Digital National Security Archive (DNSA): U.S.-Russia Relations: From the Fall of the Soviet Union to the Rise of Putin, 1991-2000

This set covers the first decade of U.S. relations with the newly independent Russian Federation after the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 – a period that started with unprecedented hopes for cooperation and partnership and ended with disillusionment and the creeping return of Cold War thinking on both sides. This collection includes  2,465 declassified documents from major U.S. government agencies along with key translated documents from the Russian archives. The main single source of documents was a successful Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit by the National Security Archive against the State Department to release documents from the retired files of Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, who was the first Clinton administration ambassador to the “newly independent states” and then the number two official at the State Department under two different Secretaries, Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright – always with the Russia portfolio at the top of his inbox.   
Over the last 20 years, the staff of the Russia project at the National Security Archive supplemented these materials by filing hundreds of FOIA and Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) requests to the State Department, the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and other agencies, receiving thousands of pages of declassified records in return. In addition, Archive staff made numerous visits to the George H. W. Bush and William J. Clinton presidential libraries, and filed many more requests there. These requests resulted in the declassification of hundreds of additional documents compiled in this set.
Another major source for the set was the growing collection of documents resulting from the Archive’s Nunn-Lugar Project which seeks to document denuclearization and nonproliferation efforts under the U.S.-Russian Cooperative Threat Reduction Program. These materials include documents donated by the participants in the program and records assembled for a series of groundbreaking critical oral history conferences that brought together high-level government participants from the United States, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. Extensive briefing books prepared for these conferences focusing on the withdrawal of nuclear weapons from the former Soviet republics were incorporated into this collection.

• The breakup of the Soviet Union in December 1991 and the birth of the independent Russian Federation.
• The dangers associated with the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the possibility that scientists who worked on nuclear, chemical, and biological weapon technologies might share sensitive information.
• Signing of the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II) with President Bush in January 1993.
• Negotiations on the removal of Russian nuclear weapons from Belarus, Kazakhstan, and especially Ukraine
• U.S.-Russian strategic partnership, including close cooperation on multiple issues such as market reform, military conversion, nonproliferation, and cooperation in space.
• The constitutional crisis of September-October 1993 and the Clinton Administration’s stand with Yeltsin
• Russia’s flawed democratic transition, economic privatization programs, and the rise of the oligarchs, including many discussions about domestic politics and elections.
• 1994-1996 war in Chechnya
• Discussions of enlargement of NATO to Eastern European countries and the Partnership for Peace (PfP) Program.
• Wars and peacekeeping operations in the former Yugoslavia and the impact of the regional crisis on European security and U.S.-Russia relations.
• Presidential transition in Russia in 1999-2000 which resulted in Vladimir Putin succeeding Yeltsin as president.