Bill Clinton: “Thank you, Alexander Nikolaiovich, for that introduction, for your lifetime of accomplishment, and your support for free…”

“Thank you, Alexander Nikolaiovich, for that introduction, for your lifetime of accomplishment, and your support for free speech and for reform. I am deeply honored to be here today at this station, which has become for all the world a beacon of information and truth. Attacked 3 months ago by opponents of reform, Ostankino stands as a symbol of the power of free expression and of the brave sacrifices the Russian people have been making to build a great and free future. I'm so glad there are many young people here, and I hope there are many, many more watching us on television, because it is the future of the youth of Russia that I wish to speak about. Once every generation or two, all great nation's must stop and think about where they are in time. They must regenerate themselves. They must imagine their future in a new way. Your generation has come of age at one of those moments. Yesterday I walked through Moscow. I stopped at a bakery and bought some bread. I went into another shop and talked to the people there. I talked with an awful lot of people on the street. I went to Kazan Cathedral and lit a candle in memory of my mother. It is a cathedral which, like Russia itself, has been built anew on old foundations. Over the centuries, the Russian people have shown their greatness in many ways: in the arts and literature, on the battlefield, in the university, and in space. Though the Communist system suppressed human rights and human initiative and repressed your neighbors and brought the world the cold war, still the greatness of the Russian people shone through. Now on the brink of the 21st century, your nation is being called upon once again to redefine its greatness in terms that are appropriate to the present day and to the future, in ways that will enable your nation to be strong and free and prosperous and at peace. We live in a curious time. Modern revolutions are changing life for the better all over the world. Revolutions in information and communications and technology and production, all these things make democracy more likely. They make isolated, state-controlled economies even more dysfunctional. They make opportunities for those able to seize them more numerous and richer than ever before. And yet even in this modern world, the oldest of humanity's demons still plague us, the hatreds of people for one another based solely on their religion or their race or their ethnic backgrounds or sometimes simply on the piece of ground they happen to have been born upon. In the midst of these conflicts between the faces and forces of tomorrow and the forces of yesterday, I believe that the greatness of nations in the 21st century will be defined not by whether they can dictate to millions and millions of people within and beyond their borders but instead by whether they can provide their citizens, without regard to their race or their gender, the opportunity to live up to the fullest of their ability, to take full advantage of the incredible things that are in the world of today and tomorrow. Therefore, if we are to realize the greatness of Russia in the 21st century, I believe your nation must be strong democratically and economically. And in this increasingly interconnected world, you must be able to get along together and to get along with and trade with your neighbors close at hand and all around the globe. To do that, I think we will have to write an entirely new future for all of Europe, a future in which security is based not on old divisions but on the new integration of nations by means of their shared commitment to democracy, to open economies, and to peaceful military cooperation. I come here as a friend and supporter of the democratic changes going on in this nation. I hope that my Nation and I can make a positive contribution in the spirit of genuine and equal partnership, not simply to these large changes but a positive contribution to the everyday lives of ordinary citizens of this great nation. In the end, you will have to decide your own future. I do not presume to do that. Your future is still yours to make, yours to write, yours to shape. But I do come to say that my Nation and its President want very much to be your equal partners and genuine friends. If I were in your place listening to this speech, I might ask myself, ``Why is this guy saying this? What is on his mind? Why is he really eager to work with us?'' First of all, I identify with and even sympathize with the difficulty of the changes you face. I ran for President of the United States in 1992 because I was convinced that my Nation had to make some very hard choices and some tough changes in order to keep the dream that had inspired Americans for 200 years alive, in order to keep the hopes of our working people alive in a fierce and difficult and ever-changing new global economy. So I understand that. I have devoted myself at home to making those changes, and I know the changes are difficult, even in an environment in which they are easier than the ones you face. So I come here in genuine sympathy and understanding. Secondly, I am interested in supporting these changes because my Nation stood for so long against a Communist system, against its lack of freedom, against its excessive dictates, against its imperial impulses, and I could not bear to think that a majority of your people would ever be sorry to have given it up. I come here because I believe that together we can write a new future for Europe and help the entire world to have a more peaceful and prosperous future. And frankly, I come here because I believe your success is clearly in the best interests of the United States and of ordinary American citizens. For it is in our interest to be able to spend less on defense and to invest more in our own people, in the education and health and welfare and technology that will help