Boris Yeltsin's resignation in favor of his heir apparent Vladimir Putin as Russia's Acting President has once again brought to the fore the twin question: Whither Russia? And does it matter for the U.S., its national security and well-being? I think that I am qualified to speak on the subject in my dual capacity as a political defector from the former Soviet Union and now a naturalized U. S. citizen.

I was among a very few American scholars to anticipate and predict the end of Communism in Russia. My book, appropriately entitled, Russia Beyond Communism: A Chronicle of National Rebirth, was published before the collapse of Communism in Russia. Moreover, I was an eyewitness to the August 19, 1991 abortive coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev when the death knell of Communism rang. I was then a delegate to the first Congress of Russian Expatriates to be held in Moscow since 1917.

After the "putchists" were defeated, the victorious Yeltsin who was then President of the Russian part of the Soviet Union, addressed our congress, attended by members of the Russian diaspora from the United States, Canada, and Argentina down to France, Germany, and Israel. Yeltsin crearly used the occasion to further assert Russia's sovereignty versus Gorbachev's Soviet Union. Aware of the anti-Communist mood of the expatriates, Yeltsin pledged that the demise of the Soviet Empire would not lead to the demise of Russia. On the contrary, Russia would be reborn as a great nation: free, democratic, prosperous and proud.

Moved by Yeltsin's eloquence, I joined the crowd of well-wishers who wanted to shake hands with Russia's "new hope." When my turn came, I started in the familiar: "Boris Nikolaevich, both you and I are natives (zemlyaki) of the Urals." He beamed upon hearing that I was a native of Perm. "However, as fate has decreed, I now live in California. But my desire for Russia's rebirth is the same as yours. Even from far away I was able to write a script for some of the events that have just played out here in Moscow," I said handing him a copy of my book. As the new white-blue-and-red Russian flag was already hoisted over the Kremlin, I concluded: "If you read English, you may see for yourself that one of the last chapters is entitled From Communism's Red Flag to Russia's Tricolor." Broadly smiling, Yeltsin shook my hand cordially and strongly, just before Gen. Aleksandr Korzhakov and his body guards whisked him away.

I had reasons to believe that Yeltsin may like my book well enough to want to read it. After all, I predicted there that "David" Yeltsin would prevail over "Goliath" Gorbachev who was then lionized by Western press. While the majority of sovietologists held the belief that ethnic Russians enjoyed their "dominance" over national minorities, I argued that they were just as fed up with Communism. "The Soviet Empire is falling apart not only at its seams but also at the where the Russians refuse to identify with it (296)." Unlike Gorbachev, I argued, Yeltsin "appeals to the national pride of rossiane, that is, not only ethnic Russians (russkie), but also those who feel they have a stake in Russia's future." It was "the populist Yeltsin," I concluded, who "now champions Russia's national rebirth (p. 337)."

I never heard again from my zemlyak. His legacy as a statesman suggests that he never bothered to read my book. Nor did he keep the pledge to make the new Russia a great nation. That's the sad conclusion I have come to after a dozen trips I made to Russia since 1991.

Russia is free, but it does not use freedom to good ends. It's democratic, but its democracy is under constant assault from the oligarchs and kleptocrats it spawned. Yeltsin's government succeeded in destroying Communist economy, but failed to create a free-market economy. The county survives on subsistence farming and raw materials exports. Its healthcare and education are in a shambles. Demographic trends are ominously reminiscent of those Russia suffered during the two world wars. The decline of Russia is steeper than that of America during the Great Depression. And this is while Communist China, with which Russia shares the longest border, has grown to an economic giant.

Yeltsin's principal fault was that he failed to balance the development of democracy and free enterprise in Russia with the development of social solidarity and patriotism. Having renounced Communist ideology and dissolved the Soviet Union, Yeltsin also had to reject the ideological Soviet patriotism which, for better or worse, bonded the country together. Yeltsin was too slow to recognize that, to hold the new Russia together, Soviet patriotism needed to be replaced by non-ideological Russian patriotism, defined as the love of, and responsibility for, one's country. When John Kennedy told the young Americans, "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country," he appealed exactly to that sentiment.

For a country going through a very difficult transition such an appeal was crucial for its very survival. However, since the reforms in Russia were not built on a national consensus and were often perceived as an imposition from former Cold War adversaries, it became impossible for the Yeltsin government to mobilize Russian patriotism. What was worse, for too many Russians, privatization came to mean an opportunity to get ahead at the expense of fellow citizens and society as a whole. It also meant theft, corruption, tax evasion, capital flight and money laundering.

