Thank you, Dr. Chubaryan, for that kind introduction, and for the opportunity to offer a few thoughts on U.S.-Russian relations in this 200th year of our history together. I do so with some trepidation, and a large dose of humility, before an audience so distinguished in both the study and practice of Russian-American diplomacy. There is certainly no statesman for whom I have greater respect than Dr. Kissinger, whose work and thought have done so much to shape international relations in the last half century.

It is a particular honor to be here with several of my most distinguished predecessors, with Ambassadors Matlock, Pickering, and Collins, each of whom set a remarkable standard of professional excellence. I have equal respect for their Soviet and Russian counterparts, who are here with us, for Ambassadors Dubinin, Bessmertnykh, Komplektov, Lukin and Vorontsov. And it is simply impossible to overstate the contributions of Anatoliy Fedorovich Dobrynin, who could not be with us today, but who molded our relationship as Moscow's ambassador in Washington for nearly a quarter century.

For all of us, the 200th anniversary of our formal diplomatic ties is a natural moment to take a step back, and reflect on where we've been, and where we're going. That is not exactly an easy thing to do these days. In our broader relationship, mutual frustration often obscures mutual interest. Russians think that Americans tend to take Russia for granted, and are too quick to lecture, and too prone to double standards. Americans think that Russians tend to assume the worst about American motives, and are too consumed with the centralization of power, and too quick to see enemies at the gate.

I don't for a minute underestimate the problems between us, nor am I naive about the road ahead, especially as we each navigate political transitions. The truth remains, however, that the United States and Russia matter to one another in important ways -- and how well or how poorly we manage our relationship matters greatly to the rest of the world. The Cold War is history, thank God, and today there is neither an ideological nor a geopolitical basis for reviving it. For all our continuing differences, Russians and Americans are no longer enemies. While we will have moments of competition and rivalry, as well as cooperation and partnership, in the years ahead, the one thing we will not have is the luxury of ignoring one another. Russia today is the only other nuclear power in the world comparable to the United States. It is the world's biggest producer of hydrocarbons, while we remain the biggest consumer. As long as both of us sit as permanent members on the UN Security Council, few major international problems will escape our engagement.

While we may not enjoy a neat strategic partnership, in which we agree on every key issue, a partnership on certain key strategic issues is not only possible, but deeply in both of our interests. Before I try to sketch some of the contours of such a partnership, let me first take a brief look at where we've been over the last two centuries, and at the Russia which is taking shape before us as a new century of relations begins.

Russian-American diplomatic relations opened on a very high note 200 years ago. Our first ambassador was John Quincy Adams, later Secretary of State and eventually the sixth President of the United States. I stand before you today as a living example of how far standards have slipped. Over the two centuries in between, it was only in the last half of the last century, during the Cold War, that we were intimately (and dangerously) engaged. Throughout most of the rest of our diplomatic history, we tended to move in our own orbits, respectful of one another's development -- each suffering an enemy invasion in 1812; each finally ending the evils of slavery and serfdom in 1862; each enduring the horrors of civil war; and each building powerful frontier traditions as we expanded our reach across whole continents and multiple time zones. And while Russia's history is marked more by its geographic vulnerabilities and America's by its geographic isolation, we both emerged with ambitions and responsibilities as nations reflecting our geographic sweep.

Both of us are blessed with immense natural resources, but what sets us apart is our greatest resource, our people. Over the last century, Russians and Americans have been at the forefront of human creativity. Whatever their differences, and despite the terrible cost of totalitarian rule in the Soviet Union, Pasternak and Hemingway, Sakharov and Martin Luther King, Gagarin and Neil Armstrong, Tchaikovsky and Duke Ellington, Microsoft's Bill Gates and Google's Sergey Brin helped define and propel the 20th century. I can't imagine that Americans and Russians won't continue to play a similar role in the decades ahead -- a moment in history powered by innovation and the flow of information, in which human success will be measured less in hydrocarbons and metals, and more in the intellect and creativity of our citizens.

Another of our similarities, ironically, is the diversity of our societies. We are both multi-ethnic, multi-confessional states -- and today the United States and Russia have the two biggest immigrant populations in the world. According to the latest Russian census, a Russian citizen can be one of 140 nationalities and 40 ethnic groups, enriched by 150 languages. That a Tatar Moslem and a Ukrainian Orthodox Christian share a Russian passport is appealing to Americans, since our own identity is built on the bloodlines and beliefs of our millions of immigrants. And we both face the huge challenges that come with such diversity: the importance of building tolerance, of fighting chauvinism and xenophobia, of remaining open to immigrants while protecting our security.

