Russia, which is becoming increasingly self-confident yet is still undecided as to where it should channel its new energy, should take a look at its recent past, especially at the acute turning point in history that marked the end of the Cold War.

That was a truly tectonic shift in international relations. It included the end of the 40-year confrontation between the East and the West, the reunification of Germany, the deliverance of Eastern Europe from Soviet domination, Mikhail Gorbachev’s democratic revolution, the breakup of the Soviet Union and the defeat of the Communist ideology.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that decisions made in those years still shape the international situation. Since there is not much optimism about the current state of affairs in the world, there are many discussions as to whether politicians missed some rare chances at that time.

Archive records recently made public and memoirs of the main players give a better idea about the events of the late 1980s-early 1990s and how decisions were made on “the other side.” In addition, I have found some interesting things in my own notes which I made in those years and which I have finally found time to review.

Four decades of confrontational stagnation gave way to an explosive period – fortunately, not literally, not in terms of nuclear missile explosions, although that could have happened as well. It was an explosive period from the point of view of a wide range of possibilities with regard to the development of global politics – from military clashes of various scales to complete reconciliation between former enemies and their transition to true cooperation, with numerous intermediary tints.

The developments were triggered by Gorbachev’s perestroika. The Soviet Union focused on a breakthrough in relations with the United States. In those years it was the axis on which all international stability balanced. I must admit that the administration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan, for all its inconsistencies and contradictions, met the Soviet initiatives with growing readiness. By the time Reagan handed over power to George Bush in January 1989, the two countries had achieved a lot – especially considering the low level from which they had started:

• The Soviet Union and the U.S. concluded their first ever agreement on the elimination – that is, not on the limitation, as had been the case in the past, but on the physical destruction – of a whole class of weapons, namely American and Soviet medium-range missiles. From this point of view that agreement was destined to remain unique. By the way, the Pentagon tried to dissuade Reagan from signing it as the U.S. Pershing and cruise missiles deployed in Western Europe gave America a huge advantage over the Soviet Union, while the Soviet Pioneer missiles, better known as SS-20, could not reach U.S. territory. U.S. hawk Richard Pearl even resigned in protest over this.
• On February 15, 1989, the last Soviet soldier – General Boris Gromov – left Afghanistan. The withdrawal of Soviet troops was in keeping with an agreement that was also signed by the Reagan administration.
• Documents were signed at the United Nations Headquarters in December 1988 in New York on the settlement of another long-standing conflict in Southwest Africa. That knot was undone not least due to the joint efforts of the U.S. and the Soviet Union. [1]
• The human rights issue was included in the agenda of the Soviet-U.S. dialog for the first time. This factor had an immediate positive impact on interaction in other areas. In January 1989, a meeting of member states of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in Vienna ended in success. Its failure was prevented by joint efforts of the Soviet Union and the United States, to which I can testify as I had a hand in those events. The Americans, due to the personal interference of Secretary of State George Shultz, supported the Soviet proposal to convene a Human Dimension conference in Moscow, which was worth a lot in those days.

The Soviet Union was ready to go further. Gorbachev, in his speech at a UN General Assembly session in December 1988, proposed a detailed program for improving global politics and announced plans for major practical steps: within the next two years, Moscow pledged to unilaterally reduce its Armed Forces by 500,000 personnel, as well as by 10,000 battle tanks, 8,500 artillery pieces and 800 combat aircraft. This was something that Europe was eagerly anticipating: this time, it was real détente, coupled with historical changes in the Soviet Union.

Suddenly, a chilly wind came from Washington. Almost immediately after the inauguration of the new president, the tone of public statements changed dramatically. Now it was warning that the true Soviet intentions were not at all obvious and that the trustful Yankees must be on their guard and must not only maintain, but build up their military – above all nuclear – might. And in general, the current behavior of America’s main enemy was nothing more than an aberration. Statements like that were made in public. As follows from materials made public now, inside the administration officials went even further: Reagan and Shultz were criticized for having yielded to the charms of Soviet leaders who, as the officials warned, were simply more sophisticated than their predecessors and, therefore, more dangerous.

