Braithwaite warned Bill Clinton that Boris Yeltsin was an autocratic bully
By Vera Kessler ·
A decade of diplomacy rested on the whims of Boris Yeltsin, despite a secret warning that the "democratic reformer" was actually a bullying, impetuous autocrat.
Ordinary Russians bet their stability on a man who mirrored their own chaos—drinking, stumbling, and hating the party—while the diplomats tasked with managing him feared his temper would derail the peace. The cost of this miscalculation was a decade of diplomacy built not on institutional strength, but on the whims of a single, volatile personality.
'Bullying, Impetuous, Autocratic'
The file's catalogue entry records a confidential memorandum dated January 12, 1993, written by Sir Rodric Braithwaite. Braithwaite had spent four years as Margaret Thatcher's ambassador to Moscow, navigating the transition from Mikhail Gorbachev to Boris Yeltsin. Writing as a foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister John Major, Braithwaite sought to brief the incoming Clinton administration on the actual nature of the man who had inherited the Soviet wreckage.
Braithwaite did not mince words. He described Yeltsin's tendencies as "bullying, impetuous, autocratic." This was the reality behind the public image of the democratic reformer. The public record notes that Yeltsin had been a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1961 to 1990; Braithwaite’s memo suggests that Yeltsin was not a break from that system, but a product of it. He saw Yeltsin as a result of the "internal jockeying and networking" of the Communist Party, a machine that rewarded those who could navigate its shadows.
Yet, the record captures a strange paradox. While the diplomats saw a liability, the people saw themselves. "Ordinary Russians loved him," Braithwaite wrote, "precisely because he got drunk, fell into rivers, and hated the Communists – just like they did."
Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu
A 'Rustbowl' Defense Industry
The memo highlights a specific, systemic failure that the West had largely ignored in its enthusiasm for the fall of the Wall. Braithwaite pointedly criticized the "reformers" and their Western advisers for failing to produce any "credible plan" to address the "rustbowl" defense industry. This was not merely a matter of outdated factories; it was the remnants of a superpower's military complex, a volatile concentration of weaponry and unemployed specialists that lacked a roadmap for peace.
Braithwaite’s analysis was steeped in the long view of history, adopting a tone that the archive describes as that of a lecturer in an introductory class on Russian history. He did not see the events of 1993 in isolation. He referenced the 1917 revolution as a direct consequence of the failures of democratic reformers. He looked further back to the reality of tsarist Russia, describing it as an autocracy "tempered by assassination."
By framing Yeltsin in this context, Braithwaite was warning Clinton that the "new" Russia was haunted by the same ghosts. He compared the struggle between Yeltsin and the Supreme Soviet to the long, bloody arc of British parliamentary struggles to restrain royal power. In his view, Russia was attempting to skip several centuries of political evolution, trying to find a stability that usually only comes after the emergence of genuine political parties—something Gorbachev had failed to establish.
January 12, 1993
The timing of the memorandum is critical. It arrived before Bill Clinton was inaugurated, and before his key Russia appointments—Strobe Talbott, the special ambassador for the newly-independent Soviet states, and Thomas Pickering, the ambassador in Moscow—had been confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Braithwaite was attempting to prime the pump for a relationship that would define the next decade of global security.
His core advice was a study in cold realism: the West could do little to actually fix Russia. Their future, he argued, was theirs to make. The role of the United States was not to engineer a democracy from the outside, but to treat Russia with respect as a "great power," even if it was no longer a superpower. He insisted that Russia be included in all international geopolitical decisions to avoid the resentment that historically fuels Russian aggression.
The record indicates that Bill Clinton followed this advice. Throughout his presidency, Clinton relied on a personal connection with Yeltsin to manage the relationship, often prioritizing the rapport between two leaders over the institutional friction of their bureaucracies.
The memorandum leaves us with the image of a leader who was loved for his flaws and feared for his temper, guided by a West that chose to treat him as a peer despite the warnings of his own nature. The question that remains is whether treating an "autocratic" leader as a great power partner stabilizes a region or simply validates the volatility.