By Brian McDonald, Substack, 6/23/26
I went back to former US Ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul’s 2018 book From Cold War to Hot Peace after an exchange on X, last week, with the French philosopher Philippe Lemoine about Russia’s 1996 presidential election, which hits the big three-oh anniversary this week. Lemoine’s point was simple enough: that the election that Western officials hailed as a victory for Russian democracy was, in fact, a grubby, over-funded, heavily manipulated, and essentially unfair, rescue operation for Boris Yeltsin.
Yeltsin broke campaign spending limits by a distance visible from space while public money was used to settle wage arrears and hand out electoral sweeteners. The IMF, under pressure from Washington, loosened the tap at just the moment when the Yeltsin campaign needed the state to look solvent again and the media landscape, already falling under the shadow of the new oligarchs, was turned into a great anti-communist siren. Meanwhile, when Yeltsin, ill and exhausted, was dragged across the line, the whole thing was presented in the West as the salvation of democracy.
McFaul called it a “tremendous victory for democracy” and that phrase alone is worth keeping in a glass case, like one of those Soviet medals that tells you more about the system that awarded it than the heroism it claims to commemorate.
I had reviewed McFaul’s Moscow memoir years ago and remembered it as 483 pages of a former US ambassador venting his agitation over unfulfilled potential, but re-reading it now, with 1996 in mind, makes the book more interesting and more revealing. Not better, exactly, but more useful, because it’s less a personal account of diplomacy than a confession of a certain American faith that democracy is holy, provided it advances the right side.
McFaul is a professional scholar, so it’s highly likely that he’s familiar with George Berkeley. The philosopher from Kilkenny gave us subjective idealism and the famous formula esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived). McFaul, whether he knows it or not, has spent much of his career practising a geopolitical version of the same creed in which what’s important isn’t democracy as lived by a country, in all its history, mess, fear, habit and contradiction, but how democracy is perceived from Washington.
In that vision, Russia was democratic when it was weak, pro-Western, dependent, ashamed of itself, and governed by men who understood the correct hierarchy of the post-Cold War world, but it began to become “authoritarian” in earnest when it stopped moving in that direction.
This is the selective idealism running through McFaul’s book. He’s not interested in democracy in the broad sense, the rule of voters, parties, institutions, mandates and national preferences. Instead, he’s interested in a particular species of democracy that’s liberal, pro-American, elite-approved, NGO-friendly, and geopolitically obedient. If a country votes the right way, its imperfections are growing pains, but if it votes the wrong way, its politics become pathology.
That’s why the silences in the book are as significant as the arguments. McFaul has a great deal to say about Putin’s Russia, and some of it is valuable and his insider accounts of Obama-Putin meetings are worth reading. His recollection that Putin insisted Dmitry Medvedev was in charge of foreign policy during his 2008-2012 presidency is interesting, especially given the later fury in Moscow over Libya, and the observation that Putin declined a White House visit in 2012 also matters because it suggests the break with the West had happened in Putin’s head before the West fully understood it had lost him.
But when the story turns to Russia’s 1990s, McFaul’s moral intensity becomes oddly selective.
Take 1993, when Yeltsin shelled his own parliament with tanks, which meant the post-Soviet constitutional order was born in blood and executive violence, the result of which was the hyper-presidential system that later made Putin so powerful. A serious account of Russia’s democratic failure would have to linger there, in the rubble of the Moscow White House, asking what kind of republic was being built when the elected president could fire on the elected legislature and still be declared the man on the “right side of history.” But McFaul, surprise, surprise, doesn’t linger and quickly moves on.
