Saturday, February 04, 2023

Inside the Global Fight for White Power

White nationalists around the globe are working together to disrupt multicultural societies and Western democracies.

Weapons training at the Russian Imperial Movement’s Partizan paramilitary camp. 
Credit: Screenshot from vk.com/partisan_kurs / ruspartizan.com

 Reveal
February 4, 2023

From Russia to Sweden and the United States, there’s a growing network of White nationalist groups that stretches around the world. The reporting team at Verified: The Next Threat investigates how these militant groups are helping each other create propaganda, recruit new members and share paramilitary skills.

We are updating this episode, which first aired in July 2022, to reflect recent activities by the Russian Imperial Movement and other White supremacist groups around the world.

We start with the Russian Imperial Movement, or RIM. Its members are taking up arms in Russia’s war against Ukraine, which they say is a battle in a much larger “holy war” for White power. Scripps News senior investigative reporter Mark Greenblatt interviews a leader of the group who says RIM’s goal is to unite White nationalists around the world. The group even runs training camps where White supremacists can learn paramilitary tactics.

Russia’s White nationalists are making connections with extremists in the United States. Greenblatt talks with a neo-Nazi named Matt Heimbach, who was a major promoter of the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Soon after Charlottesville, Heimbach invited members of RIM to the U.S. and connected them to his network of American White power extremists.

We end with a visit by Greenblatt to the State Department in Washington, where he interviews two top counterterrorism officials. They say they’re aware of the growing international network of White supremacists, but explain that White power groups are now forming political parties, which makes it more difficult for the agency to use its most powerful counterterrorism tools.
Dig Deeper



Listen: Verified: The Next Threat


Credits

Reporter: Mark Greenblatt | Editor: Taki Telonidis | Associate producer: Jess Alvarenga | Production manager: Steven Rascón | Sound design and music by: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda | Additional music: Allison Leyton Brown | Fact checker: Nikki Frick | Digital producer: Sarah Mirk | Episode art: Screenshot from vk.com/partisan_kurs / ruspartizan.com via Verified: The Next Threat podcast trailer | Executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Host: Al Letson

Special thanks to Susanne Reber, Ellen Weiss, Bruce Edwards, Natasha Del Toro, Sean Powers, Lauren Knapp, Riin Aljas, My Vingren and Alexey Veselovskiy.

Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, Democracy Fund, and the Inasmuch Foundation.


The U.S. Christians Who Pray for Putin

The mystical connection between white Southern nostalgia, the global family values movement, and Russia.

Vladimir Putin in orthodox cathedral in Astana.
Image: The Kremlin

Bethany Moreton
March 11, 2022


Last weekend a far-right group called America First held a political rally in Orlando. At one point, organizer Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist also involved in the 2017 Charlottesville rally, invited attendees to cheer for Russia. Soon the audience was chanting “Putin! Putin!”

Without context this may seem puzzling. Why would a group of ultra-nationalist Americans celebrate the invasion of a U.S. ally by someone both the left and right have largely understood to be an enemy of freedom?
White racist fantasies portray Russia as an ethnically pure land of traditional religion and gender roles.

In fact, though, the U.S. right wing has long cultivated ties with Russia. Some of these are self-evident quid-pro-quo affairs: The “sweeping and systematic” campaigns of election interference authorized by Putin in support of a Trump victory in 2016 and 2020; Trump’s attempt to leverage Congressionally allocated aid to Ukraine for political dirt on the Biden family; the confessed Russian agent who infiltrated the National Rifle Association and the National Prayer Breakfast in a bid to develop informal channels of influence on the Republican Party.

More broadly, however, U.S. conservative evangelicals have developed strong symbolic and institutional ties with the Russian Orthodox Church. In recent years, these have dovetailed with white racist fantasies of Russia as an ethnically pure land of traditional religion and gender roles, symbolized by the bare-chested kleptocrat on horseback, Vladimir Putin.

In the following vignettes, I explore how these connections came to exist, and what they reveal about the transnational currents of U.S. conservatism and white nationalism.

In the summer of 2018, the white supremacist League of the South debuted a bold new initiative on its website: in Russian, the neo-Confederates invited “the Russian people” to understand themselves as “natural allies” of white U.S. southerners in the fight “against the destructive influence of globalism.”


As descendants of white Europeans, we come from the same genetic pool. As heirs of the European cultural tradition, we share the same values, traditions, and way of life. And as Christians, we worship the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and our common Faith binds us as brothers and sisters. We Southerners believe in a society built on real organic factors such as Blood, Culture, and Religion.

If we are looking for historic roots of this imagined commonality between U.S. white nationalists and Russians, a good place to start is the 1975 address of Soviet dissident Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn to the New York chapter of the AFL-CIO labor union.