The Russia that we face in the new era before us is not the Soviet Union. And it is not the country I left a decade ago, after my last tour in Moscow, a Russia that was flat on its back economically. The Russia I see today -- after more than two years as Ambassador and some forty trips outside Moscow, from Kaliningrad in the west to Chukotka, 11 time zones to the east and 30 miles across the Bering Strait from Alaska -- is going in a lot of different directions, some promising, some troubling, and many much too early to tell.

On the positive side of the ledger is an economic revival that was simply impossible to imagine in the 1990s. Russia today has a trillion dollar plus economy, the ninth largest in the world, bigger than India's or Brazil's. In the first six months of 2007, net private capital inflow into Russia was over $67 billion, more than during the entire first decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union. With a budget discipline that those of us from Washington can only envy, Russia has built up a stabilization fund of over $110 billion, part of more than $450 billion in hard currency reserves, the third largest in the world.

Russians are connected to the world today in powerful ways, and young Russians wake up every day with choices their parents could only dream of. Russia is among the top ten countries in the world in total number of internet users, also ahead of India and Brazil. Russians, some 14 million of them last year alone, are traveling abroad more often and more widely.

While the gap between rich and poor is still much too big, the number of Russians living beneath the poverty line has been cut in half over the past decade. Most boats are rising economically across Russia, and real incomes have more than doubled in the Putin era. Most interestingly, a middle class is beginning to emerge, perhaps as much as a quarter of the population. It's not yet the tax-paying, politically-engaged, self-aware middle class that has developed over time in other countries. But this well-educated, well-traveled, property owning class is the beginning of the core constituency for modern market and democratic institutions, a growing group of people with a real stake in how their tax money is spent, how decisions are made, how their property is protected, and how the rule of law can protect their equities and those of their children.

So that's the good news. The not so good news is something that Russians themselves need to face up to, and for which Americans do not have all the answers. Let me stress that a little humility is a good thing in offering judgments about huge and complex societies like Russia. We Americans have our share of problems to contend with, and we've made our share of mistakes. I think it was Churchill who once said that "the thing he liked most about Americans was that they almost always do the right thing in the end ... they just almost always like to exhaust all the alternatives first."

Having said that, it doesn't do anyone any good to gloss over the problems that Russia faces today. Corruption is among the worst of these dilemmas. It has a corrosive effect on rule of law, crippling law enforcement and judicial independence. Bureaucratism -- the growing power and size of the state bureaucracy and the sluggishness and opacity of its procedures -- is a dead weight on sustained, sensible economic development. State control of most of the electronic media, and pressures against freedom of expression and civil society, are troubling, and work against Russia's own interests. And demographic decline is a serious impediment to Russia's revival.

In our thinking about today's Russia, both Russians and those of us who care about Russia and recognize its importance in the world, tend naturally to focus on the "who" questions: Who is going to succeed Putin? Who is going to occupy what positions after the Duma and Presidential elections? Who is going to prevail over whom? While the answers to those questions obviously matter greatly, for all sorts of reasons, it seems to me that it is the answers to the "what" questions that will shape Russia's future beyond the 2008 transition, and determine whether Russia will grow and prosper, or whether its current excesses will eat up its successes. What is Russia going to do with its hard-won stability? What is it going to do with the moment of energy-driven economic opportunity that lies before it? What is it going to do with its reborn role in the world? Only Russians can answer those questions, but how they do so will have profound implications for the rest of us.

Many of those "what" questions revolve around the long-term challenge of building the modern institutions essential to realizing Russia's enormous potential, and sustaining its current successes. I say that not as another example of preachiness or lecturing from Americans, for which I know Russians manage to contain their enthusiasm these days. I also know very well that building such institutions is not easy. It takes time, and there will be setbacks. American history is full of them. The Great Depression, for example, revealed massive vulnerabilities in our economic system and social and political institutions. It took the leadership of Franklin Roosevelt to address those massive problems -- but the genius of Roosevelt was less about personality and more about institutions. He understood that American institutions needed to be adapted and modernized, to rescue us from the Depression and avoid such traumas in the future. He strengthened a system of checks and balances which has generally served us well, and which limited his own room for maneuver during his Presidency, such as when his attempt to expand and "stuff" the Supreme Court in the mid-1930s was blocked by other branches of government. What Americans remember most about Franklin Roosevelt is not how many terms he served, which were not limited by the Constitution at the time, but his enduring legacy of leadership and the institutions he left behind.

