Strongman, The

refuelling stop at Shannon in Ireland, and asked: ‘Are you going to bomb Yugoslavia?’ Gore replied: ‘I cannot tell you anything, no decision has been made.’ 2
    The government plane took off for the flight across the Atlantic. In the back were Russian business tycoons and officials, drinking vodka and playing dominoes. Suddenly, after four or five hours, Primakov received a call on a crackly, encrypted phone line. It was Gore telling him that NATO air strikes were, in fact, about to begin. Primakov at once called Yeltsin, checked with the pilot whether they had enough fuel to return to Shannon, and then went through to the cabin to inform the businessmen that the trip was abandoned: doing business with the Americans at this moment would be inappropriate.
    The reaction was telling. The tycoons, allowing their patriotism to outweigh their business acumen, broke into applause. ‘It was very emotional,’ says Kosachev. The decision to turn the plane around in mid-flight was meant to send a signal of Russia’s profound displeasure. Over the next days the same feelings spilled out onto the streets, as thousands of Russians protested outside the US embassy in Moscow.
    On his final presidential visit to Moscow a year later Clinton found the wound was still festering. Putin presented himself as a man who would no longer allow Russia to be ignored or pushed around. For two days he hammered home his criticism of America’s plans for a unilateral missile defence shield. Then on the final morning, as they held a farewell meeting in the Kremlin, Putin issued a dark threat that if America went ahead with its plans, Russia’s response would be ‘appropriate’ and ‘maybe quite unexpected, probably asymmetrical’ – in other words, the Russians would not try to match the sophisticated and costly US system but would take means to render it ineffective. That could mean anything from building huge numbers of nuclear missiles to overwhelm the proposed shield, to destroying the American installations as soon as they were set up.
    Clinton heard out Putin’s homily, then turned to his aide, Strobe Talbott, and murmured, ‘I guess that guy thought I didn’t get it the first time. Either he’s dense or thinks I am. Anyway, let’s get this thing over with so we can go see Ol’ Boris.’ 3
    With relief, the Americans then drove out of the Kremlin to bid farewell to Clinton’s friend, ex-President Yeltsin, now living in retirement in his country dacha. There was a surprise waiting for him. By the time he got there Putin had called Yeltsin and asked him to rub in the message even harder. Russia, he said, would not put up with any American policy that threatened Russian security. When the tirade was over, Clinton steered the conversation back to his own concerns about Russia’s future. His parting words, as related by his adviser Strobe Talbott, were quite remarkable – and revealing of the American view of Russia after the fall of communism.
    ‘Boris,’ he said, ‘you’ve got democracy in your heart, you’ve got the trust of the people in your bones, you’ve got the fire in your belly of a real democrat and a real reformer. I’m not sure Putin has that. You’ll have to keep an eye on him and use your influence to make sure that he stays on the right path. Putin needs you, Boris. Russia needs you ... You changed Russia. Russia was lucky to have you. The world was lucky you were where you were. I was lucky to have you. We did a lot of stuff together, you and I ... We did some good things. They’ll last. It took guts on your part. A lot of that stuff was harder for you than it was for me. I know that.’
    As he left Yeltsin’s dacha, Clinton turned to Talbott: ‘That may be the last time I see Ol’ Boris. I think we’re going to miss him.’
    Clinton’s mawkish words clearly suggest he thought that under Yeltsin things had gone very well in Russia and Russia was where America wanted it to be. In fact, things were not going well, and Russia did not want just to go wherever America wanted it to be. In reality, what America was going to miss was a Russian leader who was compliant to the point of submissiveness. Putin would be anything but that.
    Yeltsin’s Russia
    The West’s handling of post-Soviet Russia had been just about as insensitive as it could have been. With Western corporations salivating at the prospect of a huge new market, Harvard economists hired by the Russian government urged it to introduce