There’s a certain woman here named Angela Davis. I don’t know if you are familiar with her in this country, but in our country, literally for one whole year, we heard of nothing at all except Angela Davis. There was only Angela Davis in the whole world and she was suffering. . . . [T]hey set her free. Although she didn’t have a rough time in this country, she came to recuperate in Soviet resorts.

The Nobel laureate’s vituperation seems like a bizarre digression in a speech primarily devoted to denouncing the West’s weak, short-sighted capitulation to the ruse of Soviet détente. But in fact it was a window onto a fast-coalescing relationship between Solzhenitsyn’s Russian Christian nationalism and the new post-Civil Rights politics of whiteness of his American hosts.
Orthodoxy was marketed as an alternative for conservative Christians who were growing disillusioned by what they interpreted as liberalizing trends in their churches.

The U.S.S.R’s defectors and escapees had helped shape U.S. definitions of freedom since the onset of the Cold War, but Solzhenitsyn was unique. Born the year after the October Revolution into a propertied and educated family whose land was collectivized, Solzhenitsyn later wrote that he began to lose faith in the Soviet system after witnessing Red Army war crimes while serving as an artillery officer during World War II. Letters critical of Stalin landed him in the infamous Lubyanka prison in 1945. In a politically tinged decision, the Nobel committee awarded him its prize for literature in 1970, and Soviet authorities handed the West a cause célèbre when they denounced the writer as a dupe of Western reactionaries. In 1972 he announced his faith in an open letter addressed to the Moscow Patriarch. Two years later, after the first volume of his massive, quasi-historical The Gulag Archipelago (1974) was published in the West, he was deported.

The first in the U.S. evangelical right to recognize Solzhenitsyn’s political utility was North Carolina’s white supremacist senator Jesse Helms. Helms was at the time involved in supporting Rhodesia’s ruling white minority as a bulwark against communism. Intrigued by a 1973 report from the World Anti-Communist League, Helms pursued the dissident writer, inviting him to North Carolina and proposing that Congress grant him honorary U.S. citizenship. When Solzhenitsyn finally traveled to the United States in 1975, Helms dispatched his own translator as interpreter and escort. The Nobel laureate’s first stop was the senator’s suburban Virginia home, where the two compared notes on their respective Christian faiths and the paramount necessity of religious freedom to all other human freedoms. Solzhenitsyn’s invitation to speak to the AFL-CIO during the same trip came from its conservative leader, George Meany. Meany’s enthusiasm for the dissident writer derived from the labor leader’s Catholic sexual conservatism, his support for the Vietnam War, and his decades dedicated to purging left tendencies in the U.S. labor movement.

Solzhenitsyn’s visit was a success, and his message was passed among evangelical champions in the United States and the United Kingdom. Evangelical periodicals lauded his denunciations of U.S. moral degeneracy alongside Soviet criminality. He was soon swept up into the pantheon of Christian intellectuals claimed by evangelical activists dedicated to the suffering church in Russia.

Also haunting Washington that summer was Chuck Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon who’d recently been released from prison after serving time for trying to obstruct the Watergate investigation. Now freed, he was feverishly assembling his prison conversion narrative, Born Again (1976). Colson had been a key architect of the new Republican electoral coalition forecast by strategist Patrick Buchanan in 1973—the white, Christian, conservative Silent Majority that combined the former “Dixiecrat” wing of racist Southern Democrats with the second- and third-generation children of white working-class immigrants. In the Nixon White House, Colson had been responsible for wooing Catholic and Eastern Orthodox “white ethnic” union members away from their New Deal allegiance to the Democratic Party—including, specifically, by building a relationship with AFL-CIO President George Meany. Colson had also been instrumental in promoting Nixon to Christian conservatives by staging church services in the White House. Shortly before his arrest in 1974, Colson had been converted to Christianity by the CEO of the defense contractor Raytheon Company, an influential member of the secretive, politically potent D.C. Christian organization The Fellowship Foundation, best known for organizing the annual National Prayer Breakfast that is obligatory for sitting presidents.

For Colson and his colleagues on the right, Solzhenitsyn was not only a celebrity “Slav”–one of the major European immigrant ethnic groups they courted as an alibi for “white”—just as “crime” and “welfare” were being inscribed on Black and Hispanic Americans. More specifically, he represented a way to control the narrative about who got to be called a political prisoner. At stake was the legitimacy of the “law and order” politics that had won white ethnics to the Silent Majority. The War on Poverty was transformed into a “war on crime” by shifting resources and responsibility for social programs to law enforcement. Social protest was managed through massively expanded incarceration.
The Christian right wanted to replace Attica with the Russian gulag.

