A revealing, damning and fascinating diplomatic memorandum, sent in 1994 from the US embassy in Moscow to the State Department in Washington, D.C. has recently been declassified. It is also a gripping and lacerating read, even for the non-specialist. It comes at time of heightened tension and ongoing head-scratching: why are US-Russia relations so terminally bad?
No single topic, let alone a single memo, will unlock the enduring complexity of what is broadly called East-West relations. But at least one strong voice inside the US embassy was warning that the US-Russia relationship was off to a dreadful start.
‘We have reached a point where it is arguable that the best service our aid program could now serve would be to permit Boris Yeltsin publicly to tell America to take its money and shove it,’ wrote Wayne Merry, who in 1994 worked on Russia domestic politics in the US Embassy in Moscow.
Early US policy toward the new Russian Federation insisted on supporting pro-democracy, political reform and transformational economic reform.
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