The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s was fraught with turmoil and political peril. That it did not end in disaster was due in no small measure to Russian president Boris Yeltsin, for all his flaws--and, insists former administration insider Strobe Talbott, to Yeltsin's partner in reform, President Bill Clinton. Before Clinton took office in 1992, he imagined that he would devote most of his energies to domestic matters, in keeping with the "It's the economy, stupid" slogan of his campaign war room. But, writes fellow Rhodes Scholar Talbott, his adviser on Russian affairs, "It became apparent that being president meant ... doing the heavy lifting in the management of relations with a giant nation that was reinventing itself and, in doing so, reinventing international politics and requiring us to reinvent American foreign policy." Though the Clinton administration took a few missteps early on, by Talbott's account the president soon rose to the historic occasion, tirelessly helping Yeltsin negotiate the difficult task of democratizing the former Communist power while contending with Yeltsin's troublesome penchant for drink and self-destruction--to say nothing of a committed political resistance on the part of disaffected members of the old guard. That things turned out reasonably well may seem amazing, given some of the incidents Talbott relates. His book offers an instructive, lively view of international diplomacy, personal politics, and the odd turns involved in changing the world. --Gregory McNamee

During the past ten years, few issues have mattered more to America’s vital interests or to the shape of the twenty-first century than Russia’s fate. To cheer the fall of a bankrupt totalitarian regime is one thing; to build on its ruins a stable democratic state is quite another. The challenge of helping to steer post-Soviet Russia-with its thousands of nuclear weapons and seething ethnic tensions-between the Scylla of a communist restoration and the Charybdis of anarchy fell to the former governor of a poor, landlocked Southern state who had won national election by focusing on domestic issues. No one could have predicted that by the end of Bill Clinton’s second term he would meet with his Kremlin counterparts more often than had all of his predecessors from Harry Truman to George Bush combined, or that his presidency and his legacy would be so determined by his need to be his own Russia hand.

With Bill Clinton at every step was Strobe Talbott, the deputy secretary of state whose expertise was the former Soviet Union. Talbott was Clinton’s old friend, one of his most trusted advisers, a frequent envoy on the most sensitive of diplomatic missions and, as this book shows, a sharp-eyed observer. The Russia Hand is without question among the most candid, intimate and illuminating foreign-policy memoirs ever written in the long history of such books. It offers unparalleled insight into the inner workings of policymaking and diplomacy alike. With the scope of nearly a decade, it reveals the hidden play of personalities and the closed-door meetings that shaped the most crucial events of our time, from NATO expansion, missile defense and the Balkan wars to coping with Russia’s near-meltdown in the wake of the Asian financial crisis. The book is dominated by two gifted, charismatic and flawed men, Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, who quickly formed one of the most intense and consequential bonds in the annals of statecraft. It also sheds new light on Vladimir Putin, as well as the altered landscape after September 11, 2001.

The Russia Hand is the first great memoir about war and peace in the post-cold war world.


From the Hardcover edition.

I just finished the book about 15 minutes ago, so this is surely a bit of "instant feedback."

Strobe Talbott writes vividly, with candor and with a justified and well-earned political slant that keeps the reader engaged as a would be a thrill-seeking thirty-something reading a Clancy novel (I am borrowing another reviewer's analogy; by the way, this is way better than Clancy).

For anyone interested in the delicate nature of scrutinizing national security decisions, this is a must read. It offers an 'inside the Situation Room' look at the government of the United States at work. While concentrated solely on issues of the US-Russian genre, he successfully weaves other world and domestic events into the book to give the reader a sense of pace, setting and perspective.

He adequately, though unglamourously, bookends the story with the lead-in (Bush 41) to the Clinton years and the moving away from (Bush 43) a contentious, far from self-effacing eight years of transcontinental relations.

The meat of the book, a study of how presidential decisions are made through and pressed by deputy level and below members of both governments, showcases a 'half-dozen' big ticket shows that played out in the nineties, e.g. Kosovo, NATO expansion, Bosnia, and so on. With great and intense detail, Talbott recounts many and varied emotional meetings held between the world's most prominent governments.

Though certainly not faultless, this book is one of the better memoirs to come from the eight years of Clinton. It is precise, pointed and proves that the show must and will go on in American diplomacy.

Talbott's book is captivating and addictive. He writes in such a way that leaves the reader wondering whether Clinton and Yeltsin and Primakov and Gore and Chernomyrdin and 'Chris' and Sandy and Zhirinovsky and Ivanov (both of them) and Ivashov and Mamedov - Talbott drops dozens of names on the reader - are in the next room, contemplating and calculating tomorrow's continued NATO expansion.

Not just a must read, this book should be reviewed, its merits debated and defended. It is well worth it.

The devil is in the details, but the "angels" call the shots (and in this story the "angels" are no angels). This is the short version of Strobe Talbott's exhaustive, intimate memoir of the transformation of US-Russian relations during the tumultuous 1990s. Bereft of the old adversarial structures of the cold war, and lacking any type of transitional plan, the diplomatic establishments of Washington and Moscow were compelled to feel their way through a stubborn morass of suspicion and ignorance and emerge with something like a policy of institutionalized cooperation.

By this account and many others it was a tough row to hoe. The meat of the book covers the period of Clinton/Yeltsin diplomacy between 1992 and 2000, a time when the Russian nation was reeling from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the social upheaval brought on by free market economic "shock treatment." National pride had suffered a series of body blows as the Soviet Empire fell apart and lost its coveted place as the "other" major power on the international stage.