But behind bars, members of the Black Power, New Left, and Puerto Rican independence movements embraced an identity as political prisoners and called their prisons “the fascist concentration camps of modern America.” Prison uprisings exploded, peaking at forty-eight in 1972. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights was bombarded with appeals for U.S. carceral systems to be subjected to international law. Andrew Young, the first African American ambassador to the UN, acknowledged that there were “hundreds, perhaps even thousands of people I would call political prisoners” in the United States. The most internationally recognizable was Angela Davis.

In speeches, editorials, and his book Loving God: The Cost of Being Christian (1983), Colson undertook a kind of counterintelligence campaign, promoting Solzhenitsyn as the paradigmatic political prisoner, a white man who had been persecuted for his anti-communist politics and his Christian faith. Over the next four decades, Colson’s Prison Fellowship ministry helped reframe the national conversation around criminal justice: arguing that rehabilitation could only come from the inner drama of religious conversion, Prison Fellowship justified the removal of secular, publicly funded services like GED classes, job training, and drug treatment from U.S. prisons.

In the contest over the meanings of captivity, Solzhenitsyn served the Christian right’s efforts to replace Attica with the gulag. American evangelicals leveraged his moral status to amplify the message: the people really suffering, in the United States and globally, were white Christians being crushed by the hands of godless government.

During the 1990s, the former Nixon aide Patrick Buchanan played political John the Baptist to Trump. Having delivered the Reagan Revolution, his wing of the GOP was resolute: they would not give up the ground they had gained for white Christian influence in the 1970s and ’80s. Via a 1992 insurgent presidential campaign, the “paleoconservative” made clear that rank-and-file Republican votes could be captured by populist white moral fervor. Speaking at the Houston convention that year, he declared a blood-and-soil “war for the soul of America” that clashed with the preppy monotony of the nominee supported by the party’s staid investor wing, former CIA director George H. W. Bush.

Buchanan’s jeremiads took particular aim at what he called “illegal” immigration. Wielding the slogan “America First,” he called for a “Buchanan fence” along the Mexico–U.S. border, and his best-selling book The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (2001), did little to conceal the racial content of paleoconservative sentiments—nor did the movement’s flagship magazine, Chronicles, edited by a founder of the neo-Confederate League of the South. In its pages paleocons outlined the threat to the nation’s “Euro-American cultural core” posed by non-white immigration. “The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people,” declared Chronicles paleocon Samuel Francis in 1994.
Neo-Confederates invite “the Russian people” to understand themselves as “natural allies” of white U.S. southerners in the fight “against the destructive influence of globalism.”

For more than twenty years, the chief sponsoring foundation behind paleoconservatism was the Rockford Institute, under the presidency of historian Allan Carlson. In 1995 Carlson was invited to Moscow by Anatoly Antonov, professor of family sociology and demography at the prestigious Moscow State University, to discuss their shared concern: declining rates of marriage and fertility. Many post-Soviet nations saw their life expectancy and birthrates plummet in the 1990s as neoliberal “shock therapy” destroyed social safety nets in the name of liberating market competition, and Antonov’s was already a public voice of concern over small families. Carlson’s writings had intrigued him with the argument that an “androgynous ideal” was replacing the fertile, male-headed “traditional family” and concrete policy recommendations for privileging larger families.

Antonov introduced Carlson to like-minded Russian academics, politicians, and priests, and their shared vision became the World Conference of Families. On the U.S. side of the relationship, Carlson cultivated longstanding allies such as the Utah-based Sutherland Institute, led at the time by Paul T. Mero, whose work included penning a report called How Congress Supports and Funds Organized Homosexuality for the office of California congressman Bob Dornan.

Carlson spun off the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society in 1997 as the U.S. center of this new superpower partnership for the “natural family.” According to its 2007 manifesto, the movement “seek[s] to liberate the whole world—including dying Europa—for light and life, for children.” WCF’s U.S. communications director was even blunter about where American children should, and should not, be coming from: in a 1998 article on the prospect of Puerto Rican statehood, Don Feder opined, “We need more non-English speakers in this country like we need more welfare recipients, higher crime rates and an alien culture—all of which we’ll get” if we grant statehood to this “Caribbean Dogpatch.”

However, it was the Russian branch of the organization that assumed international leadership, complete with a private laser show in the Kremlin for its 2014 Moscow meeting. Its stature was bolstered by a novel “family values” wing of the Russian Orthodox Church advising Putin-era family policy and by patronage from representatives of Russia’s flamboyant business class. The meeting took place while the European Union was sanctioning the meeting’s host, private equity financier Konstantin Malofeev, for funding illegal military units in support of ethnic Russian separatists in Crimean areas of Ukraine.

