Report Blames Gore for Russia’s Failures

House Republican leaders accused Vice President Al Gore and other officials Tuesday of mismanaging U.S. relations with Russia, with results ranging from the collapse of the Russian economy to the spread of government corruption and organized crime.

In a 209-page report, a GOP panel chaired by Rep. Christopher Cox of Newport Beach said the administration used U.S. aid to subsidize Russia’s central government at the expense of grass-roots efforts to build a free market economy.

“Our political capital and goodwill has been misspent, indeed squandered,” Cox said in an interview. “The Russians have every right to be unhappy with where they’ve ended up.”

Democrats dismissed the report as election-year politics. “Coming so close to election time . . . it raises questions about why an important foreign policy issue is being done in such a partisan manner,” White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said.

The House panel that produced the report included 12 Republicans and no Democrats.

The report charges that the Clinton administration’s policies toward Russia were doomed by “fundamental flaws . . . a strong preference for strengthening Russia’s central government rather than deconstructing the Soviet state and building from scratch a system of free enterprise; [and] a close personal association with a few Russian officials, even after they became corrupt.”

It says the administration was responsible for the 1998 collapse of Russia’s economy, because it failed to press for free market reforms.

The Cox panel blames three officials (dubbed “the troika” in the report) for the problems: Gore, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers.

The report charges that Gore made a serious error by working closely with Russian Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, who has been widely accused of corruption. “In this way, the Clinton Administration--and Gore personally--contributed not only to Russia’s failure to overcome corruption, but to the spread of corruption throughout the Russian political system,” the report says.

Gore aides have said that the charges against Chernomyrdin were unproven and that the vice president had no choice but to deal with the Russian prime minister.

“We have worked very diligently over the last eight years to engage the Russians, to try to promote democracy and to make the world a safer place,” Lockhart said.