The foreign policy team was almost completely replaced, as if some other political party had taken over from the Republicans in power in the United States. The key figures in the new team included: General Brent Scowcroft as National Security Advisor; his chief assistant Robert Gates (former CIA deputy director; now Secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush administration); Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney (now Vice President); and Secretary of State James Baker. In his memoirs, Baker does not hide his concern that Gorbachev’s strategy “was premised on splitting the alliance and undercutting us in Western Europe, by appealing past Western governments to Western publics.” [2]

The Soviet leader needed to be stopped before his “new thinking” and “Common European Home” started driving wedges into relations between the United States and Western Europe. The Soviet threat – the main thing that bound these two regions together – was disappearing. If the Soviet Union was withdrawing many of its troops from the territory of its Warsaw Pact allies, why keep so many American troops in Western Europe? Questions of this kind undermined the U.S. military-political stronghold in Europe, namely the North Atlantic Alliance. NATO needed to be preserved under any circumstances. And take those endless disarmament initiatives! They could easily provoke difficulties with the Congress over defense spending. Finally, doubts appeared among the allies about the U.S. leading role in the world.

After the new administration came to power, it immediately took a break to take a critical look at the policy toward the Soviet Union. Naturally, the Kremlin, which had welcomed the Bush victory and had even received some encouraging signals from Washington, was not happy about that. “Everything has stopped,” [Soviet Prime Minister] Nikolai Ryzhkov told Margaret Thatcher in my presence. She promised to talk with Bush. Gorbachev, as follows from his memoirs, felt like a bride abandoned at the altar. Specialists in U.S. studies from the Soviet Foreign Ministry tried to allay the fears of the Soviet leaders, saying that in the long run Washington would return to the Reagan era interaction. But it never did.

The pause in U.S.-Soviet relations continued almost throughout 1989: Gorbachev and Bush would meet for the first time only in December in Malta. By that time, the cards had already been dealt and the game was actually over. Suffice it to say that the Berlin Wall would have been destroyed by that time. Washington surely knew that Gorbachev was having difficulties at home and was interested in early success on the international arena. But U.S. politicians acted in keeping with a directive which in the spring of that year had completed the revision of the policy toward the Soviet Union: “American policy must be designed not to help Gorbachev but rather to challenge the Soviets in such a way as to move them in the direction we want.”[3]

The main target of the U.S. policy was Eastern Europe. Scowcroft wrote that “our principal goal should be to try to lift the Kremlin’s military boot from the necks of the East Europeans.”[4]

Moscow was still cherishing the illusion that East European capitals would produce Gorbachevs (heroes of perestroika) of their own, who, emancipated from the Kremlin’s control, would bring about a breakthrough for “socialism with a human face.” However, that could have happened two decades before, if the Prague Spring had survived. Now, most Eastern Europeans did not want “humane socialism,” or any kind of socialism whatsoever. Moscow now had to pay for the Brezhnev Politburo’s decision to send tanks into Prague, for the subsequent long years of stagnation and, finally, for decay. Who knows – if there had not been the Czechoslovakia of 1968, there might not have been the Afghanistan of 1979. Perhaps we would not have retained control over Eastern Europe, but if we had started perestroika 20 years earlier, we could have preserved a renewed Soviet Union.

Our other weak point was that we did not know how things really stood in other Communist countries. Our “friends” – as we called our Warsaw Pact allies – rarely reported unpleasant news to Moscow, even when they were aware of unfavorable developments. Soviet embassies, too, did not often present an objective picture of the situation in Eastern Europe – dark colors were not welcome then. Communist orthodoxy required depicting a situation the way it was supposed to be, rather than what it actually was.

The new U.S. administration started with revising the previous administration’s approach to what seemed to be an academic issue: whether the Cold War had ended or not. Margaret Thatcher had given a positive answer to this question in November 1988. George Shultz, when he stepped down as Secretary of State, “was apprehensive that the ‘new team’ didn’t understand or accept that the Cold War was over.”[5]

His apprehension was well-grounded: the Cold War continued for the new administration. George Bush announced that the Cold War “would not be over until the division of Europe had ended and Europe was ‘whole and free’.” Sometime later, to leave no doubts about U.S. goals, he added that “our overall aim is to overcome the division of Europe and to forge a unity based on Western values.”[6] Until then, Western leaders had never made such undisguised attempts to revise the geostrategic situation in Europe. Henry Kissinger’s initiatives aimed at streamlining the changes in Eastern European countries in the spirit of Realpolitik through negotiations with the Soviet Union were rejected after some hesitation.[7]

The only thing Washington wanted to negotiate were the best terms for the taking. Washington reasonably assumed that Gorbachev would be unable to keep what wanted to leave. The Americans took advantage of the difficulties faced by the Soviet leader at home and, worse still, in his own team.

