Over the past half decade, our debate about Russia--and, for that
matter, Russia's debate about us--has been episodic but always
excitable. The issue or problem dominating the news at any given
moment has been seen again and again as the test likely to determine
the overall success of the post-Soviet transformation. Handled
poorly, the problem of the day seemed likely to stunt Russia's
evolution and poison our relations for years to come--or at least
until the next make-or-break issue came along.

These would-be defining moments have included Russia's acute
financial crisis in the summer of 1998 (remembered in one recent
study as "the total collapse of the Russian economy"). It was
followed by the Bank of New York money laundering scandal in the
summer of 1999, which turned Russian corruption into headline news
for weeks on end; by Moscow's grisly grudge match against the
Chechens in the fall and winter of 1999-2000; and, this past summer,
by Vladimir Putin's (slightly) less relentless campaign to bring
independent television under government control.

Foreign policy confrontations have also generated predictions of
lasting U.S.-Russia estrangement. (I know: I made some of them.) NATO
enlargement was perhaps the first disagreement of this magnitude, but
subsequent ones have produced even more dire predictions. Was it not
obvious that relations between Washington and Moscow would never
recover, and that the start II Treaty would never be ratified, after
the war in Kosovo in 1999? When they did begin to improve, of course,
it then became obvious that the real threat to good relations, the
one from which they would never ever recover, was American deployment
of a limited national missile defense.

These seeming watersheds have revealed genuine, and sometimes
massive, problems in Russia's internal development and its relations
with the West. If none has turned out to have the enduring
significance widely predicted for it, their cumulative impact has
nevertheless been very great. They have left behind diminished
confidence about where Russia and U.S.-Russia relations are heading,
and about what kind of relationship might be constructed in the
future.

Measured against these lowered expectations, two recent stock-takings
of U.S.-Russia relations--Zbigniew Brzezinski's article, "Living With
Russia", in the Fall 2000 issue of The National Interest, and the
report of a House Republican group chaired by Representative Chris
Cox, entitled Russia's Road to Corruption--seem strikingly hopeful.
Brzezinski counsels a policy of "patience and strategic persistence"
and concentrates on the question of how over time Russia might be
accepted into NATO and the European Union. As for the Cox report, it
lambastes the Clinton administration's policy, but not (as might have
been expected) for failing to see that Russia is our enemy. The
bottom line of the critique is instead that U.S. policy has failed to
tap the immense potential of Russian-American partnership.

Both of these evaluations start with the assumptions that Russia
belongs in the West, and that--for all the difficulties that stand in
our way--the West has a major interest in anchoring it there. In the
very first sentence of his article, in which he endorses "the
progressive inclusion of Russia in the expanding transatlantic
community", Brzezinski takes as his own the goal that has guided
policy toward Russia throughout the Clinton administration. He is not
happy with the administration's means of pursuing this goal, labeling
it a "one-sided courtship" that has failed to recognize Russia's lack
of commitment to the same result and its continuing aim to regain
control over the other former Soviet states. Yet the debate he joins
is about how to promote Russia's integration into the West, not about
the goal itself.

Integration is indeed the goal that encapsulates all others, and
precisely because it can so easily be forgotten in the daily
controversies over more sensational sounding policy problems, it is
useful to look carefully at what has, and has not, been accomplished
in the past decade, and at what we--and the Russians--can
realistically aspire to in the next. For Brzezinski, the right U.S.
policy will be one that offers Russia a place in Western institutions
but makes full repudiation of empire "Russia's only viable option."
His is a grand design, with no loose ends, and it has to answer the
objections put to all such large conceptions. Is it a realistic
assessment of the world we face, and does it correctly identify the
problems we want to solve? Does it reflect what we have learned from
other efforts to effect such a vast transformation? Does it help us
understand the trade-offs that will be necessary if we have to settle
for second-best?