to carry us into a better time in the 21st century. It is in our interest to curb the spread of weapons of mass destruction and to cooperate with you in reducing threats to peace all around the world. It is in our interest to develop new trade ties and new customers. And each of these developments is more likely if we have a genuine, equal partnership with a strong and free Russia. I believe how you define your future will be determined in large measure by how you decide to respond as a people to the three great challenges facing you. First, will you continue to work for a genuine market economy, or will you slow down or turn back? Second, will you continue to strengthen and deepen your commitment to democracy, or will you allow it to be restricted? And third, how will you define your role in the world as a great power? Will you define it in yesterday's terms or tomorrow's? Let me begin with a challenge that clearly most affects the daily lives of the people of this nation, the economic one. I know that your transition to a market economy has been hard, painful, even emotionally disorienting to millions of people. But if the change seems costly, consider the price of standing still or trying to go back. A rigid, state-run economy simply does not work in the modern world. To be sure, the system you had produced a very literate society, made some of you the best educated people in the world, developed a high-tech base and developed a strong industrial base tied quite closely to your military might. But it is inadequate to a dramatically changing, highly competitive, increasingly flexible global economy in which all decisions simply cannot be made by a handful of people from the top down and in which no country is immune from the forces without. The old system failed before. That is why you are in the present period of transition. If you attempted to reimpose it, it would fail you again. Let me make it clear that I do not suggest that markets solve all problems. They clearly do not solve all of society's problems. And indeed, they create some problems for every society, problems which must be frankly and forthrightly addressed by people who propose to have a strong community of common interest and common concern within their nation. Yet it is clear that the surest way to prosperity in the world in which we live is the ability of people to produce and to sell high- quality goods and services both within and beyond their borders. There is no other clear path to prosperity. Russia clearly has the capacity to do well in this kind of economy. You have enormous technological prowess, a highly educated citizenry that is known and respected around the world. You have immensely valuable natural resources. It is clear that you have the capacity to do well. You have a rapidly growing private sector. Already your nation has privatized nearly one-third of its industry. About 600 businesses a month are privatizing. Tens of millions of your people now own private property and are gaining daily experience in market economies. But there remain serious problems, the most profound, of course, is high rates of inflation. Inflation at high rates destroys wages. It makes people feel that they can't keep up and that no matter how hard they work, they will not be rewarded for their labor. It hurts the ordinary working people, the very people that are the backbone of any society, who have to believe that the future can be better than the present. It undermines that very belief and makes it so difficult to develop and maintain a majority for the changes and the short-term sacrifices that have to be made. So inflation must be tamed. And as everyone knows, that also has its price, for inflation can only be tamed if the government is willing to print less money and therefore to spend less. The next problem you have, it seems to me as an outside observer, is that even though you have a lot of privatization of companies, the systems on which every private economy depends are not as well-developed as they ought to be. There are not enough laws which clarify and protect contracts, which make tax systems clear, which provide, in other words, the framework within which all different kinds of transactions can occur. But that can be rather easily corrected. There are other problems. I might just mention one other that President Yeltsin has talked about quite a lot lately and that has received a lot of attention all around the world since the last election here in Russia, and that is that your country must develop some sort of social safety net as all other successful market economies have to deal with the fact that some people are always going to have difficulties in a rapidly changing economy. Most people can be restored to participation in the economy in times of prosperity, but in any market economy there will always be people who are dislocated. So you have to have training systems, retraining systems, systems to make sure that new businesses can always be started when old businesses are stopping, and systems to deal with people who simply are not competitive in difficult times. Now, you must determine how to do this. No one can determine how to do it for you or even whether to do it. But as your partner, I can tell you that the United States will do what we can to help to ease your hardships as you move forward on this path and do what we can to help you make the decisions that you are prepared to make. Let me say that I think this has been, in some ways, the most difficult period of all for you because you have taken a lot of risks, you have made a lot of changes already, and yet the changes have not been felt tangibly in the lives of most ordinary citizens in the country. And that is very difficult. But I can say that just as an outside observer, it seems to me that it is likely that you will begin to see those changes. Let me just give you a couple of examples. I asked Vice President Gore and Prime Minister Chernomyrdin to work on