I was in Moscow in the waning days of the U.S.S.R., just after the aborted August coup by hard-line communists ended with former Russian President Boris Yeltsin atop a tank, saving the day for a nascent democratic order. In short order, he supplanted Former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev, and soon after, the Soviet Empire itself was replaced by a commonwealth of independent states.

My role was as a keynote speaker in Moscow’s first-ever democracy conference for newly formed political parties spanning Eastern Europe and the Baltics to Central Asia. From the conference’s start, it was clear that the Soviet nomenklatura had not disappeared. One of the local organizers was Oleg Kalugin, an affable KGB colonel who had headed U.S. operations. The spymaster’s daughter, Olga, was assigned as my interpreter.

Olga was a diminutive and attractive young blonde. As we strolled down Arbat Street while I shopped for souvenirs, we discovered a number of common interests. She spoke Spanish fluently, as did I, and enjoyed pistol shooting, although we differed on favorite firearms. I preferred the down-market Russian Vostok while she shot the decidedly more impressive IZH35M target pistol. 

I silently took note that she’d studied my KGB, the secret Russian police and intelligence agency, dossier carefully. As a former Reagan White House official who had been active in Latin America since the 1980s and brushed up against Russian intelligence officers, I’d been briefed that they would have files on me. When I paused to admire an antique military helmet, Olga suggested I could simply take it back to the States with me after the conference. I politely declined. The U.S.S.R. required a permit for the export of antiques and fine artwork. Without a permit, it would be a criminal offense. Instead, I picked up a street artist’s caricature of Yeltsin with a caption that read, according to Olga, “Mommies, don’t let your babies grow up to be Commies.”  

The Moscow democracy conference was a good introduction to the paradoxes of the former U.S.S.R. The political order and economy were collapsing, but powerful state forces still existed, uneasily side-by-side with the struggling democracies. The KGB’s successor, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, continued to probe our secrets and attempted to recruit agents just as aggressively as the KGB at the height of the Cold War.

Moscow marked the first of my many trips to the former Empire. Between 1991 and 1995, I worked in several former republics of the U.S.S.R. on projects including denuclearization, nuclear energy, and democratic development. As a private consultant and registered foreign agent for Ukraine, I worked closely with former Ukrainian presidents Leonid Kravchuk’s and Leonid Kuchma’s administrations, including the top levels of Ukraine’s equivalent of the White House, its Foreign Ministry, Atomic Energy Agency, Defense Department, and Academy of Sciences.

The United States and its allies were preoccupied with “loose” nukes, thousands of nuclear warheads, and launchers no longer under Moscow’s central control. In addition to Russia, three new nuclear powers emerged from the ruins of the U.S.S.R. virtually overnight. The newly independent republics of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine each held sizable nuclear forces left from the Soviet arsenal. They included intercontinental ballistic missiles, tactical nuclear weapons, strategic bombers, and thousands of nuclear warheads. Ukraine alone had more than 1,800 nuclear weapons. How to round up the loose nukes and reduce their number to comply with the START arms control treaty signed by the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. was a formidable problem now that control of the warheads lay with newly independent states.

I saw firsthand the misery of the Russian and Ukrainian people in the post-Soviet era. Livelihoods were upended as salaries at state-owned enterprises first went unpaid for months and then often ended altogether. A large barter economy emerged, with factories trading output with one another for supplies and raw materials, while workers were paid in products they were free to barter or sell in lieu of cash salaries. Hyperinflation soon compounded the misery.

Hard currency was king. University professors and people with doctorates were happy to work for me for $100 a month. A few dollar bills could open doors, pay for daylong transportation by a private driver, or cover a meal, provided the restaurant had any food in the kitchen. After several puzzling experiences trying to order from an extensive Soviet-era restaurant menu, only to find everything I wanted was unavailable, I learned to ask first what the cook had in the kitchen. I also learned to enjoy red beets, available in abundance, and coarse dark bread. One morning, a waiter at my hotel greeted me triumphantly. The chef, he said, had butter that day. 