The public face of this ethnopolitics are anti-LGBTQ policies, the result of many years of cross-fertilization and strategizing among WCF partners. The “Don’t Say Gay or Trans” laws currently sweeping through Republican-dominated U.S. state legislatures, for example, echo Russia’s 2013 parliamentary ban on “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations.” That is no coincidence: the Russian bill relied in part on U.S. junk social science, some of it funded by the American right.

The connections do not stop at the level of ideology; they are also thoroughly institutional. As reporting by Imara Jones reveals, the blitz of bills targeting trans athletes, gender-affirming medical treatments, acknowledgement of homosexuality and trans identity in schools, and first trimester abortions are being crafted for their Republican legislative sponsors by, among others, the Alliance Defending Freedom. The ADF is the legal juggernaut of Dominionist Christian fundamentalism, advocating for literal Christian authority over education, religion, family, business, government, entertainment, and media. This is the outfit that platformed Trump’s Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett for years and that won constitutional protection for religiously-justified discrimination in the Supreme Court cases Burwell v. Hobby Lobby and Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. It is also a member organization of the World Congress of Families, and has been well represented at the organization’s Russian meetings.
White nationalists applaud Putin’s aggressive promotion of Orthodox traditional values and racial nationalism in the fight against “anti-Christian degeneracy” and the erosion of white power.

Some of these individuals and organizations have won official status at the United Nations, allowing them to influence policy. But the public connections are only part of the story: a 2014 hack of emails revealed that WCF’s Russian funders also secretly promote a pro-Russian geopolitics through far-right anti-immigrant parties such as Italy’s Liga, France’s Front National, and Austria’s Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs. From their standpoint, the logic is self-evident: an “anti-civilization” aimed at the “physical extinction of people” is underway through the “sodomization of the world,” and only Russia can save the day. It is no surprise that last week Putin cited the need to defend the traditional family as a reason for invading Ukraine.

For English-speaking audiences, WCF documentaries on “Demographic Winter” paint a dire picture of falling white birthrates, brought about by the sexual revolution, easier access to divorce, and the end of the traditional family. “The most common boy’s name in Amsterdam is Muhammad,” WCF’s media director tells the viewer—all you need to know, that is, about the apocalyptic consequences of white women’s selfish refusal to reproduce. “Certain kinds of human beings,” one of the talking heads explains, “are on their way to extinction,” unless we can orchestrate a “return to traditional values: patriarchy, properly understood.” The paleocons voiced their explicit fears of non-white immigrant “invasions”; their new institutional platforms transmute white nativism into pro-natalism.

In the YouTube video, an SUV full of bearded men in cassocks explain that they are on a road trip to South Carolina to explore the surprising growth of the Russian Orthodox Church in the land of “barbecue, country music, moonshine, fireworks, rednecks, and much more.” Their first stop is the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum. First the museum curator dismisses the myth that the prominently displayed Confederate battle flag has any “modern political meaning.” He then addresses the question of Orthodoxy’s attractiveness for southerners: “I think there’s a very manly appeal. . . . It’s not just that you guys have cool beards like I do. It’s simply there’s challenge to the faith. . . . There’s discipline and high standards and something to aspire to. . . . Tradition.” To be sure, the video puts an optimistic face on the statistically tiny trend of white Southern conversion to Orthodoxy; converts are still probably not quite half of the congregants making up the various Eastern Orthodox churches in the United States, and Orthodoxy can claim less than one percent of Americans, versus evangelicals’ 25 percent. But the phenomenon has important symbolic value for the larger network of both conservative white evangelicals and neo-Confederate “traditionalists.”

In the spring of 1987, American Orthodoxy experienced one of the largest mass conversion events in its history. Two thousand American evangelicals were incorporated, parish by parish, into the Antiochan Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. Men who had spent years in the central institutions of conservative evangelicalism and Pentecostalism—the Campus Crusade for Christ, Dallas Theological Seminary, Biola University (formerly the Bible Institute of Los Angeles), Oral Roberts University, Wheaton College—led their flocks into full communion with world Orthodoxy, and were themselves transformed into its priests and bishops. The mass defection—the culmination of more than a decade’s seeking by a loose network of self-proclaimed “Evangelical Orthodox” churches—helped raise awareness of Orthodoxy as an alternative for conservative Christians who were growing disillusioned by what they interpreted as liberalizing trends in their churches. Just as the New Christian Right was at the zenith of its political and cultural power, some of its most committed adherents abandoned its churches for the exotic alternative that few had ever encountered in the flesh. This sudden influx of converts altered the landscape of the Orthodox Church, and laid the ground for the racist right’s appropriations in the twenty-first century.

