U.S. Signals Change of Course in Policy Toward Russia

In a speech that carried the first hints of a major rethinking of American policy toward Russia, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright acknowledged Friday that Moscow’s problems can be resolved only if the solutions have popular legitimacy.

“I do not want to suggest that there is any uniquely Russian way to prosperity,” she said in a formal address to members of the U.S.-Russia Business Council in Chicago. “The policies we would like the Russian government to pursue have to be worked out democratically, with the support and understanding of the Russian people, or they are going to fail.

“This means we need to be patient with the workings of the democratic process in Russia,” she added. “It also means we should not start each day by taking a census of reformers in the Kremlin or hold our breath every time there is a leadership change. We should be interested in politics, not personalities.”

Her comments were interpreted by Russia specialists here as an acknowledgment that tough, Western-designed economic recipes long backed by the Clinton administration as the key to Russia’s transition cannot succeed on their own. Albright’s speech also signaled that the United States is attempting to create distance between its support for reform in Russia and that for President Boris N. Yeltsin.

Administration critics long have chastised the United States and other Western countries for linking Yeltsin’s fate to that of the entire transition process away from communism in Russia.

U.S. officials dealing with Russia also have been criticized for pushing reforms that ignore the vast cultural differences that separate Russia from the West.

“It’s encouraging to see Secretary Albright beginning to recognize that if you are going to have an effective policy toward a major country . . . [it] must be based on the domestic political process,” said Dimitri Simes, a respected Russian emigre and director of the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom, an independent Washington-based think tank. “You have to start from the assumption that a serious country that stems from a different civilization and has different perceptions does not need an American model.”

Albright said the administration is reexamining all of its foreign assistance programs to Russia in the wake of the crisis there and is “retargeting money where it can be used effectively to support economic and democratic reform.”

“We will increase our support for small business and the independent media and try to bring a much larger number of Russian students, politicians and professionals to live and learn in America,” she said.

In addition to about $400 million in direct aid to Russia for dismantling nuclear weapons and keeping nuclear materials safe and secure, the United States last year provided $130 million for nonmilitary programs, including privatization and economic restructuring.

While the administration has requested an increase to $225 million in aid to Russia for civilian-only projects for 1999, a State Department official said Friday that he expects a de-emphasis of programs offering help in such areas as tax reform and energy deregulation--programs inherently heavy on Western advice.

Instead, he said, new support will be thrown into less politically charged programs such as exchanges that have brought about 35,000 Russians to the United States to watch U.S.-style democracy over the past five years.

“It will be at a lower level, people to people, and away from Moscow toward the regions,” the official said of future U.S. aid.