A Secret Cable and a Clue to Where U.S.-Russia Relations Went Wrong

It was March 1994, more than two years after the Soviet Union disintegrated, and the debates within the U.S. Embassy in Moscow were heated. Diplomats in the economic section, backed by the Treasury Department in Washington, argued ardently that radical free-market reforms were the only path for post-Soviet Russia, and that democracy would surely follow. Political advisers believed, equally passionately, that such “shock therapy” would only worsen the devastating dislocation Russians were already suffering with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Russian people, they warned, would end up blaming America — and democracy itself — for their woes.

In the heat of the debate, E. Wayne Merry, the top political analyst in the embassy and one of the most forceful critics of shock therapy, set out a detailed case against it in a long telegram provocatively titled “Whose Russia Is It Anyway? Toward a Policy of Benign Respect.”

In an essay last month about the telegram, Mr. Merry argued that America back then was falling for the old fallacy of trying to understand a foreign country “by looking in the mirror.” The push for free-market reforms in a country without any experience of a market economy or democracy was, he wrote, “an especially virulent case of Washington institutions trying to ram a foreign square peg into an American round hole.”

Mr. Merry, now a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, told me in an interview, “Why did I end up writing those 70 paragraphs? I had for two and a half years been writing about these issues, and was very frustrated that nobody in D.C. was interested in anything other than economic theory coming down from Harvard.” He was so frustrated, he added, “I decided it was my duty as head of Pol/Int” — the political/internal department of the embassy — “to tell Washington what was going on.”

But the senior staff at the embassy kept dithering on how to officially attribute the cable, so out of frustration, he said, Mr. Merry sent it over what is known as the dissent channel, a back channel to the State Department set up during the Vietnam War to allow diplomats who differed with U.S. policy to register their views. The lengthy telegram and a brief rebuttal from the State Department were duly consigned to the sealed bin of official secrets.

But the cable was not forgotten. For years, Russia experts at the National Security Archive, a nonprofit institution that publishes declassified government documents, pursued what came to be known as “Wayne Merry’s long telegram,” a nod to George Kennan’s celebrated 1946 “Long Telegram” that shaped U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union in the Cold War. The Archive finally succeeded in publishing the telegram in December. The full text of the telegram, along with its fascinating back story, is available on the Archive’s website.