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**FEBRUARY 20, 2024**
On the Prospect website
Prospect Live Weekly Roundup: The Biden Question
In our inaugural live YouTube show, our executive editor takes on the
hot topic of whether Biden should step down from the ticket. BY PROSPECT
STAFF
Dealing With the Bad Stewards
Bailing out a critical Massachusetts hospital chain should come with
some consequences for the financial operators who put them in that
position. BY ROBERT KUTTNER
The Unheralded Labor of Fighting Book Bans
Groups of educators, parents, and activists work tirelessly to expose
the costs of the post-pandemic surge in book challenges. BY JACK STYLER
Breaking News!
Tom Tomorrow brings you This Modern World BY TOM TOMORROW
Meyerson on TAP
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**** 'Useful Idiots'-Stalin's Then and
Putin's Now
Russian anti-liberalism won the allegiance of Western communists in the
1930s and has won over Trumpist Republicans today.
As events would have it, the news of Alexei Navalny's death came just
two days after I'd finished reading the second volume of Stephen
Kotkin's biography of Joseph Stalin, which covers the period from
Stalin's consolidation of power and promulgation of the policy of
industrialization
**über alles** (1929) to Hitler's invasion of Russia (1941). That is,
the period that included Stalin's war on the peasantry (conducted
largely through forced collectivization and famines) and his subsequent
Great Terror, which saw the execution of nearly one million Soviets,
including virtually every other significant leader of Soviet communism
and Soviet armed forces, on not only manufactured but patently absurd
charges of their secretly working for Nazi Germany. The book is an
astonishing work of scholarship, Kotkin having unearthed the minutes and
notes from countless sessions of Stalin's politburo and informal
meetings with his inner circle.
If he's done nothing else, Russian President Vladimir Putin has
convincingly demonstrated that Russia's brutal authoritarianism
didn't end with the death of Stalin, or Beria, or Suslov, or the USSR.
The through line stretching from tsarism to Communism to Putinism is
clear. Its common features include an opposition to Western liberalism
and a corresponding belief in Russia's mission as the guardian and
promoter of anti-liberal orthodoxy, though the substance of that
orthodoxy has varied from regime to regime. What hasn't varied is that
regimes based on orthodoxy defend that orthodoxy at home through
authoritarian, sometimes autocratic and (under Stalin) totalitarian
means. There were intermissions during the Bukharinesque 1920s, the
Gorbachevian 1980s and '90s, and the post-Gorbachev years of Yeltsin,
though the kleptocratic capitalism and national decline of the Yeltsin
period certainly paved the way for Putinism's reversion to the
murderous, authoritarian mean.
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There's another reversion to that mean that we're seeing today, and
that is the recurrence of Western apologies for that authoritarianism,
and even enthusiasm for it. It was during Stalin's reign that Western
communist parties were at their apogee. In the years between 1935 and
1945 (with two years out for the bad behavior of Stalin's alliance
with Hitler between 1939 and 1941), the USSR told other nations'
communist parties to make common cause with social democrats, liberals,
and just plain bourgeois parties to meet the threat of ascendant
fascism. In the U.S. and other nations, party membership swelled as
communists worked alongside socialists and others to build unions,
campaign for racial equality, and support the fight against Nazi
Germany. Those were also, however, the years (particularly 1936 through
1939) of the Great Terror in Russia, of the show trials in which the
surviving leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet state
before Stalin's ascent, having all been tortured and seen their
families threatened, confessed to having secret lives spent helping the
Nazis, and were subsequently all executed. Such was the zeal, the
blindness and obtuseness of Western communists at the time that they
actually believed this horseshit, or at least excused it as somehow
politically necessary.
Today, a latter-day version of support for authoritarian Russian
orthodoxy has risen in the West and elsewhere, this time among
reactionary nationalists whose base of support centers in rural,
traditionalist, nationalist, xenophobic communities, all of them arrayed
against what they see as liberalism's threat to their values. That's
what unites Le Pen's followers in France, Orban's in Hungary, the
AfD's in Germany, and the Trumpified Republicans here in the USA, a
large number of whom polls show to believe that force is necessary to
repel that threat. As was said of Stalin's Western supporters in the
1930s, so may we say of Putin's today: They're all "useful idiots,"
though some are also wannabe thugs.
For Trump himself, Putin-philia is more personal. It's clear that his
idea of proper leadership is autocracy and its accompanying use of
force. That's why he's expressed admiration not only for Putin but
also China's Xi and North Korea's Kim Jong Un. No larger ideology
clouds Trump's vision; all events are funneled through his sociopathic
narcissism. Hence his "response" to Putin's apparent murder of
Navalny, which was to allude to it indirectly and then directly compare
it to the malign abuse he insists he's the victim of by virtue of his
conviction for financial fraud and his upcoming trials for illegally
seeking to cling to power by overturning a presidential election.
If he truly believes he's the same kind of victim as Alexei Navalny,
he at least should have the decency to die.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
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