From the point of view of geopolitics, Eastern Europe was, above all, East Germany. When one urged Eastern Europeans to gain freedom (which implied emancipation from the Soviet Union) and when economic aid was closely linked to “political liberalization,” the question inevitably arose: What would happen to the existence of the two German states? Until then, the East and the West had been unanimous on this issue: the status quo would be maintained. But for how long? On March 20, 1989, Scowcroft wrote in a memo to Bush that “virtually no West German expects German reunification to happen in this century.”[8]

Such an approach needed to be changed. The efforts to cede Eastern Europe from the Soviet Union focused on the reunification of Germany. There were many signs that it was initiated by Washington. It was Americans, not West Germans, who in the spring of 1989 gave the initial impetus to the movement which gained momentum so rapidly. It was from Washington that Bonn received the instruction “Go ahead, we will support you” – together with a clearly defined price: non-withdrawal from NATO. A united Germany must remain within the frameworks of Western alliances, while U.S. troops would remain on its territory.

American politicians, including former diplomats with whom I talked, strongly deny that the first word about the reunification of Germany came from the United States. One of them, who is close to the Democratic Party, even argued that the then administration was not quick-witted enough for that.

The reunification plan involved risks, considering the Soviet troops deployed in East Germany and the reluctance of Washington’s European allies to see a united Germany. Yet it could offer a lot from the point of view of intercepting the strategic initiative from the Soviet Union and, still more important, it could help the Americans to channel the imminent changes in the required direction. Moreover, the specter of the Treaty of Rapallo [a 1922 agreement between Germany’s Weimar Republic and the Soviet Union – Ed.] was looming over them.

For the time being, the Americans preferred not to talk about “moving beyond the status quo” even with their allies across the ocean. The U.S. would lose little from Germany’s unification carried out on Washington’s terms; rather they would gain from it, whereas the Western Europeans’ gains were not obvious. In any case, they would have more work on their hands, while Germany would be engrossed for a long time in its domestic affairs, which the subsequent difficult absorption of East Germany confirmed.

Meanwhile, Gorbachev, struggling against fierce resistance, was conducting an unprecedented liberalization of Soviet society. However, he had very few instruments at his disposal. It was then that perestroika particularly needed understanding and support from the West – if, of course, the latter was really concerned about democracy. But, precisely at that very moment, the U.S. pushed the accelerator of two parallel processes – German reunification and the painful ousting of the Soviet Union from Europe. All is fair in love and war, even though it is a Cold War.

In the first few months of 1989, Bush advisers proposed that he reanimate the German issue from a years-long state of anabiosis. The president was advised to “get ahead of the curve” on the issue of German unification or Gorbachev “might grab it first.”[9]

In May of the same year, Bush said in an interview that, if unification was achieved at acceptable terms, that would be fine. The U.S. president also came out with a public peace initiative, making seemingly bold proposals concerning conventional armaments. The proposals were aimed at a vulnerable point of the Soviet Union – its advantage in conventional weapons in Europe – and were intended to distract attention from nuclear arms where the U.S. and NATO had an edge. The proposals were timed to coincide with a summit session of the North Atlantic Council, held in May 1989. Council members were pleased that the U.S. was regaining the role of leader. Yet, the Council’s Declaration of May 30, 1989, still had a cautious wording on the German issue: “We seek a state of peace in Europe in which the German people regains its unity through free self-determination.” Yet, the word was said – and said as a common position of NATO.

Now the idea needed to be “sold” to the main actors. Current memoirs about those events do not conceal that the Americans were the first to raise the reunification issue in their contacts with highly placed West German officials. Interestingly, they met with a reserved reaction. This follows even from Bush’s conversation with NATO Secretary General Manfred Wörner of Germany, now declassified along with many other materials. The most the West Germans were willing to do was to politely prod the Americans to take further steps.

Although the West German government quickly grasped the new situation, it was slow to act. Horst Teltschik, Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s assistant for foreign policy and security and his main adviser on German reunification, recalled later that the United States “was far ahead of the Germans at this time”[10] on this issue. Compare the chronology: Bush spoke about the importance of the German issue in May 1989, while Kohl made his key statement to the effect that this issue was again on the international agenda, in late August 1989.