In 1992, while publicly basking in cold war "victory", the US political establishment was inwardly wringing its hands over how to handle its volatile, battered, erstwhile enemy. Internally in Russia political wars continued to rage among nationalists, communists, and liberal market reformers, and it was nowhere near apparent that the nation might not suffer a political hijacking or economic meltdown which would lead the nation back down a path of despotism and isolation. This was a moment of limitless opportunity and unfathomable risk for the US and the world. The stakes were huge, and the outcome unknowable.

Enter the diplomats. Under the direction and tutelage of Mr. Talbott in this country and Yuri Mamedov in Russia, the two little armies of bureaucrats started the decade long brainstorm over nuclear arms, NATO enlargement, the worrying linkages between Russia and Iran, the disposition of Soviet era debt, and myriad other potentially explosive issues. It was no easy business, and progress was halting.

Time and again Talbott's team ran into roadblocks and obfuscation from their Russian counterparts. Some of it was related to the long Russian predisosition to hiding behind opaque bureaucacry; some had more to do with national pride. Most often, though, US Russian progress was stymied by forces inside the Russian establishment with a vested interest in arresting diplomatic progress where it took hold.

Bill Clinton understood all this. And more importantly, he understood Boris Yeltsin. More than once Talbott invokes the importance of the personal relationship between the two men, both by turns rogues, charmers, and vulgarians, with a singular optimism and clarity of vision both for their respective nations and for the future of world security. With some funny and incisive anecdotes Talbott demonstrates again and again the power of the personal in the political process, as Clinton and Yeltsin transcend the turf wars going on among their minions below to hammer out compromises and agreements that start to assume real political and economic coherence.

Not that there weren't bumps along the way. Yeltsin, though Talbott declines a formal diagnoses, comes across as a classic manic depressive, high energy and visionary when his back is to the wall, despondent and alcoholic when he feels his enemies smothering him. Clinton, though keenly attuned to the constraints on his counterpart from the factional strife in the Russian military and the obstreperous Duma, had his hands full when Yeltsin came to the bargaining table in a blustery or drunken temper. Talbott is masterful in recounting the tensions in these encounters, especially in Helsinki in the early part of the adminstration.

In the end, this is the story of two flawed, great men who left their world a better place for having worked together. Talbott leaves no doubt that all the rest, the quibbling and arguing and messy details of diplomacy, were inconsenquential in the face Clinton and Yeltsin's determination to not just preside over the death of an old era but to define a new one. It's somewhat poignant to go back to the beginning of the book, when Clinton, in the twilight of his term, meets the rising star Putin for the first time and senses a new, more stringent and controlled era settling over the Russian nation and the face it shows the world. There's just no chemistry between the bumptious American and the cautious new leader. Talbott leads us to believe that it wasn't just chemistry, but a genuine personal friendship that put the final stake in the heart of the cold war and all the bad that came of it.

Clinton's old friend and key Russia advisor provides insight on a number foreign policy topics as they evolve. As deputy secretary of state, his accounts provide personal, scholarly and practical accounts. The reader might determine both that Talbott was an invaluable resource as the post-Cold War era evolved, and that in the end, Clinton was his own "Russia Hand."

The primary theme of the book is the relationship between Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin. As they address issues such as NATO expansion, the Balkans, economic difficulties, and each president's own personal troubles, a number of lessons emerge. First, great power politics takes place between human beings, not merely among structural or organizational frameworks. Second, the blending of idealism and realism is thorough and complex, they are not either-or options. Third, political, military, economic, domestic and international issues all impact each other, often in surprising ways. Fourth, watch out for the u in trying to explain policy making: in the generic Y=Ax+By+Cz+u, that u (for unexplained/unexpected) can often play a large role.

The Russia Hand is valuable to students of foreign policy, Russia and U.S.-Russia relations, and the emergence of the post-Cold War era.

I have read this book almost 6 months ago, so i cannot cite any specific passages from the book, but i do feel this book was well written and was very very intresting. It is better than what some of the reviewers rated it. I liked how the book was cronologically arranged, it took you through the clinton years as if you were there almost with Strobes. The only down fall i can think of is the list of names that continued to come up. I almost broke down to making some notes so i would remmber who was who. There are so many clinton bashing books out there, it is always good to read the opposite view point.

Contrary to several other reviewers on this site who are rather critical, I found this a very useful and insightful book. The fact that it hardly deals with the rise of the oligarchs and other important Russian domestic items is in my view not relevant as this is a book mainly on Russian-US relations in the 1990s. Talbott writes lucid prose and is often entertaining. One gets a good impression of the endless diplomatic wheeling and dealing behind the scenes with the Russians. Talbott gives a very interesting account of his direct relationship with the Russian official Yuri Mamedov, who served as his personal contact at the Russian foreign ministry. The wounded pride of the Russians, basically due to the collapse of the old Soviet empire, was so great that all kinds of irritations about Yugoslavia and Kosovo, NATO enlargement and other issues were basically inevitable, Talbott suggests between the lines. Amazing that things went so well between Russia and the US in this period of great difficulty for Yeltsin on the Russian domestic front. Boris Yeltsin comes through as an unpredictable politician with a drinking problem which was much bigger apparently than I suspected from reading other written accounts of the 1990s. During summits with the Russians, Clinton and his team were always counting the number of drinks Yeltsin gulped down and were often trying in vain to keep the hard liquor out of reach of the Russian president. When the summit was on American soil, that is. In Russia they didn't have this possibility, of course. Talbott writes with a great knowledge of Russian history and a love of the country, but is in no way uncritical of the mess Yeltsin and his team often made in the realm of foreign policy as well. Witness the unexpected transfer of Russian troops from Bosnia to Pristina at the end of the Kosovo crisis in 1999, which as Talbott pictures it, was a clear example of messy and irresponsible Russian decision making. Still, Talbott rightly suggests that Yeltsin as president was definitely preferable to a communist fossil like Zyuganov.