This dramatic Reagan-era mass evangelical defection to Orthodoxy paved the way for a small but significant hemorrhage. Several Christian celebrity converts have kept the issue alive in conservative Christian circles. The typical conversion narrative starts with an extremely self-aware religious “seeker.” This believer appreciates the fervent search for communion with Christ and clear rules for right living, but finds evangelicalism flaccid where it should be militant, insipid where it should be imposing, relaxed where it should be rigorous. Particularly disturbing are the seeming compromises with gender liberalization: church feels like another place where men’s authority and basic nature are unwelcome. Often in their telling, the converts are driven to Orthodoxy by a dramatic apostasy by mainline Christianity or the culture more generally: Episcopalians allow gay priests, Methodists allow women as pastors, abortion remains legal, the Supreme Court makes gay marriage the law of the land.

In these conversion scenarios, the tradition that Orthodoxy offers is one that is forthrightly patriarchal and masculine. “There is something in Orthodoxy that offers ‘a deep masculine romance,’” explains a convert priest. “’Most romance in our age is pink, but this is a romance of swords and gallantry.’”

Southern traditionalists see the former slave states as a particularly promising mission ground alongside the original Pacific Coast efflorescence of evangelical defection. “Like the planter class of the South,” writes one former Catholic convert to Orthodoxy for the neo-Confederate Abbeville Institute, “the hierarchy of the Orthodox Church recognizes how irrevocable institutional change can be, and has therefore been wary to allow it.” Among such ill-considered sudden changes he includes the “radical and immediate emancipation” of enslaved Southerners which the rational, principled planters opposed.
“Some [Orthodox] priests openly display Confederate symbols on their Facebook timelines.”

Similarly convinced by the paleoconservative tradition was white nationalist Matthew Heimbach, who founded the hate group Traditionalist Workers Party and converted to Orthodoxy, citing the Eastern church’s subdivision into Greek, Russian, and other geographically rooted patriarchates as evidence that “[r]egional and racial identity is a fundamental principle of Christianity.” He applauded Putin’s aggressive promotion of Orthodox traditional values and racial nationalism in the fight against “anti-Christian degeneracy” and the erosion of white power. “Russia is our biggest inspiration,” Heimbach asserted. “I see President Putin as the leader of the free world.”

Heimbach was a principal organizer of the deadly 2017 Charlotteville rally, at which he appeared as a spokesman to the press. A number of other right-wing Orthodox communicants helped on social media to organize the event, as well. Despite credible reports of this activity by anti-racist Orthodox believers to their regional clergy and bishops, none of the American Orthodox jurisdictions took steps to distance the Church or denounce the white supremacist and anti-Semitic recruitment. After all, the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States of America—the body that speaks officially for the fourteen Orthodox jurisdictions in the United States—had responded with alacrity and clarity to denounce gay marriage and lament the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Why did Charlottesville not merit an equally speedy and unequivocal national statement?

The Orthodox bishops finally released a statement on Charlottesville itself, but the larger problem would not go away. “Some of our priests openly display Confederate symbols on their Facebook timelines,” charged an open letter on the scholarly Canadian site Orthodoxy in Dialogue in early 2018, adding that at least one Orthodox seminarian was actively posting white supremacist materials under an alias. More than 150 priests and laypeople signed a letter forcefully requesting “a clear, unambiguous public condemnation of white supremacy, racism, and xenophobia” from the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States of America—to no avail. Matt Parrott of the Traditionalist Worker’s Party blasted back, asserting that “AltChristianity’s Church Militant is steadily and quietly working its way through the seminaries and sinecures just like the leftist radicals and homosexuals did in the 20th century.”

But meanwhile other devotees continue to build the mystical connection between aggrieved white Southern nostalgia, Putin’s authoritarian Russia, and Orthodox leadership of the global family values movement. At southernorthodox.org, the faithful quote Confederate General Stonewall Jackson and the neo-Confederate intellectuals of the Abbeville Institute. In the pages of Patrick Buchanan’s paleocon magazine The American Conservative, celebrity convert Rod Dreher advocates for an Orthodox seminary in Texas. And as new research by anthropologist Sarah Riccardi-Swartz shows, converts in Appalachia add another wing to the edifice of authoritarian white Christian nationalism. At the much broader level of institutionalized ambitions to “dominion,” the Russian partnership has proved invigorating to the American right’s overlapping agendas of white supremacy, masculine authority, and anti-democratic Christian authority. If Putin’s cooperation with the Moscow Patriarchate is a model for emulation, American theocrats are telling us what they seek here at home. We would be foolish not to take them at their word.