Why didn’t Kohl and his team believe in their luck at once? Were they afraid they would scare it away with untimely actions? Did they consider it more reliable first to soften East Germany with substantial economic aid, which Bonn had already been providing for several years, and only then pick a ripe fruit? I dare surmise that some West German policymakers tried to figure out whether Bonn would gain much from a deal with the Americans, which would perpetuate Germany’s membership in NATO, and whether a unified Germany could get full freedom of action. Such thoughts, if they ever existed, quickly vanished because their implementation required a different Soviet policy. Moscow, in turn, lulled itself into thinking that it had 50 or even 100 years of leeway, and that even then the issue would be decided by history.

Gorbachev’s memoirs make no mention of German unification until the time when it became inevitable, even when he writes about his visit to West Germany in June 1989 and his conversation with Chancellor Kohl. We must have overestimated the importance of Old Europe’s unwillingness to fight for a unified Germany. But our main mistake was that we miscalculated the strength of the East German regime. Erich Honecker annoyed many people. When, finally, he was replaced by Egon Krenz in October 1989 (weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall), it was already too late.

Encouraged and prodded by the Americans and then by the voice of the East German population, Kohl resolutely assumed the role of a key actor. Bonn spared no money. Kohl promised to exchange weak East German marks for West German hard currency at a rate of one to one, which was actually done. Washington and Bonn kept adding fuel to their coordinated policy. East German shops began to fill up with goods from West Germany; border checkpoints between the two countries disappeared; and the two Germanys were engaged in hasty bilateral negotiations on their economic and political union. Soon these rapid developments became irreversible.

For a short period of time I was directly involved in the German affairs as I participated in the first few sessions of the “Two-plus-Four” group.[11] The group was set up in February 1990 to discuss international aspects of the impending unification. Due to joint U.S.-West German efforts, the group refrained from discussing the domestic affairs of a united Germany, however hard we resisted. I assumed the new assignment inspired by what I had achieved in African and humanitarian affairs. But the fact that I was unable to influence the policy making left me with a sad feeling, which is still not over.[12] At the Soviet Foreign Ministry and the Central Committee, the tone in the policy toward Germany was set by people who had for decades worked on German affairs, and many of them were very old. One could not but share their bitterness over what was going on, but their slogan “No Retreat,” not backed with real possibilities, hanged in mid-air.

Until the very end, we did not even think of changing the status quo of our own volition and putting East Germany at risk. We preferred to wait, stepping back and snarling, until the country itself went. Charles de Gaulle’s advice that one should lead the inevitable if one was unable to prevent it was not for us.

As a result, we failed even to retreat in an organized fashion. The discord hit diplomats and even the Politburo, which increasingly often let this into the open. I think many remember the open anti-Gorbachev speech by Politburo member Yegor Ligachev about the “sellout” of East Germany. Moscow’s rivals could pick from its reaction whatever suited them best at the moment. One day, Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze could bargain with the West over unification terms, and the next day they could announce that they would defend the German Democratic Republic until the end.

The Soviet Union itself resembled a house divided which, as the Bible warned, cannot stand. The division went along ethnic boundaries. The Baltic nations were about to go; the Caucasus were on fire; and separatist sentiments were growing in Ukraine. The Soviet leaders were torn between snowballing problems at home – old problems which for decades had been swept under the rug, and new ones which surfaced when people became intoxicated by freedom and glasnost – and on the international arena, as there was deep inequality between the East and the West in the balance of forces. Moscow still had military might, and many of its troops were stationed in East Germany and some other Warsaw Pact countries. Yet it was here where a continuously ignored conflict lay – we had military might, built up through strenuous efforts, but could we really use it? The Soviet Army was well-trained and armed, and in East Germany alone it had over 750 cantonments, 5,000 military camps and 47 airfields, but could all those troops be moved out of the barracks? This was hardly possible due to domestic and international factors.

There was tense inner rivalry in the Soviet Union; everything was done to weaken the Center. There was even less accord among those who we believed were our allies. I remember a March 1990 Warsaw Pact conference in Prague. However hard we tried, we failed to hammer out a common approach to the German issue and even to a united Germany’s non-participation in NATO. That was no wonder, since this happened one day after supporters of an actual Anschluss had won elections in East Germany.