As a result, while failing to revitalize economy, the reforms produced divisiveness, selfishness and social tension. The reformers unwisely relegated Russian patriotism to the xenophobic Zhirinovky-style fringe. Alas, having ceased to champion the cause of Russia's national rebirth, Yeltsin rendered his government impotent in advancing the cause of universal democratic values as well. Equally suppressed under Communism, both Russia's national values, including its Orthodox Christianity, and universal human rights, should have gone hand-in-hand in a free Russia. Alas, the Russian society was artificially split into two antagonistic groups: the self-styled allegedly pro-Western and pro-reform "democrats" and allegedly anti-Western "patriots." Burdened by their Communist mentality, both groups were oblivious that the development of democracy is doomed unless it is followed by a swell of patriotism.

The fault was not entirely Yeltsin's. He and his advisers belonged to the generation of Soviet citizens who have been deprived of essential information not only about the outside world, but about their own history. That's why Gorbachev, in his effort to modernize the Communist system, had to start with the introduction of glasnost, that is, lifting of the taboos from many topics, authors, and documents. Unfortunately, glasnost did not last long enough to allow Russians fully digest the enormous amount of information with which they have been overwhelmed.. As a result, neither Yeltsin nor his advisers were intellectually equipped to provide a conceptual framework for the reforms based on Russia's national experience and needs.

Not only did they know little about the West. But they knew even less about their own history, be it pre-1917 Russia or the Soviet period. They suffered from the historical amnesia and myopia forcibly induced by their Communist indoctrination. As a result, much of Russian history fell between the cracks to be swallowed by what George Orwell aptly called the "memory hole."

Russia's own experience with reforms largely disappeared in the memory hole. Ignoring such Russian reformers as Alexander II and Petr Stolypin, the "young pro-Western reformers" around Yeltsin bought wholesale into whatever passed for well-intended reform advice from the West. They thus merely replaced one Western ideology, Marxism-Leninism, with another questionable Western import, free-market monetarism. Neither was rooted in Russian history.

As a Russian saying has it, these reformers were truly "The Ivans who do not know their kin." Burdened by Soviet mentality, they did not know who they were, nor where they came from. Didn't they imagine, under Gorbachev, that they belonged to "our common European home?" Unfortunately, under Yeltsin, the "pro-Western reformers" fell under the same spell, except that now they wanted Russia to be Americanized and integrated into the global economy overnight. They were naove enough to believe that globalization and integration presupposes the irrelevance of national history and the abolition of national interests.

The pro-Western euphoria of "young Russian reformers" came to the embrace of the hubris of U.S. expansionism. While some U.S. officials sincerely wished to spread, among the Russians, the ideas of democracy and free-market economy, there were other influential circles within the government, for whom the primary goal was elimination of Russia as a great power. It didn't really matter for them whether economic reforms and democracy in Russia succeeded or not, as long as Russia was greatly reduced in stature as a geopolitical player.

Having suddenly become the only superpower in the world, the U.S. government, or rather the jingoistic elite which took control of it, decided that there was no better way to assert the American hegemony than by integrating Russia into a global economy as a semi-colonial dependency and supplier of raw materials. The so called Russian economic reforms were then a brain-child of that union between the euphoria of Russian pro-Westernists and the hubris of the American jingoists. However, with the August 17, 1998 financial crash that misbegotten child was aborted.

Be that as it may, the U.S. government embarked on active meddling in domestic Russian politics by siding with President Yeltsin or, rather, the small coterie of "reformers" around him serving as the chief conduit for U.S. macroeconomic advice.

The best analysis of what happened then is Janine Wedels book, Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe 1989-1998. According to Wedel, the fundamental mistake of the U.S. policy toward Russia was siding with, supporting and promoting not even Yeltsin himself, but certain cliques around him. The symbolism of the title is especially suggestive in respect to Russia: the collusion between certain cliques in Russia and America, ostensibly in the name of democracy and free market, may actually lead to a dangerous and totally unnecessary collision between the two countries.

An anthropology professor from George Washington University, Wedel berates Western aid deliverers for "Cultural coupled with the idea that cultural knowledge is either irrelevant or easy to achieve" (p. 190). She makes it clear that not only did we fail to encourage consensus-building in Russia, but we had none in the States. The so called "Washington consensus" was a sham. For a crucial period of time, our macroeconomic advice to the Yeltsin government was channeled through the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID, which was just disbanded) which got the contract without competitive bidding, "for foreign policy considerations." Thus, while preaching democracy and free-market to the Russians, the United States itself failed to adhere to both.