Bethany Moreton is a Professor of History at Dartmouth College. Her book Slouching towards Moscow: American Conservatives and the Romance of Russia” (HUP) is forthcoming.


Putin Is Attempting to Center Russia as a Hub of the Global Right Wing
March 31, 2022
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Source: Truthout

In the current crisis, the left needs a full and thorough understanding of Vladimir Putin and his aspirations for Russia. We have been troubled by some of the statements from the U.S. left concerning the invasion of Ukraine. It seems when confronted with a complex array of contradictions, too many have lost an ability to sort out and grasp the principal contradiction: the Putin regime’s effort to subjugate Ukraine, end its sovereignty and deny its right to exist independently.

“Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia, more precisely, Bolshevik, communist Russia. This process began immediately after the revolution of 1917,” Putin said in a televised address in February. “As a result of Bolshevik policy, Soviet Ukraine arose, which even today can with good reason be called ‘Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s Ukraine.’ He is its author and architect. This is fully confirmed by archive documents…. And now grateful descendants have demolished monuments to Lenin in Ukraine. This is what they call decommunization. Do you want decommunization? Well, that suits us just fine. But it is unnecessary, as they say, to stop halfway. We are ready to show you what real decommunization means for Ukraine.”

Putin here is clear enough: “Ukraine has no national rights that Russians are bound to respect. Prepare for reunification, reabsorption, or some other euphemism for subaltern status with Mother Russia.”

The difficulties among our left, however, are still understandable, given there are other major contradictions in this terrain. NATO’s expansion and press toward Russia’s border is a prominent one. The tension between the U.S. and the European Union regarding military expenditures in their respective budgets is another. Then there is the rise of pro-Putin right-wing populist parties in most European countries, with an echo in the U.S. right wing as well. The EU’s conflict with the Global South, both in military campaigns and refugee crises, also come into play. And in Ukraine, there are also the actual fascists of the Svoboda party and its armed militia — though their influence was sharply reduced by the recent election of Zelenskyy. And in both Russia and Ukraine, there are class and democratic conflicts with corrupt oligarchs among ruling elites.

Getting clear for the sake of both strategy and tactics will require a deep examination of Putin’s Russia and its political character and direction.

It is well known that Putin entered Russian elite circles as a KGB officer. Less well known are the circumstances of his rise. House of Trump, House of Putin, by Craig Unger tells the story: As a working-class youth in the old USSR, Putin’s sole ambition was to be an intelligence officer. The KGB told him to go to law school first, where he did well. After his KGB training, he was stationed in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) to a mid-level position. When “the wall” came down and the USSR broke up, he was out in the cold. He made his way back to St. Petersburg, driving a cab to survive and hanging out in martial arts gyms, since he was reportedly good at judo. Along with sport and social solidarity, the gym crews also ran a lucrative drug trade, selling heroin from Afghanistan, among other contrabands. Putin used his money and connections politically, getting connected, first, to the city’s mayor, and later, to Russian President Boris Yeltsin. At every step, he brought his judo friends with him. They served as a “security” force and were rewarded with escalating levels of corruption in taking over the country’s wealth via trade and buyout deals. They remain with him today as the core oligarchs in his inner circle. It is said that Putin’s political rule is a three-legged stool — his loyal gangsters, the new intelligence operatives and state bureaucrats.

Under Yeltsin, the new Russian Federation was in considerable turmoil. U.S. neoliberal think tanks held sway for a time with a “privatize everything” policy that soon produced the ruling order accurately named a “kleptocracy.” It caused living standards to fall, along with life expectancy. Chechnyan fighters were wreaking havoc. On his way out, Yeltsin put Putin in charge, and to Putin’s credit, he got an economy functioning via central control of Russia’s immense oil and natural gas wealth. He also brutally crushed the revolt in Chechnya. Putin gained a popular majority for himself, if not for the semi-gangster crew around him.

After the Yeltsin years, the Russian Federation settled into a “Presidential Parliamentary” system, wherein the elected president picks the prime minister and cabinet. He can dismiss both, but parliament can only dismiss the prime minister. This shifts primary power to the executive, and Putin has made much use of it. After being elected as an independent, he oversaw the formation of his United Russia Party, which has always won solid majorities, partly because serious opponents have been jailed or otherwise forbidden to run. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) serves as a sizable but still second-place loyal opposition to United Russia, while the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) serves as a more secure backup to the otherwise dominant United Russia. The LDP, as many wryly note, is neither liberal nor democratic — nor is it much of a party. Its politics are a mixture of right-wing populism and a monarchism connected with the Russian Orthodox Church.