There was a very dark side to the economic turmoil in Russia and Ukraine. Young girls, many of them college students, turned to prostitution to support their parents, siblings, and sometimes grandparents. They sought out foreign businessmen in the streets, bars, clubs, and often by knocking on their hotel doors after agreeing to pay a kickback to the hotel staff. 

Babushkas, elderly women, tried to maintain their tattered dignity while begging silently in front of churches during Sunday services and subway entrances on weekdays. Often, their take would be little more than some pieces of fruit, a few coins, and a vegetable or two. Black markets flourished. Rackets ranged from scavenging empty liquor bottles with Western brand labels from ritzy hotels and refilling them with sometimes lethal home-brewed booze to demands for kickbacks from officials and protection payments to gangsters. Corruption flourished at all levels of society, from the rise of powerful oligarchs — insiders who became mega-rich by being handed the crown jewels of the old Soviet state through botched privatizations of state enterprises and natural resources to petty bureaucrats demanding bribes.    

No wonder many ex-Soviet citizens longed for the good old days of the Brezhnev era when the shops were well-supplied, the state paid salaries on time, internal repression was not too harsh, and there was order in the streets.  

Similar to the rest of society, the Soviet Union’s former nuclear complex was in disarray. Scientists and military personnel went for prolonged periods without pay. Security at nuclear sites, already primitive by U.S. standards, rapidly deteriorated. Russia’s inventory of nuclear armaments was a paper ledger that could be easily altered. Storage facilities lacked security cameras and electronic monitoring systems. The economically strapped former Soviet states or corrupt officials might have sold weapons or transferred nuclear know-how, leading to a proliferation of nuclear-armed countries. It took several years, but when Ukraine agreed to return its nuclear warheads to Russia, the U.S., Russia, and Britain signed the Budapest Memorandums in 1994, guaranteeing Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Separately, China and France made similar pledges.

That high point in the U.S.S.R.’s transition from a Marxist state to a democracy was thirty years ago. Decisions made by former President Clinton during the 1990s led to increasingly strained relations with Russia. A once-in-a-century chance to woo Moscow westward was squandered. 

America’s preoccupation with the nuclear problem blinded it to the complexities of helping Russia and its former dominions evolve into market economies modeled after the U.S. and Western Europe. Instead of a comprehensive Marshall-style plan to reinvigorate the economies of the former Soviet republics, the West used aid as leverage on the surrender of nuclear weapons to Moscow and later conditioned it on economic reforms or anticorruption measures.     

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin simmered over what he viewed as the West’s deliberate humiliation of Russia. During the Cold War, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former President Richard Nixon played the Sino-Soviet rift to our advantage, so when Clinton gave China the “Most-Favored Nation” trade status in the 1990s and entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001, Putin could be forgiven for believing we were up to our old tricks of divide and conquer. Russia had applied to join the WTO in 1993, but it wasn’t admitted until 2012. China’s exports soared almost tenfold in the decade after its entry into the WTO. Russia remained shut out of the WTO while China rose to become America’s top trading partner and an economic and military powerhouse.

Ironically, China’s commitment to Marxist one-party rule never wavered during the post-Cold War period, while Moscow, at one stage, entertained actually joining NATO. Kissinger weighed in to quell the idea on the grounds that it would be too provocative to China. Similarly, he enjoined against allowing Ukraine to join lest Moscow be irked. He finally reversed his position on NATO membership for Ukraine in 2023.

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Today, we face an axis of Russia, China, and Iran. Call them our Cold War hangovers. All three regimes have their strengths and weaknesses, and all three may be more brittle than is realized. If Western governments commit to a Reagan-style defense buildup and to rolling back their influence from Ukraine to the Middle East to Asia, change could come rapidly to one or more of them.

If so, let’s hope policymakers do a better job with their transition to democracies than we did with the U.S.S.R.

John B. Roberts II is a former international political consultant and executive producer of The McLaughlin Group. His latest book is Reagan’s Cowboys: Inside the 1984 Reelection Campaign’s Secret Operation Against Geraldine Ferraro. His website is www.jbrobertsauthor.com.