a program of economic cooperation in the fields of energy, the environment, and space. You have massive energy resources. If we can just get a few more things worked out, it will lead to big flows of money and investment, prosperity, and jobs into this nation. We have reached an agreement, an unprecedented agreement, for cooperation in space. Next month, Russian cosmonauts will serve on our space shuttle. We will share our resources, share our knowledge, share our training. And we will uncover things in space and in our venture which will have direct economic benefits to the people of Russia and the people of the United States. We both have different but very significant environmental problems which require high levels of skill and technology but which generate enormous economic opportunities and large numbers of jobs. These things will come. Secondly, last April when I met with President Yeltsin, I pledged $1.6 billion in United States aid. We have now committed all that aid, and 70 percent of the money has been spent. And I provided a map the other day which showed that it had been spent all over the country in all kinds of different ways, mostly to help you to develop a private economy. You will begin to see the benefits of that. Just this week, the G-7 big industrial nations opened an office in this city, led by an American, for the purpose of making sure that we speed up the aid that was promised last summer but which has been coming too slowly. In September, the Congress of the United States approved another $2.5 billion aid package which can now begin to flow again to try to create jobs and opportunities and to help slow the rate of inflation in this country. So I believe that specific benefits will begin to be felt, and people will come to see that there is a light at the end of this long tunnel. Just today we announced the signing of a contract for the purchase of highly enriched uranium, a contract which will bring another $12 billion to this nation over the next several years. And we are working hard to get assistance to the nations which buy your energy, because so many of them cannot afford to pay for it, to make sure that you can be paid in cash, promptly, as you sell your energy resources. All these things will begin to have an impact on the lives of ordinary citizens. That is something that--as someone who also has to run for election on a periodic basis, I am sensitive to that. In a democracy, if you put people in the driver's seat, they are going to drive. So it is best to give them a good road to drive on, and we are working with that. The next great challenge Russia faces is the consolidation of democracy, and I want to say just a few words about that. Just like the market, democracy is no cure-all for all economic troubles or social strains. It is always a noisy and messy system. Our common ally in World War II, the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once said that, ``Democracy is the worst possible form of government, except for all of the others.'' Why did he say that? Because the debate is so wide; the opinions are so different. And sometimes the differences are so sharp that you wonder if anything will ever be done. But democracy still offers the best guarantee of good decisionmaking and the protection of individual and minority rights. In a society like yours and mine and throughout the multiethnic expanse of Europe, democracy offers the best hope of protecting diversity and of making diversity a source of strength, harnessing it to a world in which diversity is perhaps the overwhelming fact of life. That is why I would argue to you that each of us, in order to protect your democracy and mine, has a personal responsibility to denounce intolerance and ethnic hatred and anti-Semitism and anything that undermines the ability of everybody who lives within our national borders to be as productive as possible. Because, keep in mind, in the world in which we live, if you make any decision that deprives anybody who lives in your country of the right to live up to the fullest of their capacities, you have weakened your own ability to be free and prosperous and successful. I might say it is also why the United States has cautioned other nations to respect the rights of ethnic Russians and other minorities within their borders. In both our nations, the success of democracy depends partly on a formal constitution and partly on regular elections and respecting those elections. But it also depends upon a full array of other free associations that give real life and texture to democracies: independent trade unions, newspapers, and a wide variety of civic and cultural associations. If, like me, you are in a position of authority, you know that the freedom of speech can sometimes be a painful thing. Even in Roman times the great Emperor Marcus Aurelius said that the freedom of speech for someone in power was something to be endured, not enjoyed. But it is essential to democratic life that people feel free to say what they believe without fear of retaliation. We are committed to fostering this kind of democratic ferment, and we are prepared to provide whatever kind of technical assistance we can to help it do well here. I say that because some people are concerned at the wide variety of views and the loud expression of those views we see in the Duma here after the last election. That can be a healthy thing if, but only if, everybody else's views are respected and protected too. For once democracy becomes an instrument of crushing the views of the minorities, of those who disagree, of those who don't have the muscle, then democracy itself soon disappears. The third great challenge you face today is redefining the role of your great nation in this age: What does it mean to be a great power in this 21st century? How will you define it? How will you know Russia is a great nation? If someone asked you to describe it, looking to the future, how would you know? If someone asked you