Putin, closely aligned with the church, embraces the right-wing populism of the LDP as well. But his “conservative” politics have deeper roots. Some might think that as someone who was both a KGB operative and trained through a USSR law school, Putin might have some underlying fidelity to Marxism. If so, they would be wrong. How so? Note that Putin, as a KGB officer, had intimate knowledge of how the USSR actually worked. Then in the Yeltsin period, he watched the sweeping theft and privatization of vast state resources by the top sectors of the old Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) elites and their criminal hangers-on. If he had any illusions, they quickly evaporated.

Putin took charge in 2000. A few years later, in 2006, he visited the Donskoy Monastery cemetery in Moscow. He placed flowers on the new graves of three prominent Russians he had reinterred there: Gen. Anton Denikin, philosopher Ivan Ilyin and writer Ivan Shmelev. Many leftists will recognize the name Denikin, a military leader of the counter-revolutionary “whites” who tried to overthrow Lenin and restore reactionary rule. Shmelev is a lesser-known individual to us, but he was a popular Russian writer who joined the “whites.” (“Whites” was the term used during the Russian Civil War to denote the myriad counter-revolutionary forces. The “Reds,” of course, were the Communists.)

Ivan Ilyin is the most obscure and most important today. Ilyin was a Russian nationalist philosopher in Lenin’s time who turned fascist, even moving his work to Germany under the Nazis in the 1930s. Putin now has his officers studying Ilyin, along with Ilyin’s follower today, Alexander Dugin, a modern Russian fascist and favorite of Steve Bannon, formerly of team Trump. Both Ilyin and Dugin are theorists and advocates of “Eurasianism,” a worldview asserting that dominance of the central land mass “homeland” of both Europe and Asia is the key to world hegemony.

The point? Far from wanting to be a “new Stalin,” Putin’s dreams are more in tune with wanting to be a new Tsar of the Eurasian ”Third Rome.” The first “Rome,” naturally, was Rome (i.e., the Roman Empire), and the second was Constantinople (i.e., the Byzantine Empire and the Eastern Orthodox Church). When that center of the Byzantine Orthodox world fell to Islam, the Orthodox church moved north and eventually settled in the Moscow of the Tsars, thus the “Third Rome” to save the Orthodox church and all Christendom. Today’s Russian Orthodoxy, as well as Putin, see the main challenge to the church in the values of Western liberalism and the corrupting ideas of the Enlightenment, especially notions of equality that extend to the defense of LGBTQ+ people, the right to abortion and related causes. Putin’s jailing of the feminist rock group Pussy Riot is a case in point. A good number of U.S. Christian nationalists also look to this side of Putin as today’s anti-liberal chief defender of Christendom worldwide.

Putin claimed these departed anti-Lenin and anti-Soviet “whites” were “true proponents of a strong Russian state” despite all the hardships they had to face. He stated, “Their main trait was deep devotion to their homeland, Russia; they were true patriots” and “they were heroes during tragic times.” He also placed red roses on the grave of the prominent Russian monarchist, writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was also laid to rest there.

“Eurasianism,” as the term suggests, stretches from the Great Wall of China to the coasts of the United Kingdom. To unite “the homeland,” then, requires purging all of Europe, especially the West, from the “Atlanticist” influence of the U.S. and the U.K.

“Proponents of this idea,” write Anton Barbashin and Hannah Thoburn in Foreign Affairs, “posited that Russia’s Westernizers and Bolsheviks were both wrong: Westernizers for believing that Russia was a (lagging) part of European civilization and calling for democratic development; Bolsheviks for presuming that the whole country needed restructuring through class confrontation and a global revolution of the working class. Rather, Eurasianists stressed, Russia was a unique civilization with its own path and historical mission: To create a different center of power and culture that would be neither European nor Asian, but have traits of both. Eurasianists believed in the eventual downfall of the West and that it was Russia’s time to be the world’s prime exemplar.”

The task of purging Europe of Atlanticism — its various forms of liberalism, socialism and social democracy — requires Putin allies within each country concerned. Hence over the past decade or so, we have watched Putin’s growing support, both financial and political, for a variety of right-wing populist parties and politicians. The Pew Research Center in 2017 published a study examining the trend of Europeans who favor right-wing populist parties being significantly more likely to express confidence in Putin. “The largest increases in confidence were in Germany and Italy, where 31% of the public in each country expressed confidence in Putin in 2016 compared with 22% of Germans and 17% of Italians in 2012,” the study says. “Notably, the survey was fielded before revelations of Russian hacking in the U.S. presidential election and the subsequent increase in anxiety ahead of European elections.”

It continues:


Within these countries, those who hold favorable views of right-wing populist parties — like the Alternative for Germany (AfD) or Italy’s Northern League — are more likely to express confidence in Putin than those who hold unfavorable views of those parties. Just about half of those who give positive ratings to the AfD and 46% who favor the Northern League say they are confident Putin will do the right thing regarding world affairs.