In contrast, we were confronted by a strong and united rival. Naturally, there were differences among NATO members, but I do not believe that we could really take avail of them, especially considering our condition then. The Americans covered Kohl against the discontent of France, Britain, Italy and smaller European countries. If those countries broke ranks, they were immediately called to order. Francois Mitterrand, for example, who was the first to realize that the process could not be stopped, tried to get something for his country. And he really got it – Kohl promised, and kept his word, to speed up the establishment of a currency union within West European integration. Margaret Thatcher held out longer than the others but, being more and more often in the minority, settled for minor concessions. U.S. observers rightly noted that those who resisted a fast reunification had respective aspirations, but lacked a policy.

The Americans tried to scare their worried allies with the possible neutrality of Germany and exploited the fact that no one in NATO wanted the American troops to leave West Germany. Kohl, in turn, frightened Washington with the Kremlin. He told Baker that if he had not put forward his plan, “the Soviets might have proposed reunification linked to the neutralization of Germany in a reprise of Stalin’s ploy in 1952.”[13] Such a move, he asserted, “had been in the air.” (Where was it in the air, I wonder?) However, the differences in the West German-U.S. tandem were rare. For the United States and West Germany, the task was facilitated by changes in the internal political situation in Eastern European countries, above all in the German Democratic Republic, Poland where Solidarity won the elections in 1989, and Hungary.[14] These changes were not in favor of the Soviet Union and, in general, not in favor of socialism, if we view them from the point of view of ideology.

The public on that side was purely pragmatic and not without treachery, to put it mildly. We, in turn, were overly ideologically minded. The “protection of socialist gains,” even when this was irrational, stood in the way of a policy that would place state interests above all. Regretfully, the Foreign Ministry apparatus during Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko’s 28-year-long service steadily lost its ability to think and work creatively. What ministry officials called adherence to principle and what in real fact was merely a “nyet,” without any explanations, was valued more than a desire to find an unorthodox solution and to reach a mutually acceptable compromise. Even in the years of perestroika it was a rule that no one at the ministry show any initiative on the issue of détente, while everyone turned up when it came to giving a rebuff.

Meanwhile, we had to peel the true intentions of our partners from under two or three layers of verbal acrobatics. In one specific case, we were obviously late: we overlooked the change in U.S. policy toward an early unification of Germany. At first, this policy was accompanied by assurances that Moscow should not take seriously some statements that were targeted at the electorate, and that in any case the keys to unification were in Soviet hands.[15] What Bush or Kohl suggested to Gorbachev confidentially and especially in private was often taken as the ultimate truth. But when things turned hot, the U.S. and West Germany acted on the verge of foul: they used a whole arsenal of reticence, half-truths and promises which they knew they would never keep. Proofs of that are plenty, including in the above-cited books by Western authors. Here are just two classic examples.

Gorbachev skillfully operated the ‘Common European Home’ categories aimed at removing frontiers in Europe and advocated broader use of structures of the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe, both those already established and those only planned. The Helsinki Final Act not only fixed the borders in Europe, but also laid the foundation for collective security on the continent. That was our alternative to the confrontation of military-political blocs. West Germans repeatedly promised, including at the top level, that the process of Germany’s reunification would be incorporated into pan-European structures.[16] Naturally, nothing like this happened, and completely different structures were put to use.

The other example is even more unattractive; it refers to solemn assurances by American and West German leaders, both confidential and public, that after a united Germany joined NATO, the latter would not move an inch eastwards. That was done to wrest consent from us for a united Germany’s NATO membership, which we fiercely resisted. In addition, in the then atmosphere of rapid changes, people cherished the illusion that Europe soon would not have any military blocs at all. The newly-started transformation of NATO was viewed as confirming those hopes. In particular, NATO’s summit meeting in London in July 1990 mapped out some measures in this direction. NATO showed its true self later, in 1999, when it bombed Yugoslavia, which was the first time in its history that it used military force.

In its actions toward Gorbachev in 1989-1991, the U.S. administration was guided by the rule “Give nothing, take everything, demand more.” In January 1992, in his State of the Union address to both houses of Congress, Bush “declared triumphantly that the United States had won the Cold War.”[17] Those words were a logical consequence of that policy.

