There are two aspects to this. Firstly is the matter of whether there was an explicit or implicit promise to Russia at the time of negotiations concerning German reunification to not extend NATO beyond the reunified Germany. There certainly was no explicit agreement, and key officials involved at the time (James Baker, US Secretary of State, Michael Gorbachev and then Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze) all assert there was no such agreement of any kind.

Second, there is the matter, irrespective of any promises, whether NATO expansion was a good idea, and whether the Russian response to it was reasonable. On the former, George F. Kennan, who as US ambassador to Moscow authored the famous 1946 "long telegram" that led to adoption of the policy of "containment" of the Soviet Union, strongly criticized expansion in a 1998 New York Times interview. 

At the time Kennan gave this interview, prospects for democracy in Russia seemed far more benign than now, to put it mildly. Kennan says "Russia's democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we've just signed up to defend from Russia". So why do it?

The problem with this view is that it takes little account of the views of the new democracies of Eastern and Central Europe who, given their historical experience might wonder what might happen if Russia's democratic experiment were to go sour, leaving them all vultnerable to intimidation and agression.

This paper, as well as addressing the above issues, goes in to some detail to describe measures implemented to reassure Russia at that time and since.

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