Andrew C. Kuchins, director of the Russian & Eurasian Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says U.S.-Russian relations are "rather precarious" and could spiral downwards. The latest development was the speech given by Vice President Dick Cheney in Lithuania in which he criticized Russian internal policies, drawing sharp responses from the Kremlin.

But Kuchins points out that Cheney, while visiting oil-rich Kazakhstan on the same trip, delivered no criticism of its dictatorial ruler. Likewise, he says, the authoritarian president of Azerbaijan was welcomed without criticism in Washington recently.

"I think the Russians are struck by what looks to be a sort of breathtaking exercise of double standards on the part of the Bush administration," says Kuchins. He also says he believes that the administration felt it had to be tough in public on Moscow to allow President Bush to attend a scheduled G8 meeting in St. Petersburg this July.

You've been a close observer of the Russian scene for many years. How would you describe the current state of U.S.-Russian relations?

I think the general state is rather precarious right now. We're in a dynamic that has the potential to spiral downwards. An awful lot has changed in Russia. Russia's changed so fast, it's just breathtaking. You look across the board at the economic numbers of Russian growth and the recovery of the economy and we can dismiss it and say: "Well, this is all based on high oil prices." That's true, but the recovery is nevertheless real and it's changed the dynamic of the relationship. I think it's a fundamental starting point that the level of confidence that we see in the Kremlin is higher today than it's probably been maybe going back twenty-five years ago when the Brezhnev team and his colleagues got old and sick, at a time when the Russians had achieved nuclear parity with the United States and when they really had arrived as a nuclear superpower.

You're talking about 1980?

I think the key event for the Russians then was the collapse of oil prices back in 1986. From 1973 through the mid-1980s, they had massive energy revenue coming into the economy, and that was able to support a more assertive and independent Russian policy, which contributed to the collapse of détente. But when those oil and energy revenues diminished considerably, not surprisingly, that was when Mikhail Gorbachev undertook perestroika, which produced a retrenchment that eventually brought an end to the Cold War.

That's interesting. I haven't heard that theory about the oil price being a determinant in the rise of Gorbachev's perestroika and essentially the collapse of the Soviet empire.

I think basically the Soviet empire was able to live off fumes because of the energy revenue. And they didn't undertake the structural economic reform which was needed. So the economy was running itself into the ground, but it was propped up by the energy revenues, which gave the Kremlin a greater degree of confidence. And when the energy revenues went away they hadn't addressed the economic reform issues. If oil prices were seventy-five dollars a barrel in 1986, I don't think that Mr. Gorbachev would have undertaken a perestroika, etc.

[U.S.-Russian relations] seemed to come to a crashing denouement after the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky [the oil oligarch] and the takeover of Yukos [his major oil company]. What prompted the whole Khodorkovsky-Yukos episode, which really began the process of putting a strain on Western relations with Russia?

Well, first of all, one thing I would say before getting into that is that after 9/11, and the second honeymoon in U.S.-Russian relations, we cooperated together in defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan—along with the Iranians, by the way. That was a case in which the U.S. and Russian interests directly coincided, because the Russians saw the Taliban and radical Sunni Islam as directly threatening their interests in the northern Caucuses, Chechnya first and foremost, but also throughout the northern Caucuses, and also in Central Asia.

Well, a month or two after the Taliban's defeat we announced our withdrawal from the anti-ballistic missile treaty. We also pushed hard on the second round of NATO expansion, to include former Warsaw Pact members. These were things that the Russians stated clearly to us were not in their interests. So the Russians feel like they got stiffed by the Bush administration after their cooperation in Afghanistan. Now, the Khodorkovsky story is a little bit related, but really kind of a different story: We have a very different narrative of the 1990s than they do. To them, the 1990s represents what the Russians call a "Smutnaya Vremya," a time of trouble, and the core thing there was the collapse of state power. There was chaos, anarchy reigned, half of the population was impoverished, people's savings disappeared, the empire collapsed, and Russia actually lost a civil war on its own territory, the first Chechan war.

So Putin sees as his mission to restore state authority first and foremost, that is the key to restoring Russia as a great power. Yes, they've got kind of a nineteenth-century view of realpolitik and the role of great powers in the world but that's the way it is. Oil and gas revenues are such an important piece of the Russian economy and they're the key lever for Russia's recovery in the near-term, and the oil companies have been privatized for a song. Mr. Khodorkovsky was becoming too powerful and too independent from the standpoint of the Kremlin; they did not think they could tolerate that.

He was buying up the parliament [Duma], he was more aggressive than his colleagues in that way and that was just not acceptable. And I think from the Kremlin's standpoint, a turning point there was June of 2003, when there was a piece of legislation before the Duma about taxation of oil-extracting companies. It would have raised taxes on those companies, and a very strange coalition of forces arose in the Duma—the liberal rightist parties, Yabloka and Union of Right Forces, together with the communists, the leftists—to vote this piece of legislation down. Why? Well the Kremlin believes that they are all being bought off by Khodorkovsky and supporters. I think not coincidentally it was within two weeks after that that his colleague, Platon Lebedev was arrested. That was the Kremlin's way of saying, "hey look, man, you went too far."

