A political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow wrote his objection on March 28, 1994, and sent it through the one internal State Department channel built specifically to carry dissent.
The document
The cable is titled “Whose Russia Is It Anyway? Toward a Policy of Benign Respect.” It went out through the Dissent Channel, addressed from the U.S. Embassy Moscow to the Secretary of State, and runs to seventy paragraphs. Its author was E. Wayne Merry, the embassy’s top political analyst and head of its political-internal section, who served in Moscow from 1990 to 1994.
The National Security Archive, a nongovernmental research group, published the cable in full for the first time on December 18, 2024, alongside a retrospective essay by Merry and other related papers. A photograph released with the cable shows Merry next to Deputy Chief of Mission James Collins.
What Merry argued
Merry was writing in the wake of Russia’s December 1993 parliamentary elections, in which, in his words, reform-minded radicals “lost a general election, lost it badly, and lost it fair and square.” His argument turned on sequence: Washington was pushing Russia toward rapid, radical market reform ahead of the slower work of building democratic institutions, and that order carried a cost.
He predicted that a policy centered on markets, with institution-building treated as secondary, would build anti-American sentiment inside Russia. Carried far enough, he wrote, it could leave Russia “adversarial” toward the United States. That word is his, written into a cable dated 1994, not supplied later by anyone describing it.
The Dissent Channel
The Dissent Channel was created during the Vietnam War as a sanctioned route for State Department personnel to register “responsible dissenting and alternative views on substantive foreign policy issues that cannot be communicated in a full and timely manner through regular operating channels.” It is used rarely, and what makes a Dissent Channel cable worth archiving is not only its content: it is the fact that a formal dissent was lodged, inside the system, and then kept from public view for decades.
Merry’s retrospective essay, released with the cable, says he could not get the message cleared for government-wide distribution because of Treasury Department objections: the draft, he wrote, “would give Larry Summers a heart attack.” Ambassador Pickering offered him the option of sending it instead as a front-channel statement under his own name. Merry used the Dissent Channel. He later wrote that he regretted the choice, because it kept his argument out of whatever debate was happening inside the government.
What the record doesn’t settle
The cable’s original classification level is not stated in what has been released. Nor is the docket number of the lawsuit that produced it: Archive historian Svetlana Savranskaya sued the State Department for the papers of former deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott, and Merry’s cable came out as part of that unrelated case, not from a request aimed at his dissent specifically.
State’s Policy Planning Staff is required to answer a Dissent Channel message directly. One reply did arrive for this cable, a single page, written by a Policy Planning Staff officer named Steinberg, but it did not reach the embassy in Moscow until the summer of 1994, after Merry had already left his post. What that page said, and whether anyone above Policy Planning Staff level engaged with the argument, is not part of what has been made public.
How it has been read since
The Archive’s own material describes Merry’s cable in the same breath as George Kennan’s 1946 Long Telegram and presents the 1994 warning as prescient, a forecast of the adversarial relationship that developed between Washington and Moscow in later years. That reading is the Archive’s, supplied in December 2024, three decades after the cable was written. The cable itself addresses the Russia of 1994. It does not claim to be forecasting anything beyond it.
Former New York Times Moscow bureau chief Serge Schmemann wrote about the cable in the Times on January 28, 2025, under the headline “A Secret Cable and a Clue to Where U.S.-Russia Relations Went Wrong.” That, too, is a judgment applied after the fact, not a conclusion reached by Merry or by the officer who answered him in 1994.
What doesn’t fit
A Dissent Channel cable exists because an embassy judged its contents too important for ordinary channels. Yet when Merry filed his own Freedom of Information Act request for his cable in 1999, the State Department denied it in 2003, on the grounds that releasing a Dissent Channel message, even to the officer who wrote it, “would inhibit the willingness of Department personnel to avail themselves of the Dissent Channel to express their views freely.” That is the only explanation on record for keeping the cable secret: not a judgment about its content, but a standing policy to protect the channel itself. Requests from House Foreign Affairs Committee staff and the PBS program Frontline were refused on the same grounds.
The cable became public only because it was caught up in Savranskaya’s unrelated lawsuit over Talbott’s papers. Merry has said as much himself, telling the U.S.-Russia Accord forum that the Archive “had not asked for anything concerning me… I was simply ancillary to it.” Whether his warning was ever seriously weighed in Washington, read and set aside without comment, or simply has not surfaced in what FOIA has produced, is not something the released record answers. What is public is the cable itself, Merry’s account of writing it, and a one-page reply that arrived too late to reach him.