Lousy Joiners

The goal of integrating Russia into the West is not a new one. Before
the collapse of the Soviet Union, even before the fall of the Berlin
Wall, Bush administration officials used the term "integration" to
describe their hopes for the next, post-Cold War phase of East-West
relations. Beyond the political, economic, military, even
psychological dimensions of this process, Western policy paid special
attention to the institutional side of it--to the "club memberships"
that would give countries that had been kept out of the global
mainstream a place in Western institutions. Their participation was
expected to give them a stake in a more regularized, consensual,
rules-based international order. The prestige of membership would
confirm that they had not been permanently relegated to second-class
status by decades of communism. For Russia it would show that defeat
in the Cold War was not a setback but a new opportunity. Most
important, the practical benefits of drawing steadily closer to
Western institutions would create continuing incentives for
governments and societies to reshape themselves--their economies,
their military establishments, their international conduct, their way
of thinking.

Although this acculturation strategy was fashioned above all for
European states isolated by the Cold War, its basic logic--accept
certain norms of behavior, receive a seat at the table--has been
embraced by others as well. Both China and Turkey have lately made
winning a major new "club membership"--in China's case, accession to
the WTO; in Turkey's, to the EU--not only the center-piece of their
foreign policies but the principal measure of their international
success.

Russia has also gained access to new groupings, but largely where
entry has been offered unconditionally, as a political gesture or
sign of respect. It was in this spirit that in 1991 Gorbachev was
invited to join the members of the G-7 in London for part of their
annual meeting. Although Yeltsin and, after him, Putin have gradually
been granted something close to full membership, their role has still
had largely symbolic significance. Because the G-8 lacks a membership
process, Russia gained entry without having to meet the demanding
performance criteria of other institutions. The same was true of its
accession to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), the annual
gathering of the leaders of the Pacific Rim states. Russia joined
this particular club on the strength of an emphatic nominating speech
by President Clinton at the 1997 meeting--and because other members
were willing to go along. But because APEC is, like the G-8, less an
organization than an annual meeting, it demands (and imparts) little
in the way of organizational culture.

Russia's largely decorative participation in the G-8 and elsewhere
tells us little about its overall commitment to integration. Over the
next several years, the process of integration will be defined less
by political gestures and more by how well Russia's actions match the
purposes of groupings--like NATO or the WTO--that have higher
aspirations, a more focused mission, and more rigid membership
criteria. Here Russia's record as a joiner looks far poorer.

NATO is of course the most problematic case, since neither side has
wanted to address the issue of membership as such; Russia was spurred
to develop a new association with the Atlantic Alliance by the fact
that others wanted to become members. Enlargement was Russia's most
complicated foreign policy problem since the collapse of the ussr,
and neither passive acquiescence nor ultra-ferocious opposition, much
less retaliation, would have been an effective strategy for dealing
with it. In the end, the 1997 NATO-Russia Final Act, signed on the
eve of the alliance's invitations to three new members, proved a deft
accommodation for both sides. It allowed Russia to avoid isolation
without obliging it to withdraw its objections to enlargement; the
same solution allowed NATO to create institutionalized ties not only
to new members but to states (Russia, but also Ukraine, which
negotiated a similar document with NATO, and other former Soviet
states) that were, for the time being, left out.

But although the Final Act defused a dispute over enlargement, it has
not created much of a cooperative relationship between Russia and the
alliance. From the moment the document was signed, the Russians have
shown little enthusiasm for the project, and Russia's representatives
at NATO have acted as though they were under instructions to resist
implementing it. The Permanent Joint Council, the new forum created
by the Final Act, has shown little life, and even before the Kosovo
war Russia had blocked the establishment of a NATO "Military Liaison
Mission" in Moscow. Joint peacekeeping deployments in Bosnia and
Kosovo prove that cooperative arrangements can be hammered out in a
crisis, but they are exceptions in a relationship that the Russians
have never been comfortable with. Putin's remark to David Frost last
spring, that Russia might someday be interested in joining the
alliance, seemed for a moment to break this pattern; a day later, of
course, he took it back.

