Reinventing Russia: Al Gore’s Misguided Quest

By E. Wayne Merry,
The Wall Street Journal, 08 September 1999

With each new revelation of Russian money laundering or the failures of reform, accusing
fingers point at Vice President Al Gore. Why? Aren’t the State and Treasury departments more
likely culprits? Obviously Mr. Gore is a partisan political target, but the real reason he finds
himself in the hot seat is his involvement in a little-known government body called the
Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission.

The commission is a bilateral coordinating mechanism co-chaired by the American vice
president and whoever is the Russian prime minister (originally Viktor Chernomyrdin). It meets
formally twice a year in alternating capitals, but the working level never stops. The American
delegations travelling to Moscow total 700 to 800 officials, including many hangers-on who
never see the inside of a meeting room. The Russians, from poverty and good sense, are more
austere in their staffing.

The Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission was launched early in the Clinton administration as
the
keystone of its partnership with Boris Yeltsin’s government. The new administration recognized
that vested interests and bureaucracies on both sides were stuck in Cold War thinking. The idea
was to engage the No. 2 man in both political systems to force initiatives through their respective
red-tape factories. Expectations were high. Indeed similar commissions were created for Mr.
Gore to co-chair with Ukraine, Kazakstan and South Africa.

Political and economic reforms in Russia have largely failed, and part of the blame must go
to
Mr. Gore and his commission. Over time the commission has taken on a bureaucratic life of its
own; it now impedes rather than encourages innovation. U.S. agencies cannot conduct normal
cooperation with Russian counterparts because the commission needs fodder for its twice-yearly
summits: new programs to unveil, documents to sign, photo-ops for the principals. New areas for
cooperation are very limited and for the most part were exhausted long ago, but even initiatives
of real merit are deliberately delayed to pad the press conferences. No program or project is ever
deemed less than a success; every project gets at least an A-minus.

U.S. staffs are under constant political pressure to increase the “deliverables” for each
meeting–regardless of whether these taxpayer-supplied goodies will do Russia any good. I have
conducted
negotiations at the defense ministry in Moscow to offer programs and funding we knew the
Russians did not want and would not accept, but we could not take “no” for an answer. (The
Russians must have concluded that we were either arrogant, naive, or in search of spying
opportunities.)

Still worse, Washington has increasingly politicized its own internal analyses of Russian
reform
so as not to rock the commission boat. As first publicly exposed by James Risen in the New York
Times and by former Central Intelligence Agency official Fritz Ermarth in The National Interest,
the CIA repeatedly warned the White House of massive corruption on the Russian side, to no
avail. One report implicating then-Prime Minister Chernomyrdin (formerly head of the famously
corrupt national gas monopoly Gazprom) was returned with a barnyard epithet scrawled across
the front in the vice president’s hand.

During 1993-94, when I was in charge of the U.S. Embassy’s reporting on Russian politics,
there
was an unmistakable shift in the Clinton administration’s priorities, from “tell us what is
happening” to “tell us that our policy is a success.” On the political side, I believe we told
Washington the truth (with full support from the embassy leadership). On the economic side, the
commission had (in Mr. Ermarth’s words) a “chilling effect” because the same people were
responsible for implementing the commission’s agenda and for evaluating the Russian reform
process–an inherent conflict of interest.

As a result, I personally saw dozens of draft reports on economic problems that were never
transmitted, while the Treasury representative blocked a negative assessment of Russia’s
capacity to introduce a market economy rapidly by arguing it would “give Larry Summers a
heart attack.” As Robert Kaiser has reported in the Washington Post, my successor had similar
experiences from 1994 to 1997.

The commission should long ago have gone out of business. Why doesn’t it? The answer lies
in
the domestic politics in both countries.

Rather than a way of using the power of the vice president to advance Russian relations, the
commission became an instrument to advance the political career of the vice president. Mr. Gore
became the superminister for Russia with his future presidential campaign in mind, so he could
claim another achievement–remaking Russia into a market economy–to go along with
reinventing the federal government and inventing the Internet.

The commission served a similar purpose for Mr. Chernomyrdin, giving the dour apparatchik
a
major foreign-affairs role not called for in the Russian constitution. The result was a relationship
built on shared personal ambitions rather than on mutual national interests, and a personalization
rather than an institutionalization of ties.

Mr. Gore’s association with the new Russia is now proving a political liability. So with each
new
Russian scandal, the vice president’s spokesmen assert he was not informed, not engaged, not
responsible. Mr. Gore undertook to reinvent Russia. Can he really claim not to hold the
patent?