U.S. Policy on Russia Seen as Failure by Some Experts

As Moscow’s new government of old faces searches for ways out of the country’s economic crisis, a heated debate has broken out among Russia specialists in the United States about how the Clinton administration should respond.

Some experts argue that recent events have unmasked as a catastrophic failure the seven years of U.S.-backed efforts to build free-market capitalism in Russia. What is needed, they argue, is emergency action to contain the immediate havoc and a wholesale overhaul of American policy.

“The collapse of Yeltsinism is the collapse of American policy toward Russia,” said Stephen P. Cohen, a professor of Russian studies and history at New York University. “Everything we’ve recommended there has been an abject failure.”

He called for the administration to lend its support to:

* an international humanitarian aid effort to ease the impact of what he believes will be a grueling winter;

* a scheduled $5-billion installment of a loan from the International Monetary Fund so that the Russian government can pay back wages;

* a reworking of Russia’s foreign debt.

“This is a destabilized, nuclear-laden country coming apart at the seams,” Cohen said. “Our priorities should be clear.”

Another group of experts--including many within the administration--believes that conditions in Russia are too fluid and the crisis too fresh to declare either the reform efforts pushed by Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, or U.S. support of those efforts, a failure.

“I don’t think it is either accurate or smart to say that Russia has fundamentally changed course,” Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott said. “I don’t believe . . . that reform in Russia has come to an end, and therefore U.S. policy has failed.”

Talbott added: “There’s no question that Russia has hit a major slippery spot on the road to its future. It’s slipping back and forth, and it’s not clear what direction it will be pointed when it comes through this slick spot. A crisis, yes, but what I’m cautioning [against] is proclaiming a crisis as a disaster.”

Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers took a similar tack in testimony earlier this week before the House International Relations Committee.

“It would be difficult to exaggerate the uncertainties of a moment such as this one,” he said.

Critics regard such comments as waffling by those who refuse to admit the failure of policies they backed so strongly.

So far, the Clinton administration has limited its response to the drastic downturn in Russia’s economy and corresponding political turmoil to low-keyed jawboning.

For instance, U.S. officials warned new Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov that Western help can only come if Russia follows responsible economic policies and does not try to pay the nation’s debts by printing money.

In his House testimony, Summers said the U.S. will recommend against the release of further financial aid from the IMF to Russia until the Primakov government imposes basic controls over the banking system, the budget process and the currency.

Since 1992, Russia has received more than $20 billion in financial assistance from the IMF.

In public statements and interviews this week, senior officials who deal with Russia policy gave no indication that any new U.S. initiative was in the works. Instead, they stressed that the tumult in Russia--which includes a strong backlash against further advice from the West--required a deliberately low profile.

So far, U.S. officials have resisted calls from some in Congress for emergency humanitarian assistance to help Russia through its winter--calls made against the backdrop of reduced harvests, a potato blight, diminishing food imports and the prospects of further economic problems.

“We don’t now see food shortages, although there is some hoarding,” State Department Russia expert Stephen Sestanovich told a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee hearing earlier this week. “One can’t react too quickly.”

Another senior administration official said offering unsolicited food aid was a “politically difficult” matter, given that Moscow already has rejected a Polish offer of such assistance. Humanitarian aid is under study, this official said, but so far “they haven’t asked, and we haven’t offered.”

Coit Blacker, who helped formulate Russia policy in the George Bush White House and is deputy director of Stanford University’s Institute for International Studies, endorsed the administration’s minimalist short-term response to the crisis.

“We can’t do much until the Russians present what they regard as a viable set of economic policy prescriptions,” he said. “We can continue to talk, to jawbone, to remind them how important it is to do what needs to be done, and that’s what’s happening now.”

Others, however--including those worried about Russia’s huge, tenuously guarded nuclear arsenal in such an unstable environment--vehemently disagreed.

“Our Russia policy is at a dead stop and sinking,” said Joseph Cirincione, an arms control specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “What concerns me most is that administration officials, to a person, seem complacent, blase” in their response.

“Control over Russia’s nuclear materials and expertise were already shaky, but in this crisis, this control is threatened with collapse,” he said.

Cirincione said he is especially concerned about the security of 715 tons of fissionable material--enough for 40,000 nuclear weapons--now guarded by individuals who have not been paid for months.

“As this crisis continues, some of these scientists, technicians and guards are going to conclude they’ll never get paid and will take action to feed their families using the resources they have,” he said, thus creating the prospect of the material being peddled on the black market.

As debate focuses on the immediate U.S. response to the Russian situation, questions are surfacing on the larger question of how a major reform effort, supported by Washington’s stamp of approval and more than $70 billion in combined Western loans and credits, could have gone so badly awry.

Efforts to create a free-market economy in Russia have generated a small group of powerful, super-rich individuals, known collectively as “the oligarchs,” but have also left millions of Russians unpaid.

Citing examples of massive corruption and misspent Western loan money, House International Relations Committee Chairman Benjamin A. Gilman (R-N.Y.) asked Talbott and Summers this week: “Was the administration ignoring all this, or just wishing it would all go away?”

Gilman continued: “How can Russia change from the ‘success story’ of our foreign policy, as it was portrayed by this administration just two years ago, into the dismal failure for our foreign policy that it appears to be today?”

The two administration officials disputed Gilman’s assessment.

Times staff writer Elizabeth Shogren contributed to this story.