One sees similar foot-dragging on other fronts. At the same meeting
in the spring of 1997 at which Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin reached
agreement on the NATO-Russia Final Act, the United States also
offered its support for Russian accession to the World Trade
Organization by the end of 1998. Now two years past this target date,
Russia's effort to join the WTO is only a bit further along than its
effort to develop a cooperative relationship with NATO. The ups and
downs of the Russian economy in this period have surely been one
factor blocking progress, as has the lack of top-down political
initiative in the last years of Boris Yeltsin's presidency. In the
absence of a sustained push for accession, domestic economic
interests that expected to be losers in a more competitive
international marketplace have been able to slow the process.

WTO negotiations are lengthy and complicated in the best of
circumstances, and Russia's effort to join is likely to bog down
again and again unless its leaders treat accession as more than just
another trophy membership. If it is only that, the benefits of
joining will hardly outweigh the costs of overruling special
interests that believe the provisions of an accession agreement will
affect them adversely. Far from being a trophy, entry into the WTO
has to be viewed as a tool--for completing Russia's economic
transformation and assuring it a place in the global economy. This
has been the Chinese approach, and it is clear that at least some
Russian officials see its advantages. It is equally clear, however,
that the strategy will only succeed if it is endorsed at the very
top. It cannot be our idea; it has to be theirs.

Making Russia Choose

Russia's stalled participation in NATO and its slow-track approach to
WTO accession confirm Brzezinski's insight that integration will not
succeed unless the joining country has a real commitment to see it
through. The same negative dynamic, it should be said, has hampered
the process of economic transformation throughout the former Soviet
Union: governments that saw their negotiations with the IMF as a kind
of game whose object was to get new loans on the loosest possible
conditions rarely made good use of the money once they got their
hands on it. Not having "taken ownership" of a reformist program,
they did not know what to do next or have the political muscle to
move forward if they did.

Lawrence Summers, then deputy secretary of the Treasury, referred to
this problem when, in the immediate aftermath of the 1998 Russian
financial crisis, he said that any successful Russian recovery
strategy had to be "Russian-owned"--that is, conceived, backed and
implemented by the Russians themselves. It has been a key ingredient
of Russia's far more successful economic performance since then that
its governments have finally "taken ownership" of their own policy.
Having stared into the abyss in August 1998, they stopped treating
control of inflation, or smaller budget deficits, or better tax
collection as concessions they had to make in order to qualify for
IMF loans. To the contrary, Russian officials now typically say that
the value of their relationship with the IMF does not concern loans
at all; they want benchmarks against which to measure their own
policy performance.

Over the next two or three years, a series of first-order policy
choices will test Russia's commitment to integration. On the security
front, NATO will soon begin reviewing another round of enlargement
decisions, to be discussed at its summit in 2002. On the economic
front, WTO accession will be one factor determining whether Russia's
current economic buoyancy, sustained for the time being by high oil
prices, can continue.

These events will, of course, also pose a demanding test for
Brzezinski's strategic design. He is right that seduction will not
work as a way of getting Russia to make the right choices: we cannot,
and should not, want the international integration of Russia more
than its own government does. But if seduction is ruled out, then how
exactly are we supposed to get our way?

Brzezinski offers, in effect, three different but overlapping answers
to this question. The first approach involves persuasion: laying out
for the Russians all the disadvantages of their present and
prospective weakness and isolation. The second emphasizes diplomatic
unilateralism: maneuvers that leave the Russians only one "viable
option." Finally, he relies on generational change, confidently
predicting that, as the current crop of Russian leaders gives way to
the next, its successors will do the right thing as a matter of
course. These approaches can be, and have been, part of an effective
Western strategy. Yet, looked at closely, they do as much to
underscore the difficulty of the enterprise as to identify a solution.