Then comes 1996, which is the great wound under the plaster because this was the election Western liberals had to believe in, given the alternative was too inconvenient. Indeed, the famous July 1996 Time cover, “Yanks to the Rescue,” which openly celebrated the role of American political consultants in helping Yeltsin secure re-election, looks extraordinary three decades later in its total lack of self-awareness. Not to mention downright hypocritical when you remember that McFaul later became one of the loudest American voices condemning the far, far lighter and less effective Russian interference in the 2016 US election. Yet the 1996 Russian vote, with American advisers assisting Yeltsin, Western institutions helping steady the Russian state and Washington openly invested in the outcome, rarely inspires the same moral outrage. The asymmetry is revealing.
And that’s why his ambassadorship in Moscow was doomed from the first week. He arrived in January 2012, just as liberal protests were convulsing Moscow and shortly after Hillary Clinton had appeared to encourage the demonstrators from afar, and it so happened that his first public meeting as ambassador was with opposition figures. He says this wasn’t his preferred idea and perhaps he’s being truthful, but politics is made of optics as much as intentions, and in Moscow the optics were spectacularly bad. A man who had written on promoting regime change in the Soviet Union and Russia arrived in the Russian capital and immediately met the opposition during anti-government protests and you didn’t need to be a Kremlin paranoiac to notice the red rag.
Russian television then did what Russian television does, it mauled him, crudely and often dishonestly. McFaul complained of anti-American hysteria, not without reason, but his later comfort on American cable television, where anti-Russian hysteria is also manufactured with a straight face and a lavish studio budget, makes the complaint look rather hypocritical.
The deeper problem is that McFaul never seemed especially interested in Russia as Russians actually live it because his Russians are the Russians of a narrow Moscow circle, dissidents, liberals, refuseniks, black-market types, the disappointed children of the Soviet elite, and the people who speak the language of Western seminars and embassy receptions. These people can’t be totally dismissed, of course, because they’re real and some are brave and some are even admirable, but they’re definitely not Russia entire, or even usefully indicative of it. Meanwhile, the provinces, the conservative middle, the industrial towns, the military families, the voters who didn’t see the 1990s as liberation but as humiliation, remain distant shapes in the snow. But the problem is that those people elect Russian leaders too, and there’s simply far more of them than there are of the well-heeled internationalists who are more comfortable in the cosmopolitanism of London or Paris than the grind of Volgograd or Irkutsk.
This is where McFaul’s Berkeleyan problem returns in that the Russia that counted was the Russia visible to Washington, urban, liberal, English-speaking, Western-facing, and morally legible. At the same time, the bigger Russia beyond that niche was a problem to be either modernised or overcome, and wasn’t assigned any agency as a political subject.
Re-reading From Cold War to Hot Peace now, it’s easier to see why McFaul was so poorly received in Moscow but it’s important to concede that not every Russian attack on him was fair, and many were not, and also that it wasn’t because the Kremlin’s suspicions were pure, because they weren’t. It’s really because he embodied, almost too perfectly, the American assumption that Russia’s proper destiny was to become a lesser version of America’s idea of itself.
Putin ended that project, whether we like it or not, and that’s long been McFaul’s real grievance because his gripe isn’t merely that Russia became authoritarian, though that is his stated case, but that Russia stopped travelling toward the destination he believed history had assigned it. There’s very little doubt that he’d have been happy enough with a pro-American Pinochet, which, incidentally, is what Western elites appeared to think they were getting when Putin was chosen as Yeltsin’s successor in December 1999.
The book is therefore valuable, but not always in the way its author intended. It tells us something about Obama, Putin, Medvedev, Libya, the failed reset and the psychological weather of US-Russia relations, but above all, it tells us how American democracy promotion looks from inside its own church, which is sincere, learned, energetic, blind, and astonishingly forgiving of its own side.
After Lemoine’s nudging about 1996, McFaul’s old phrase, a “tremendous victory for democracy,” rings differently. Was it really, or rather instead was it the moment Russian democracy was saved from the voters by money, fear, oligarchic scheming, media discipline, failure to recognize Yeltsin as a train wreck, and foreign approval of that myopia?
That’s the question McFaul’s book never really answers and it may be the question it was written to avoid.