With the United States fixated on crime and corruption in Russia, Russians obsess about two other dramas: upcoming parliamentary elections and the war in the Caucasus region. The first drama might well have a happy ending, rare for Russian dramas these days. The second is almost certainly a tragedy in the making. Worse, the war in the Caucasus may eventually subsume elections altogether, resulting in their cancellation, civil resistance and even civil war. Before such a scenario gains more momentum, U.S. officials should look beyond Russian corruption and do what they can to lower the probability of democratic collapse in Russia.

According to conventional wisdom, the United States "lost" Russia in the 1990s. This

assessment can be found on the pages of The Nation, The Washington Times, The New

York Times magazine, or foreign policy issue papers prepared for presidential candidate

George W. Bush. These attacks fall into two contradictory categories. One school holds

that the policies pursued by the United States over the last decade have failed to establish capitalism and democracy in Russia, and instead have fueled corruption, crime, and ill will towards the United States. The other school argues that the United States was wrong to try to engineer domestic change within Russia in the first place.

When presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin meet in Moscow next month, issues such as

START II, NATO expansion, trade with Iran and Iraq, and Russia's new draconian law on

religion are likely to dominate the agenda. To historians of US-Soviet relations, this agenda

should sound familiar as arms control, European security, regional conflicts, and human rights were the main components of most summit agendas between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. This old agenda suggests that the promise of a new post-communist strategic partnership between the United States and Russia has not been realized. Especially as Russia continues to struggle in reforming its economy, many in the US have now concluded that engagement with this "basket case" is not worth the trouble--better to walk away from the failing project of internal reform and prepare instead to contain future external aggression.

U.S.-Russian relations offer one bright counter to the otherwise gloomy and complex set of issues facing American foreign policy makers after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Russian President Vladimir Putin was one of the first foreign leaders to speak directly to President Bush to express his condolences and offer his support for the American response. He followed these rhetorical pledges with concrete policies, including military and humanitarian support to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and Russian acquiescence to American troops in Central Asia.

The improvement in Russian-American relations is one of the few positive factors in the muddled picture of international relations today. Russian President Vladimir Putin's support for the American struggle against international terrorism has elevated communications between two former enemies to a new level. The upcoming November summit will be yet another sign of this. Politicians on either sides of the ocean are even calling the US and Russia "allies." Noting the decisiveness with which President Putin supports the US and Washington's extremely positive reaction to this, many Russian politicians and public figures have began speaking openly of Russia's entry into Western organizations and unions. Membership in the World Trade Organization is discussed in Moscow as an obvious reward Russia should receive for supporting American military actions; entry into the European Union is brought up as a relatively near goal, and so forth. The hopes are great, but do they reflect reality? Inflated expectations and skewed assessments of the speed and character of Russia's integration into the West are dangerous.

From both the right and the left, critics of U.S. policy toward Russia have had a heyday in recent weeks asserting that the Clinton administration got Russia wrong. The refrains are by now familiar: "Clinton became too close to Yeltsin." "The IMF was naive." "The West funded crony capitalism." "Russians are not culturally predisposed to markets," etc. The policy conclusion from these observations is that the United States neither can nor should do anything more to aid Russia but instead should reconstruct a firewall around this basket case of a country and try once again to contain the Russian threat to markets and democracy around the world.

The second error of omission is a failure to acknowledge the real menu of choices foreign policymakers face, especially when dealing with a revolution in midstream such as Russia's in the '90s. The same Mikhail Gorbachev who let the Warsaw Pact fall apart and helped Germany reunite also let his government loot Soviet gold reserves and allowed his armed forces to kill innocent people in Georgia and the Baltic states. Was [George W. Bush] wrong to deal with such a leader? The same Boris Yeltsin who bombed his parliament in 1993, invaded Chechnya twice and allowed corruption to flourish also destroyed the Soviet empire, introduced markets and democracy to Russia, destroyed thousands of nuclear weapons, acquiesced to NATO expansion and cooperated with the United States to end the Kosovo war.

Russia's state media openly championed the benefits of a George W. Bush victory for Russia. Under Bush, so [Putin]'s people believe, the United States will no longer care about domestic politics in Russia, such as human rights, independent media or the war in Chechnya. With Bush in power, so the thinking goes in Moscow, the Kremlin will have a free hand to roll back democracy in the name of restoring law and order.

Obviously, Putin and his people have a cartoonized understanding of the new Bush administration's foreign policy philosophy, a crude reading of how foreign policy is made in the United States and a flawed historical reading of Nixon's policy toward the Soviet Union. It is not the job of the new Bush team to give history lessons or civics courses about the U.S. policy process to its Russian counterpart. But it is imperative that the new Bush foreign policy team signal clearly and immediately to Moscow its true intentions regarding Russia, which above all else should reflect no nostalgia for the "good old days" of the Cold War era.

The Bush administration cannot interfere in the ownership of a Russian company. Nor can it save independent media in Russia or democracy more generally. Ultimately, only the Russian people can prevent dictatorship from reemerging. The Bush administration can, however, signal clearly and loudly that it sides with the majority of Russians and the brave NTV journalists. Silence only confirms what many of those holed up in the NTV offices already believe: that the new American administration does not care about Russian democracy. Even if these Russians lose their battle to maintain a free and independent media, the Bush administration should position itself on the right side of history in this struggle.