U.S.-Russia relations at the beginning of our third century of diplomatic engagement are bound to combine cooperation with competition, and the management of differences with the creative expansion of areas of common ground. While the U.S.-Russian relationship differs from the Cold War, when the fate of the world literally depended upon it, much of the history of the 21st century is going to depend on how well and how responsibly the two of us pursue a very complicated agenda.

To restate the glaringly obvious, as diplomats are wont to do, let me repeat that we have more than our share of tough issues before us. The United States and Russia, for example, have differences over Kosovo, missile defense, and the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty. But what I'd like to highlight briefly are five areas in which we can do more together, in which we can demonstrate real leadership to the rest of the world, and in which we can serve our own interests.

First and most crucial is nuclear and global security. Russia and the United States have unique capabilities, and unique responsibilities, in the nuclear field. Last July, our Presidents affirmed their commitment to jointly developing civilian nuclear energy, and making it available to developing countries in a way that guards against the dangers of nuclear weapons proliferation. We've initialed a so-called "123" agreement on civilian nuclear cooperation, and are on the verge of a new understanding on Russian access to the U.S. uranium market. We've launched an important new global initiative against nuclear terrorism. We're working hard to set a good example in managing our own remaining nuclear arsenals, with negotiations underway on how best to maintain strategic stability after the expiration of the START Treaty in 2009. Secretary Rice and Secretary Gates are working with their counterparts to try to turn differences over possible missile defense sites in Central Europe into a strategic opportunity for joint early warning and missile defense. Nothing in our relationship with Russia matters more than how we handle this whole set of security issues.

A second priority is economic cooperation. American direct investment in Russia increased by more than 50% last year, and 40% of total Russian investments outside Russia went to the United States. Companies ranging from Boeing to ConocoPhillips are helping to fuel Russia's economic resurgence -- with more than 100,000 jobs in Russia today connected to American business and investments. We continue to support Russia's integration into global economic institutions, especially the World Trade Organization. Russia's early accession will help consolidate the remarkable economic gains of recent years, provide a foundation for further progress and diversification, and also bolster the emergence of a middle class and respect for the rule of law.

A third area of common ground involves our efforts together to resolve some of the world's most difficult regional conflicts. Russia and the U.S. work closely with our partners in the Quartet to bring the Arab-Israeli conflict closer to resolution. Together with our other partners, we have made significant progress on the North Korean nuclear issue. Despite tactical differences, we continue our crucial diplomatic collaboration to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. There is more we can do together to help stabilize Afghanistan, and especially to combat drug trafficking. Our record of cooperation on regional conflicts is not perfect, and sometimes involves real disagreement, but it represents a huge leap beyond the zero sum competition of the Cold War.

Fourth is growing partnership in dealing with many of the other global challenges which dominate the new century before us. President Bush has made the fight against HIV-AIDS and other deadly infectious diseases a critical priority for the United States, and Russia is also doing more, both to overcome its serious domestic problem, and to work with us in vaccine research and strengthening of laboratory capacity in East Africa. We share many common views about how best to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; and Russia and the United States continue to lead efforts in space exploration, as we have since Sputnik was launched, almost exactly fifty years ago.

And finally, we both have a stake in expanding ties between our societies, outside formal relations between our governments. One of the smartest investments we made during the 1990's was in innovative exchange programs. We now have nearly 70,000 alumnae of American exchange programs in Russia, and their experiences do as much as anything in our relationship to keep us connected to the next generation of Russians. We recently launched a number of new university partnership programs, and are working hard to make exchanges more of a two way street, with Russian institutions like the Alfa Bank launching programs to bring young American professionals to Russia. There is much more than we can do, and it would be a huge mistake, for both of us, to lose sight of the value of such programs at this pivotal moment for Russia, and for our relationship.

There will certainly be moments in the months and years ahead when doubts and disappointments and differences between us will seem to crowd out possibilities and opportunities. This is not likely to be an easy period. But those opportunities for cooperation do exist, if we both keep a sense of perspective and remain persistent enough to take advantage of them. I'm reminded of the observation of the famous American inventor, Thomas Edison, that "opportunity is missed by most because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." The first two centuries of our relationship have often been hard work -- but hard work and mutual respect can unlock opportunities, for both of us. At the dawn of our third century of diplomatic ties, I can think of few challenges that matter more to America, or to Russia, or to the rest of the world.

Thank you.