Consider, first, what can really be accomplished by cataloguing the
Russians' domestic pathologies for them. The figures Brzezinski
cites--the dismal statistics about lagging economic competitiveness
and living standards, filthy air and water, birth defects and life
expectancy, corrupt institutions, and so forth--are entirely familiar
to Russians. What they say and print about their own situation is far
worse than this. It was candidate Putin himself who declared that his
first task as president would be to grapple with the country's
"humiliating poverty." And it is the same Putin who reminds audiences
how long it will take for the Russian economy, even with very
optimistic assumptions about future growth, to rise to the level of
Portugal's.

Nor do they have illusions about their international situation. The
grim picture that Brzezinski paints--unstable Muslims to the south,
multiplying Chinese to the east--is standard stuff for
hyperventilating Russian geopoliticians (who, of course, make it
grimmer still by adding aggressive Americans, Germans and Poles to
the west). The only way one could start an argument in Moscow with
Brzezinski's analysis would be by trying to persuade people that he
actually offers a way out of their fix. He envisions an "epiphany"--a
sudden, blinding awareness of the advantages of being a normal
Western nation--that will, he says, "liberate Russia from its ominous
geopolitical context."

The typical Russian reaction to such hyperbole will likely be
skepticism, and rightly so. Is there, in fact, any foreseeable
relationship that Russia can have with the EU or NATO that will make
a measurable short-term difference in the depth of its domestic ills?
Or that will insulate it against radical Islamist groups to the
south? Russians are likely to think that they have to deal with these
problems by putting their own house in order, and in this they are
not wrong.

Suppose, then, that we cannot get the Russians to be better joiners
merely by educating them about what is really in their interest. (In
my experience, Russians are not the only people who do not enjoy
being told our view of their interests.) Can we push them into it by
actions that we take on our own? Brzezinski proposes to bull
ahead--but with an outstretched hand. His program combines
enlargement of NATO and the EU with formal statements envisioning
some sort of eventual Russian participation in both organizations. By
proposing to incorporate new members while deepening ties with those
left out, he recapitulates the basic approach taken by the alliance
in round one of enlargement. Clearly, he suggests, a second round
will call for the same kind of balance.

Yet striking a balance will be far harder when NATO is considering
Russia's immediate neighbors for membership. Russians who were
willing privately to pooh-pooh the significance of adding Poland,
Hungary and the Czech Republic will not treat the Baltic states the
same way. And they will hardly be mollified by suggestions that their
own ties to NATO (or the EU) might develop faster if they were
prepared to drop their objections to further enlargement. One of the
crucial principles that made it possible to find a workable balance
in the first round of NATO enlargement was precisely that the
Russians were not asked to drop their objections to the idea. In a
second round, those objections (at least to inclusion of the Baltic
states) will be far more intense. Brzezinski proposes, in effect, the
following deal to the Russians: if they do what we want most--welcome
the enlargement of the EU and NATO to all who want to join--we will
reciprocate by doing what they want least: accelerate the process and
bring the alliance right up to their borders as early as next year.

The next round of NATO membership decisions is likely to have an
enormous effect on Russian elite opinion--and, in turn, on the
prospects for Brzezinski's third approach to getting Russia to make
an unhesitating choice in favor of full integration into the West. As
he sees it, the next generation of Russian leaders will have a
fundamentally different mindset from the current one, reflecting far
greater understanding of what the world is like and of what Western
ways have to offer. With such people in charge, Russia's orientation
toward the West should occur almost automatically.

This depiction of Russia's next generation is so persuasive that one
could almost make waiting for it the heart of U.S. strategy. Yet
quite apart from the fact that the country has just elected a
forty-seven year-old president (so the next people in line may have
quite a wait on their hands), the real problem with such a long-term
strategy is the possibility that the next generation's world-view
will change before its members come of age as national leaders. The
number of events that might shake their confidence in the advantages
of integration into the West is probably very small, and a protracted
global depression is surely at the top of the list. But a sustained
confrontation between their country and NATO can hardly be far behind.

Only One Option?