That was a delayed yet finally frank response to Gorbachev’s call for cooperation. The Soviet leader viewed the end of the Cold War as a mutual victory of the Soviet Union and the United States and, moreover, of all sensible political figures of those times. Void of confrontation, the U.S. and the Soviet Union could become truly strategic partners. Menacing problems were already rising then, ranging from international terrorism to proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to extremism of all kinds and hues. The leaders of perestroika warned the Americans about them, and I witnessed that. For us, the solution of problems related to the end of the Cold War was a necessary stage which was to be followed by our joint work with the U.S. The Bush administration never went beyond the first part of that process. It was not inspired by the prospect of building a better world together, as Reagan had proposed at the end of his presidency. Apparently, it was more important to it to go down in history as the victor. What could be more convincing proof of victory than the breakup of the Soviet Union – even if this happened after the Cold War was over, this time once and for all?[18] It seemed it was an hour of triumph for America, when it established itself as the full-fledged master of the world. It did not even need allied Western Europe, not to mention Russia. So, one could talk about lost opportunities only by stretching the imagination; they were simply not taken into account. The algorithm of projecting the American might onto the foreseeable future and further on was chosen consciously. The voices of advocates of a more balanced approach were shouted down by those who believed that America would have enough strength for everything.

So, what do we have as a result? Two wars with no end in sight, snowballing international problems, and a decreasing number of countries wishing to help the U.S. with solutions. There is hardly any country that has denied itself the pleasure of shooting critical arrows at the country whose popularity rating has been decreasing everywhere. Indignant Americans wonder why? After all, they have set themselves the noble goal of rebuilding the world on the principles of democracy. But, as Maximilien Robespierre, the French revolutionary leader, once said, no one loves armed missionaries.

In conclusion, I would like to offer readers a highly hypothetical supposition. If the American administration had supported Gorbachev, would he have been able to bring his perestroika to a successful conclusion?

My answer is Gorbachev’s chances would have definitely increased – especially if the Americans had come out as the leaders of political and material support for Gorbachev’s reforms on the part of the West, as Thatcher urged them to do. I heard U.S. political analysts say that history could have developed differently had Reagan stayed in power. But, however important international factors could be, they were not dominant. As a poet said, there was a “little rift within the lute.”

For years, previous Soviet leaders, up to Konstantin Chernenko, had been building a system which, however, failed to stand the test of time. It was perfect in serving the interests of the ruling elite, placing it above all criticism and not making it accountable to anyone but itself. But rule without freedom doomed the country to a wretched existence. In economic, technological and many other respects, we were increasingly lagging behind the West with which we entered a bitter ideological and military confrontation. By the beginning of perestroika, the Soviet Union was already in a deep systemic crisis, which was barely visible to the naked eye as there was no publicity or freedom of information in the country. Gorbachev’s attempts to softly change the system with economic and political reforms and put the country onto the track of social-democratic development were suppressed by the Communist Party bureaucracy from the inside.

Add to this the loss by Washington of a unique historical chance. It was overwhelmed by short-term interests and down-to-earth pragmatism. Perhaps the U.S. administration lacked the strategic farsightedness of great American presidents, like Woodrow Wilson or Franklin D. Roosevelt. By the way, the choice made by the Americans at the final stage of perestroika was not accidental – instead of supporting the reforms of Gorbachev who strongly advocated “democratic socialism,” they preferred the destructive anti-communism of Boris Yeltsin.

And even after the Soviet Union broke up (Bush was the first to learn the news from a telephone call from the Russian president) and after a new government came to the Kremlin, the U.S. did little to support Russian democrats. Instead, it took avail of Russia’s weakness. The attitude toward Russia as a “defeated country” was expressed in NATO’s eastward expansion, in the bombings of Yugoslavia, and in the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty. The same attitude is behind the strong unwillingness to admit that Russia’s interests in the territory of the former Soviet Union have great and sometimes even vital importance for it. But the DNA of U.S. foreign policy is well-known and will hardly change any time soon.

Another more important question remains open: What path will Russia take?

In the opinion of many American experts, in order to overcome the deep crisis of the 1990s, Russia inevitably had to go through the restoration of an authoritarian regime. But perpetuating forms of a political system that closely resemble those that proved to be untenable in the period that was fatal to the Soviet Union would mean making the same historical mistake. Strength may prove to be illusory. If a country wants to feel confident on the international arena and to react to outside impacts quickly and adequately, it must build its home life in accordance with political parameters that produce the greatest economic effect and the best quality of life. This is particularly true at the present time of globalization and rapid technological progress. Russia will not get away from democracy.

History cannot be cheated – in it, like in everyday life, what must happen usually happens.