Russia – New Meets Old

In the meantime, the monsters and dictators grow as thick as fleas. They tell us who they are, and our leaders ignore the hard for the frivolous.

Regardless of what you think about the two-year-old war between Ukraine and Russia, the murder of a hero of freedom and crusader against government corruption, Alexei Navalny, inside an arctic Gulag tells you all you need to know about Vladimir Putin.

But no one should have required a refresher course. Mr. Navalny’s murder is only the latest evidence.

The lawyer-turned-blogger led public anti-government campaigns and demonstrations for over a decade and ended up as Putin’s primary political opposition, with his refrain that Russia was ruled by “crooks and thieves.” Over that decade, Mr. Navalny was jailed several times (the national media has labeled him a nationalist and a white supremacist) and then poisoned, which required him to be flown to Germany for lifesaving medical attention. After his recovery in 2021, he bravely decided to return to Russia, regardless of the risk of arrest or murder.

Back in Russia, Alexei Navalny showed the world who he was again. He was arrested once more and tried as an “extremist” and sentenced to 19 years in prison.  

Putin, the former KGB colonel, is exactly what he was then, today. By his public admission, he’s still basically a communist and “misses” it. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ensuing political turmoil, he finally gained power and promptly turned modern Russia into an ancient thugocracy. He’s publicly lamented the dissolution of the Soviet Empire. And, of course, he’s already murdered critics, even overseas.

Old meets new. Nothing ever changes but the names.  

That Western politicians are so gullible and foolish that they didn’t see Putin coming – or take him at his word – is the real surprise here. Who can ever forget when former President George W. Bush told us he saw Putin’s soul when he looked him in the eye?

Or former President Barack Obama – who did nothing while Putin grabbed Crimea – writing in his  memoir that Putin reminded him of the sort of men “who had once run the Chicago machine or Tammany Hall – tough, street-smart, unsentimental characters who knew what they knew, who never moved outside their narrow experiences, and who viewed patronage, bribery, shakedowns, fraud, and occasional violence as legitimate tools of the trade.” (I think the psychologists call that transference.) As usual, Mr. Obama measures the world by the surreal standards of his lethargic intellect.

For all the made-up drama and now-documented lies concerning former President Trump’s relationship with Russia and Putin, the fact is that the old KGB colonel fell silent after the President ordered US fighter aircraft to attack and kill up to 300 Russian Wagner fighters (here) as they advanced toward a US compound in Syria in 2018. Mr. Trump grew up in Queens. Say what you will about him; he understood the only language Vladimir Putin speaks.

Modern liberalism, as it’s practiced in the post-WWI West, breeds contempt and murderers such as Putin – like Wrigley’s produces gum. Time and again, barefaced thugs, bandits, and totalitarians rig elections by various means or seize power only to be labeled and treated as legitimate leaders of legitimate governments. Often, this is after spending years telling us who they are. An endless list –  Lenin, Hitler, Mao, Xi, Castro, Chavez, Hamas, the Taliban – fill in a name here.

Liberalism in the West has now bloomed into the politics of Pollyanna without the good intentions or charm. From Washington, London, Paris, Brussels, and beyond, the modern liberal state is suffocating from preening politicians’ posturing and grifting along with the media, concerned with whether men and women are interchangeable, if the right to free speech is even good for their “subjects,” whether we should have cash in our pockets, whether merit even matters since DEI is the new standard of excellence. Most importantly, they worry about the weather they can’t change. While they can’t control it, they can grow fabulously wealthy by talking about it. The stupidity rolls over the West like a tidal wave.

In the meantime, the monsters and dictators grow as thick as fleas. They tell us who they are, and our leaders ignore the hard for the frivolous.

[In 1984, while writing the US Government’s official reckoning of the rise and fall of the communist coup on the island of Grenada using the internal documents captured there during its liberation by US Rangers and Marines, it was eye-opening to read the hard-core Marxist-Leninist’s (both brands eventually attacking each other!), in their own words, mock the media and politicians concerning their “political” goals. They laughed about them, including the US State Department, ascribing Jeffersonian principles to the coup when they all had been publicly part of the “revolutionary vanguard” for years.]

One of the twentieth-century giants, another Russian who spent time in the Gulag, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, wrote prophetically about the West’s waning attention span and the loss of religious virtue and moral clarity. When God is deserted, darkness rushes in to fill the vacuum in men’s hearts. But today, even Mr. Solzhenitsyn might be shocked at the accelerated timeline of the West’s upward climb on wings of wax.  

Note to readers: Natan Sharansky, the famous Russian hero for freedom who wrote his classic Fear No Evil 1988  (here) and who spent nearly a decade in Soviet prisons – corresponded up until last year with Alexei Navalny. The Free Press’s Bari Weiss – https://www.thefp.com/p/navalnys-letters-from-the-gulag –  has published these letters and the originals, which provide a remarkable backdrop to the high cost of freedom of conscience.