When President Bill Clinton eulogized Richard Nixon in April 1994, Mr. Clinton referred to advice he had received from the former president just the month before.
“Even in the final weeks of his life, he gave me his wise counsel, especially with regard to Russia,” Mr. Clinton said. “One thing in particular left a profound impression on me. Though this man was in his ninth decade, he had an incredibly sharp and vigorous and rigorous mind.”
The advice on Russia came in the form of a memo, never before seen by the public until now thanks to the work of researcher Anthony Constantini. In March 1994, following a trip to Russia, Ukraine, Germany and the United Kingdom, Nixon wrote a seven-page memo detailing the grave problems undermining Russia’s experiment with liberal democracy and market economics. He warned Mr. Clinton that the U.S. aid program was a corrupt mess and that Russian President Boris Yeltsin was faltering, largely because of his excessive drinking. Nixon recommended the aid program needed major oversight, and he suggested that Mr. Clinton find alternatives to Yeltsin who were dedicated to reform.
In this episode of History As It Happens, Mr. Constantini, who is a regular contributor to The American Conservative, says the memo opens a window into a critical period of U.S.-Russia relations. The stakes were evident to astute observers such as Nixon, who did not subscribe to triumphalist notions of “the end of history.” Should Russia fail to establish political and economic freedom, it would revert to despotism with grave consequences for the world, in Nixon’s view.
“The story can now be directly traced back to the events of the ’90s. And not in a sense that they were to blame for everything that went wrong, but you see the genesis of what happened,” said Mr. Constantini, who studied populism and the spread of democracy at the University of Vienna. Russia experienced massive economic hardship and national humiliation, as by the end of the decade its economic resources had been captured by oligarchs and the former Soviet satellite states began joining NATO. In 1999, Yeltsin handpicked Vladimir Putin to be his successor.
SEE ALSO: History As It Happens: Why Yeltsin chose Putin, why Putin chose war
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