In promoting Russia's integration into the West, we should certainly
aim to create what Brzezinski calls "a compelling context" in which
the Russians are more likely to make the right choice. Putin's recent
statement welcoming the prospect of EU enlargement may even be a sign
that this approach is working. And yet it is an illusion to think
that we can so narrowly limit Russia's room to maneuver so that the
right choice is its "only viable option." If nothing else, this
objective is at odds with Brzezinski's insight that a lasting choice
will have to be one that the Russians make themselves.

To understand the complexities involved in promoting a major
country's path toward integration, it is hard to do better than the
analyses that Brzezinski himself has published recently in The
National Interest. In his discussions of both China and Turkey, there
is no suggestion that the other guy's policy choices can ever be
narrowed, godfather-style, to just one. His article on "Living With
China" in the Spring 2000 issue sets its sights just as high as his
proposals for Russia, announcing that the "central strategic task of
U.S. policy toward China should be nothing less than the attainment
of a fundamental, truly historic shift in the mindset of the Chinese
elite." Yet, presumably because the goal is so important, Brzezinski
favors extreme judiciousness in pursuing it. He worries, for example,
about forcing choices on China that it would not find "palatable",
and about pursuing outcomes that "no current Chinese leader could
accept." He speaks of "the imperative of sensitivity for Chinese
concerns", and warns that "how China is treated might well become a
self-fulfilling prophesy." There is no brave talk here of leaving the
Chinese just one viable option.

As for Turkey, Brzezinski's article on "Living With Russia" argues
convincingly that anyone interested in promoting a historic shift in
the mindset of the Russian elite needs to study Atatürk's achievement
in giving his country a post-imperial European identity after the
break-up of the Ottoman Empire. The importance of Turkey's
modernization strategy as a model not only for Russia but for other
former Soviet states as well is beyond question. Brzezinski is also
right that its ultimate success was made far more likely by the
welcome that Turkey received in the West. A half century in NATO
served as a kind of antechamber for its current candidacy before the
EU.

Yet the story of Turkey's successful integration into the West has
also been one of ongoing unresolved tensions, many of which continue
to the present day. To these, the United States and its European
allies have responded over many decades with a balancing act
combining encouragement and restraint. Turkey did indeed start to
make itself "post-imperial" under Atatürk, but its relations with
Greece, Cyprus, the Kurds and Armenia remained--and remain--extremely
complicated, to say the least. There were other ways things could
have turned out. Any one of a number of flashpoints could have
precipitated a break between us. If Turkey can serve as a model for
Russia, then let us be sure to make U.S. policy toward Turkey a model
as well. This sophisticated policy did not go into reverse just
because at any given moment Turkey's embrace of its integration into
the West was less than unequivocal.

There is always more than one option, a fact that teaches us to be
wary of grand designs. It is hard to argue with a plan that holds out
the benefits of early membership in NATO for all the democratic
states of Central and Eastern Europe that want it, and of
consolidated democracy in a Russia that is coming to grips at last
with its internal problems, and of expanding cooperation between NATO
and Russia, and of reduced Russian pressure on its neighbors, and of
a consensus among Russians so strong that all this feels like their
own choice. But if this prospect sounds too good to be true, then we
should have an honest debate about the trade-offs that we may face if
the design does not work out as planned. If we are going to end up
with something less than the best of all possible worlds, then let us
think about it realistically in advance, so that we at least get the
next-best world rather than a truly undesirable one.

To have the debate we need about trade-offs, nothing is more
important than avoiding a mere restatement of old positions. This
rule applies to those on both sides of past discussions. Those who
used to argue that enlargement of the alliance would put Russian
democracy at risk need to take account of its impressive durability;
if it remains vulnerable in 2001 (on which more below), it is
nevertheless not the vulnerability of 1996.

By the same token, those who used to argue that NATO and the EU were
our only effective tools for assuring the stability of Central and
Eastern Europe have to acknowledge that stability has put down deeper
roots than one could have counted on a half decade ago. Like Russian
democracy, this region may have its vulnerabilities, but they too
have changed.

