doesn't know if the allegations about Chernomyrdin's own corruption are true.

Is it reasonable to believe Gore really didn't know what was happening? In a word, no. A friend of mine was visiting Chernomyrdin's own Imperial Bank-every civil servant should have his own bank-one afternoon in the heyday of the Gore-Chernomyrdin alliance. He found the officers and directors in a state of confusion. A bomb had gone off in front of the bank that morning, and it was understood that one of their business rivals was sending them a message. But the bank was involved in so many shaky deals with other criminals that they didn't know which deal was at issue. They'd been sent a message they couldn't understand.

That's the kind of thing that happens when, like Chernomyrdin, you do business with just about anyone who will pay you a $1 million fee just for a hearing. Chernomyrdin's main power base was Gazprom, the natural-gas monopoly and the biggest company in the country, over which he exercised direct control all the time he was prime minister. He and his partners used it to set up a parallel financing system (to compete with the foreign-loan/banking scam run by another Gore client, Anatoly Chubais). Chernomyrdin made hundreds of millions, if not billions, from his end of the rackets. The operation of these systems was familiar to tens of millions of Russians. Among them, it is to be hoped, were one or two in contact with the CIA.