Others have criticized our Russia policy and urged its speedy revision. Katrina vanden Heuvel and Professor Stephen F. Cohen have repeatedly demanded that U.S. cease its meddling in domestic Russian affair." They suggest that our policy should be "based on a very different not the intrusive, ideological conditions imposed by US and IMF," but "letting Russians, not our State and Treasury Departments, decide what constitutes reform in Russia." (The Nation, January 11-18, 1999).

Last March I wrote an Open Letter to President Clinton urging the re-invention of U.S. policy toward Russia and warning that Russia's economic collapse may threaten U.S. national security by destabilizing the entire region. The Letter was endorsed by more than a hundred scholars, businessmen, journalists and other people dealing with Russia.

More recently, James M. Klurfeld, a Newsday editor, suggested that our lack of understanding for Russian actions in Chechnya will only exacerbate the anti-American backlash in Russia, already spurred by the NATO expansion and the bombing of Yugoslavia. Unless "the growing chasm between the United States and Russia" is bridged, Klurfeld warned, we are likely to "undercut the position of the pro-Western reformers in Russian politics and increase the support for the nationalists and xenophobes." (Newsday, December 2, 1999).

Christopher Layne, a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in Global Security, puts the failure of our Russian policy in a global context: "Whether one looks at Europe, China or Russia, the handwriting is on the wall: America's superpower strategy is triggering a geopolitical backlash that will run counter to its interests (The Washington Post Outlook, November 21)."

Even on the purely economic side, our advice to Russia has been of a very dubious nature. As Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist for the World Bank, admitted at a conference in Washington, "the failures of the reforms that were widely advocated go far deeper - to a misunderstanding of the very foundations of a market economy, as well as a failure to grasp the fundamentals of reform processes." (At IBRD Washington conference of April 28-30, 1999).

Now, when Russia again stands on a threshold of presidential elections, it needs to define its national purpose and the immediate course to achieve it. The acting President Putin appears to be groping for such a definition, as his programmatic article on the Russian Government's website (www.pravitelstvo.gov.ru) clearly shows. He seems to be on the right track when he speaks of the need to combine democracy and patriotism, finding a true balance, "an alloy of universal humanitarian values with traditional Russian values." However, the contingencies of war in Chechnya have apparently made Putin place excessive emphasis on patriotism at the expense of democracy and human rights. The war has also diverted the attention from the larger questions--What type of economy suits best the needs of the Russian people? What role should Russia play in world affairs? In spite of some authoritarian tendencies that Putin has clearly exhibited, let us give him the benefit of doubt. Let us hope that there are enough talents among both Putin's loyalists and his opponents to produce a blueprint of Russia's national strategy that is equally strong on democracy and patriotism. And let us hope that Putin does not use the power of incumbency to squash a nascent democratic and patriotic opposition, so that the March 26 election would not turn merely into a Stalinesque "coronation by acclamation."

In any case, unlike the Russian presidential elections in 1996, the United States should stay away from the temptation of meddling again. Let Russia be Russia. Let the Russians rely on their own historical experience. Let them formulate their own economic policy consistent with their national interests. We may prefer that they continue to move toward the free market. But the United States has no right to meddle with any Russian government that promotes the well-being of Russian citizens and does not threaten Russia's neighbors.

Madeleine Albright likes to talk about our "strategic partnership" with Russia. But do we need a partner who, rightly or wrongly, feels humiliated by us? Do we need a partner on a dole? Do we need a friend that only money can buy? No, the best partners, friends and allies are those whom we cannot buy. Only a strong, proud, and independent Russia can be a dependable trade partner and a true strategic ally that America can rely on in the hour of need.

Russia has many affinities with Europe. It has much in common with Asia. But it also has much that is entirely its own. Russia is not only a distinct political entity, but a unique civilization. Like the United States, it is a melting pot of many ethnic groups and races: Slavic, Finno-Ugric, Turkic, Jewish, and, yes, Chechen. While our immediate sympathies are with the innocent Chechen civilians (many of whom are ethnic Russians) who greatly suffer from the Russian bombardment, we must treat all Russians with a respect befitting a civilization that has enriched the world. Let Russians sort out their differences among themselves.

The Russian czars had enough political savvy not to meddle with the civil war in the United States, even though the Lincoln government used very rough tactics against the rebels. As a matter of fact, the Russian czar Alexander II send the Russian Navy to our shores to stand guard for U.S. territorial integrity since Great Britain and France were about to recognize the Confederacy. I don't suggest that we go as far in respect to Russia's war in Chechnya. Just staying out of Russia's internal affairs will do.