to describe it looking back in the early 1800's, you would say, ``We are a great nation because we beat Napoleon and ran him out of Russia.'' Right? Whether you agree or disagree with the Communist system, you can say you were a great nation in the sense that you loomed large at the height of the Soviet empire with the Warsaw Pact. Great does not always mean good, but at least it's large. How will you define your greatness? It is a profoundly important question that you must answer. I think there are some different ways to describe it. Russia cosponsored with the United States the Middle East peace process. I think it was a very great thing when Israel and the PLO signed their accord on September 13, 1993. I think it is a good thing that we are continuing to work until a comprehensive settlement is reached in that troubled area. I think it was a great thing what we did today with the Presidents of Ukraine and Russia and the United States, agreeing to get all the nuclear weapons out of Ukraine and to give fair compensation to that nation for the uranium they are giving up. It makes the world a safer place. It makes your nation and mine less vulnerable to nuclear terrorism or threats. It shows that we can move beyond the nuclear age entirely. There are still questions, you know, in the world about how you will define your greatness. When I was at the NATO conference and afterward, there are nations that live between Western Europe and the border of Russia who still wonder what the future holds, nations who said, ``Put me in NATO now just in case. Oh, I believe this President of Russia when he says he respects the territorial borders of other nations, but look at the history of Russia. Think of the national impulse. Draw another line across Europe now, while you have a chance.'' There are people who are in the Baltic nations now who hear some of the debate in your politics, who hear the threats to take them over again. One of your political leaders even suggested you might like to have Alaska back. I don't think I can go along with that. [Laughter] I say that because all those definitions, I would argue to you, are looking to yesterday. What in the world would you do with an army of occupation to the east? How would you pay for it? And what would it give you? How would you be more powerful than some small nation, one of the industrial tigers of Asia, for example, producing and selling goods and services at such a rate that their people's incomes are going up by 10 percent a year, and they are giving the people who live there the opportunity to do things that would have been undreamed of by their parents or grandparents? This is a very serious thing. I believe that the greatness of a nation that lasts for centuries and centuries and centuries, as this nation has, is the ability to redefine itself in every age and time. The young people of Russia especially now have a chance to show that a great power can promote patriotism without expansionism, that a great power can promote national pride without national prejudice. That, I submit, is your challenge. Today, you face no threat from invasion. That was a legitimate concern of Russia for decades and decades, a legitimate reason to want a buffer zone around your borders in former times. It is not there now. I believe the measure of your greatness in the future will be whether Russia, the big neighbor, can be the good neighbor. That is why it is so important that as your forces operate beyond your borders, they do so according to international law, why it is important that you continue your planned withdrawal from all the Baltic States, why it is important that your nation work with the United States and the rest of Europe to build the Partnership For Peace called for at the NATO conference this year, so that for the first time in the history of nation states we can have a Europe that is united by a shared commitment to democracy, free-market economies, and mutual respect for borders, instead of a Europe that is divided, for the first time in history. I'm very proud and pleased that President Yeltsin decided to participate in the Partnership For Peace and work for an integrated Europe, that he signed the historic accord with President Kravchuk and with me today to eliminate over 1,800 nuclear warheads. These are hopeful signs and, I believe, signs that indicate you can make a future that is different from the past. Yours is a history of heroism and of persistent hope. The question now is, can we make the economic decisions, the political decisions that foster hope? You will have to decide these things. I'm amused when I come here in the spirit of genuine partnership and respect and some people say, ``Well, the United States is trying to dictate our course.'' Nothing could be further from the truth. Believe me, my friends, it's all we can do to deal with our own problems. We don't have time to try to dictate your course. But the course you take will affect us, and so we want you to make decisions that are best for you. And I will close as I began: Will you define your future greatness in terms that were relevant to the past or terms that will shape the future? This is a crossroad and a difficult one. But the younger generations of Russians will look back on this time with either gratitude or regret, depending on how those questions are answered, the economic, the political, the military questions. I believe you will choose the future. After all, Russia did not get to this point by making all that many wrong decisions in the past. And every nation makes a few mistakes. There are few people anywhere that have more knowledge of history, both positive and negative, that have more reason to hope for the future than you do. I know the present is difficult, but if you make the right decisions, if you choose hope over fear, then the future will reward your courage and your vision. Thank you very much. [At this point, the television station took a commercial break.]”