The Russians themselves will affect our debate about trade-offs, and
they need to know it. It goes without saying that Russian
bellicosity--menacing statements and worse--will only strengthen the
case for putting enlargement on a fast track. But could Russian
leaders who take a different approach, who at last get serious about
their own integration on many different fronts, including in their
relations with NATO, elicit a Western response that recognizes this
change and tries to support it?

Finally, we cannot think our way through any of these problems
without focusing on the East European state that worries most about a
serious breach between Russia and the West: Ukraine. I know
Ukrainians who hope to be in NATO; I know Ukrainians who do not; I do
not know any who think there is a national consensus on the issue, or
that one could take shape soon, or that it would be a good idea to
try to induce one. In the best of all possible worlds, Ukraine could
take its time sorting out its views, and if it wanted to approach
NATO about a deeper association, even about membership, it could do
so when ready. But the unraveling of a Brzezinski-style grand design
could create difficult choices for Ukraine well before it is able to
make them. Before we put ourselves or the Ukrainians in this
position, we need to understand their sense of their own dilemmas far
better than we, or even they, now do.

The Mighty Russian "State"

There is one factor that might seem to make any talk of trade-offs
irrelevant as we consider how to handle Russia, and that is what
Brzezinski sees as the neo-imperialist mindset of the Russian elite.
For him, it is obvious that Putin has already identified his "central
goal" and it is "not democratic reform" but rather "the restoration
of a powerful Russian state." Sure, he may for tactical reasons seek
good relations with the West, but he has not made the historic
decision to adopt a Western model to overcome Russia's many
infirmities. Far from it: he just wants "to gain a free hand in
dealing with the new states in the former Soviet space."

Putin does, in fact, talk ceaselessly about strengthening the Russian
state, and he is not alone. When Russians complain about their health
care, their drinking water or their niggardly pensions, they
frequently trace these problems to "the weakness of the Russian
state." When they worry that their armed forces have become
dangerously feeble, or rail that other countries are trying to take
advantage of them, their complaint will be the same: "the weakness of
the Russian state." But in making what sounds like the same
diagnosis, they are not necessarily proposing the same cure; in fact,
they are usually not even using the same word.

The Russian word for "state" that means "complex of national
institutions for the exercise of political power" is gosudarstvo. The
word that means "national actor in international affairs" is
derzhava. When a Russian politician promises to improve social
services or crack down on criminals and corrupt public officials, the
state he says he will strengthen is the Russian gosudarstvo. But if
he touts the importance of rebuilding a mighty Russian state that
will never be vulnerable to attack and will always have a large role
in world affairs, he is more likely to say derzhava.

This distinction is no mere linguistic nicety. Only by keeping it in
mind can we understand what Putin means when he says both that
domestic problems are his top priority (this is his constant refrain)
and that he is determined to strengthen the state. The "Open Letter
to Russian Voters" that launched Putin's presidential candidacy last
winter was littered with the word gosudarstvo and its derivatives;
derzhava, by contrast, showed up only here and there. Candidate Putin
obviously thought the voters wanted to hear that he would kick-start
governmental institutions that have ceased to work for ordinary
people and rescue the bureaucracy from the control of criminalized
special interests.

Understanding the different ways in which the Russians want to
"strengthen the state" can help us to see that they are thinking
coherently about the problems they face. But it can also help us see
that a focus on their domestic pathologies will not necessarily
facilitate their integration into the West. Consider this other
formula from the "Open Letter": "The stronger the state
[gosudarstvo], the freer the individual." Putin plainly does not mean
by this that the average Russian citizen will feel freer if he knows
that his country can kick around Georgia and Azerbaijan. The
ostensible meaning is this: the average Russian's life will be better
off if the central government is strong enough to, among other
things, keep corrupt regional governors from running mini-despotisms
that impoverish everyone except an inner circle of thugs and cronies.
But it also carries with it a more ominous potential meaning: the
anarchic effects of the past ten years have been so great that a
major reassertion of governmental authority is needed to keep order.

