The Clinton-Yeltsin Relationship in Their Own Words

Clinton Presidential Library Releases Memcons and Telcons of the 1990s

“We’ll build the partnership on the basis of our friendship, yours and mine, and we’ll do so for the sake of world peace”

“I understand your point Bill, and I will act as you suggest I should, especially since this is part of past practice established between you and me, and it has never failed us in the past” (Yeltsin to Clinton, September 12, 1998)

Washington, D.C., October 2, 2018 – President Bill Clinton saw Russian leader Boris Yeltsin as indispensable for promoting American interests following the collapse of the Soviet Union, often prompting him to take controversial steps to ensure Yeltsin’s political survival, according to top-level memoranda of conversation just released from the Clinton presidential library.

Clinton believed backing Yeltsin personally was necessary to ensure Russian stability and market reform, which he privileged over the development of democracy in the former Soviet republic, a careful reading of the presidential memcons shows. These priorities led to the U.S. tolerating election irregularities, and doing little to oppose Yeltsin as he empowered oligarchs and installed Vladimir Putin as his successor, among other consequences.

The new records confirm the Bill-Boris camaraderie was genuine but also masked a complex relationship and ultimately an uneven partnership that reflected the diametrically opposite political and economic trajectories of their two nations in the 1990s.

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The Clinton-Yeltsin Relationship in Their Own Words

By Svetlana Savranskaya and Mary Sarotte

In July 2018, students of U.S.-Russian relations added hundreds of pages of declassified documents to their required reading list when the Clinton Presidential Library released almost all memoranda of Clinton-Yeltsin conversations in response to requests by historian Mary Sarotte in 2015. Today the National Security Archive publishes the highlights of this release.

The partnership between the United States and Russia that Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin tried to build in the 1990s succeeded only in part – but even that partial success helped to make the world a safer place. Cooperation on non-proliferation efforts, particularly within the framework of the Nunn-Lugar program, led to the successful withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Belarus, Kazakhstan, and above all Ukraine (briefly the third-largest nuclear power in the world due to the amount of Soviet-era weaponry on its territory). The Clinton-Yeltsin cooperation also enabled the safe dismantlement and storage of nuclear weapons in Russia as it complied with the START I treaty. Russia even participated in the international peacekeeping mission in Bosnia, became a member of the G-8, and joined the Council of Europe. In return, the Clinton administration provided badly needed economic assistance and used its leverage with international financial institutions to help Russia.

However, many contentious issues damaged the partnership along the way – most importantly NATO expansion and the military campaign in Kosovo. And, behind the rhetoric of equality and friendship lay the undeniable reality of an enormous power and status disparity. Russia was no longer the superpower that had challenged the United States at the height of the Cold War, and it was not even the declining-but-democratizing Soviet Union of Mikhail Gorbachev. Moscow often felt disrespected, and claimed that its interests and priorities were not being duly considered. For its part, the United States was willing to cooperate only – in Strobe Talbott’s words – on “what we deem to be [Russia’s] legitimate security concerns,” not on everything the Russians claimed to be important.

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