In France, those partial to the right-wing National Front (FN) are about twice as likely as those with negative views of the FN to say they are confident in Putin’s leadership (31% vs. 16%). And those who view Geert Wilders’ Dutch Party for Freedom favorably are nearly three times as likely as the party’s detractors to express confidence in Putin (26% vs. 10%).

Putin may have miscalculated in his invasion of Ukraine, not only in terms of underestimating Ukrainian resistance, but also in terms of the response by forces on the political right around the globe. Putin seems to have underestimated the force of national identity among those trying to assert national identities and sovereignties of their own that they see challenged. This has traditionally been a difficulty for forces on the far right internationally, i.e., how can one be an internationalist when one is a fervent right-wing nationalist? As Jason Horowitz writes in The New York Times:

Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally party — which received a loan from a Russian bank — declared Russia’s annexation of Crimea was not illegal and visited Mr. Putin in Moscow before the last presidential elections in 2017. While she opposes NATO, Ms. Le Pen denounced Mr. Putin’s military aggression on Friday, saying, “I think that what he has done is completely reprehensible. It changes, in part, the opinion I had of him.”

Her far-right rival in the presidential campaign, Éric Zemmour, has in the past called the prospect of a French equivalent of Mr. Putin a “dream” and admired the Russian’s efforts to restore “an empire in decline.

Like many other Putin enthusiasts, Zemmour doubted an invasion was in the cards and blamed the United States for spreading what he called “propaganda.” Horowitz runs through a number of other European countries and their rightist leaders with similar results.

At least one voice on the U.S. right is standing firm. Pat Buchanan has written a string of columns backing both Putin’s nationalist and religious “traditionalism.” Even with the invasion unfolding, he explains, “Putin is a Russian nationalist, patriot, traditionalist and a cold and ruthless realist looking out to preserve Russia as the great and respected power it once was and he believes it can be again.” He favorably compares Russia’s takeover of Ukraine to Teddy Roosevelt and Panama. (Roosevelt’s administration orchestrated the secession of Panama from Colombia and blocked Colombian troops from putting down the rebellion.)

Tucker Carlson on Fox News has been carrying on in a similar vein with more half-baked notions. Carlson, who has been accused of being “one of the biggest cheerleaders for Russia” during the conflict, asked viewers whether Putin had called him a racist or promoted “racial discrimination” in schools, made fentanyl, attempted “to snuff out Christianity” or eaten dogs. “These are fair questions,” claimed Tucker, “and the answer to all of them is ‘no.’ Vladimir Putin didn’t do any of that, so why does permanent Washington hate him so much?”

So, what does this tell us?

For much of the left, exclusive opposition to U.S. imperialism is equivalent to being on the “right side” of history. This is frequently articulated in terms of the notion that the priority for the U.S. left must be opposition to U.S. imperialism.

The problem here is that, first, it ignores that the U.S. is not the sole source of global violence and oppression on this planet and, second, that there have been times when the U.S. left has had to focus elsewhere, e.g., support for the Spanish Republic in 1936 in the face of a fascist uprising and the intervention of Italy and Germany. This reality coexists with the fact that the U.S. had not ceased to be imperialist.

What our examination should remind us is that Putin is part of a global right-wing authoritarian movement that seeks to “overthrow” the 20th century. In Putin’s specific case, we are looking at a complete repudiation of the founding principles of the USSR, most particularly, the notion of the right to national self-determination. But what is also underway is the positioning of Putin-led Russia as a pole for the global right. Opposition to socialism, for sure, but also opposition to constitutional rule as a whole.

A mistake made by several anti-imperialists, in the 1930s and early 1940s, was to see in Imperial Japan a savior from Western colonialism and imperialism. It is to the credit of communists such as those of the Viet Minh in Vietnam, the Communist Party of the Philippines and the Communist Party of China that they could see through the alleged anti-imperialism of Japan and recognize that what was being introduced through the so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was not “co-prosperity” but capitalist domination under Japan and a racial subordination of entire populations.

We should ponder this history as we reflect on Putin’s obsession with Eurasia and the white supremacist, homophobic, sexist, religious intolerant politics that rest behind that one term.


Carl Davidson is a socialist writer and educator. He was a leader of the New Left of the 1960s. Today, he resides in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, where he was born and raised. His current projects include the Online University of the Left and Beaver County Peace Links.


Bill Fletcher Jr. is a longtime trade unionist, international activist and writer. He is a past president of TransAfrica Forum and was a cofounder of the Black Radical Congress.

No comments:

Post a Comment