You think that's true, actually?

I think that is true. I think there were some people in the Kremlin that actually wanted to destroy Khodorkovsky and of course, they were being driven and supported by commercial rivalries, first and foremost that of Sergei Bogdanchikov at Rosneft, whose Kremlin sponsor and now chairman of his board is Igor Sechin. Bogdanchikov was a rival of Khodorkovsky and Yukos, and he wanted their resources. So you have the commercial rivalry aspect to it, but first and foremost, I think, there's the sense that the Russian state is insufficiently strong to tolerate such a powerful, wealthy figure. I remember at the time Khodorkovsky was already worth about $8 billion in June of 2003, and by the fall, as he was getting into the negotiations with Chevron, Texaco, and ExxonMobil to sell a very significant share of Yukos—and of course, he also merged the company with Sibneft, another large privatized company. I thought he honestly had the potential to be one of the wealthiest guys in the world, if not the wealthiest guy in the world.

Was he really planning to put up a candidate to run against Putin?

I don't know that for sure, but I am quite confident that he had larger political aspirations.

When did U.S.-Russian relations really go bad?

Okay, well the Yukos case was a first blow. Then you had the parliamentary elections and the presidential elections, which were not exactly stellar exercises in democracy, but of course none of the Russian elections had been particularly stellar exercises in democracy but that was another blow. Then of course we had the dispute with the Ukrainians over the presidential election at the end of 2004. I was in Moscow at that time and you could just see the drift in the tone in the relationship. We were diverging, as the Bush administration could no longer look askance at democratic backsliding in Russia. Our hopes for the energy partnership were not panning out. And while we had agreed with the Russians about the Taliban, of course we did not agree with the Russians about Iraq.

Then, of course in January of this year you have the dispute over gas between Russia and Ukraine. And so our administration's concerns about what's happening internally in Russia as well as Russia's behavior toward its near neighbors—the former parts of the Soviet/Russian empire—have become greater irritants in the relationship. The things that we agree on, the pragmatic, realist side of the relationship, and even the quite good progress actually on nonproliferation and nuclear security things have drawn less attention.

And of course the Russians are really not giving the United States much help on Iran, I guess.

A few months ago we were a lot closer on Iran than we were a few years ago. I think the Russians were taken aback by the revelations that came forward from the Iranian dissident group about Natanz, the nuclear enrichment facility there. But the Russians just look at Iran differently than we do. For one, Iranians are a pretty supportive geopolitical partner for the Russians. The Iranians have never criticized the Russians for what they're doing in Chechnya. The Iranians and the Russians worked together with us to take out the Taliban. I think the Russians are also wary of attracting Iranian-supported terrorist groups to turn their attention to Russian territory or to Central Asia. Russians want to avoid that. So they certainly don't want to see military action go on in Iran. They think, as they thought in Iraq, that it would be more likely to destabilize rather than stabilize the regime. I think they're probably right about that. And then they also have commercial interests, which kind of cut both ways. If Iranian oil goes off the market, or some amount of Iranian oil goes off the market, oil prices spike above a hundred dollars a barrel, it's not exactly a bad thing for the Russians.

And if European and American companies are not able, through sanctions, to be involved in the development of Iranian oil and gas resources, well, guess what, the Russian companies will eagerly come down there and get involved.

And that brings us up to Vice President Dick Cheney's speech the other day in Lithuania.

Right. The administration is in a fix right now. Nobody in the administration is happy about the fact that the Russians are chairing the G8 meeting [in July in St. Petersburg]. Admitting Russia into the G8 when in fact it was not a mature liberal democracy was based on the hope that Russia would, through the G8 interaction, promote more cooperative behavior. It's not clear that those assumptions are panning out. And certainly Russia's not becoming more democratic, it's become less democratic.

So it's a problem for the administration. Mr. Bush is going to go to St. Petersburg, unless something really catastrophic happens between now and then in the relationship, but I think the administration has been debating about how to send a strong signal to the Russians about its unhappiness on certain issues. The Cheney speech was clearly one of the moves that was developed. And then, of course, he flies over Russia and goes to Kazakhstan and breaks bread with President Nursultan A. Nazarbayev and doesn't really say anything in public that could be could construed as critical of Kazakh violations of human rights or democracy, which are at least as egregious as the Russians if not more so. And, of course, Washington had played host to President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan ten days ago. He is yet another dictator whose regime has been very oppressive politically, but he happens to rule a small country with a lot of hydrocarbons and Kazakhstan happens to be a smaller country with a lot of hydrocarbons by comparison with Russia. I think the Russians are struck by what looks to be a sort of breathtaking exercise of double standards on the part of the Bush administration.

Do you agree with that? I mean that's what the Russians think. Is this a double standard by the Bush administration?

Of course it's a double standard. How can we avoid that conclusion?

Was Cheney's speech a way to let Bush go to St. Petersburg, indicating ahead of time that the United States is wary of Russia?

Yes, I think so. The Bush administration has felt on the defensive as the chorus of voices in Washington criticizing Russia has grown louder and louder, with the Council on Foreign Relations' report being a good example.