"Order", says Putin soothingly, "is nothing more than rules." But
what kind of rules? When the government's new doctrine on
"information security" declares that the state has to take
responsibility for ensuring that citizens receive correct information
from the media, it is clear that the "rules" could start to chafe
against basic democratic liberties.

If we tell ourselves that the main problem represented by a strong Russian state is what it can do to its neighbors, we are setting ourselves a task that in all likelihood we will be able to solve successfully.  But the real world may present us with tasks for which we are not so well prepared. Neo-authoritarianism may be a larger problem for Russia's integration into the West than neo-imperialism. And it may also prove a larger problem for us, for two reasons.

First, it will be much harder to reach agreement about when the "strengthening of the state" has gone too far. After all, much of what Putin talks about involves measures that most of us would support if we were Russians and had witnessed first-hand the decrepitude and corruption of state institutions. But some of his measures could also easily produce a rollback of the past decade's democratic achievements. Russians who are concerned about this will be discouraged if all they hear us talking about is neo-imperialism--not the principal problem they think they face.

Second, even if we had clearer benchmarks for how much "strengthening of the state" is too much, the leverage we have in reacting to neo-authoritarianism in Russia is simply less than we have for countering neo-imperialism against its neighbors. For this reason, in "living with Russia" in the future we have to make sure that we hold on to such leverage as we have. As long as the G-8, for example, continues to define itself as the club of industrial democracies, Russia's status in the group will remain somewhat provisional, and constructively so. If Russian democracy were in real jeopardy, Putin's participation could, and should, be reconsidered. Proposals (like Brzezinski's own) to include China in a new G-9 should be judged in this light. It would be hard to imagine ever again putting Russian media freedom on the agenda of such an expanded group. When we tell the Russians that their democratic evolution is a key test of integration, we need to mean it.

Putin's Test

WHEN Madeleine Albright is asked whether she thinks President Putin is a democrat, she gives the following artful answer: she thinks he understands that Russia will not reach the goals he has publicly set for it unless it continues to develop as a democracy. The same thing can be said about Russia's integration into the West. It is hard to see how Putin can successfully address the deep structural problems he has described (to give him credit, he has described them more realistically than any other Russian leader) without a strong commitment to integration.

Over the past decade, Russia has--for good reasons and bad--done no more than a fraction of what was possible in advancing the process of integration. Its good reasons for being a poor joiner include political and economic upheaval, and weak and unfocused leadership. But there were bad reasons as well, and they include an expectation that Russia's political importance would guarantee a place at the high tables of international affairs. Winning a place by refashioning one's policies was a logic that others might follow, but not Russia.

If President Putin wants to turn back to this agenda with new seriousness, he will have many things going for him: a lift in the economy, a moment of relative political calm, and even his own credibility as an interpreter of Russia's interests. But the task of integration is also a harder one now. Over the next two years, during which questions about Russia's relations with both NATO and the WTO will be especially difficult, he is likely to be able to advance the process only by changing Russia's approach. This is Putin's test, and it will tell us whom we are dealing with.

Stephen Sestanovich has served since 1997 as ambassador-at-large and special adviser to the secretary of state for the New Independent States. These are his own views.

Zbigniew Brzezinski replies:

I will confine myself to only one issue raised in Dr. Sestanovich commentary on my article. Evidently exercised by my criticism of the Clinton administration's feckless non-reaction to the Chechen tragedy, he cites a number of puerile verbal protestations that his State Department superiors made to the Russians, concluding triumphantly that the Russians doubtless "noticed" them. Unfortunately--encouraged also by President Clinton's public profession that, "I have no sympathy for the Chechen rebels", not to mention Clinton's shocking reference to Russia "liberation" of Grozny--that is all they did.