Clinton leaves Russia with appeal for cooperation

KAZAN, Russia — U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday challenged Russians to open up their political system, embrace diversity and scorn Cold War-era thinking.

In Moscow and Kazan, the capital of Russia’s religiously and ethnically diverse republic of Tatarstan, Clinton underscored to audiences at elite universities the Obama administration’s desire to “reset” relations with Russia.

“We have people in our government and you have people in your government who are still living in the past,” she told a crowd of about 2,000 students at Moscow State University. “They do not believe the United States and Russia can cooperate to this extent.”

“They do not trust each other and we have to prove them wrong,” she said.

Though she seemed to cast blame equally, Clinton took particular aim at Russian suspicions toward improved ties and the influence of U.S. policies and Western values.

“The more open that Russia can become, the more Russia will contribute,” she said. “The more active and dynamic the political system you have, the more … ideas will go into the mix and out of it will come even better answers to the problems that we all face.”

The comments came a day after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov objected to the Obama administration’s strategy of publicly threatening Iran with more sanctions to get it to come clean about its suspect nuclear program.

At a news conference with Clinton on Tuesday, Lavrov said that while more sanctions might eventually be needed, talking about them or other penalties now is “counterproductive.” The U.S. believes Iran will respond only if confronted by a unified position.

Although Clinton and top aides maintained that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev had assured them Russia would support sanctions if Iran did not comply, Lavrov’s comment exposed a rift in tactics between the two countries that could be exploited by Iran.

She glossed over Iran in her Wednesday comments but aides said they remained surprised by Lavrov’s remark, which came as the U.S. tries to rally international opinion in favor of sanctions against Iran if needed. Lavrov is closely associated with Russia’s old guard.

Instead, standing in front of a monumental Soviet mosaic topped by a red hammer and sickle at Moscow State’s main auditorium, Clinton made an appeal for a new U.S.-Russian partnership that would extend from the political to the personal.

“I choose partnership and I choose to put aside being a child of the Cold War,” she intoned. “I choose to move beyond the rhetoric and the propaganda that came from my government and yours. I choose a different future and that’s a choice every one of us can make every single day.”

Clinton is the first secretary of state ever to visit Kazan, which bills itself as Russia’s third capital, and Tatarstan, an oil-rich moderate Muslim-majority republic that is often hailed as a model of multicultural tolerance.

There, she visited a mosque and nearby Orthodox cathedral, before speaking to students at Kazan State University, where Lenin once studied. She urged them to carry on the republic’s tradition of ethnic and religious inclusion and equality.