Hannah Gais , July 16, 2024

To Russia, with Love

The American right’s romance with Russia The Baffler

Roughly thirty-five years after Boris Yeltsin wandered through a Texas supermarket and threw his hands up in amazement on the frozen food aisle, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson experienced his own moment of unbridled awe in the bakery of a French-owned supermarket in Moscow. “Look at that!” Carlson cried, holding up a loaf of white bread and shoving it under his nose to take a sniff.

Carlson’s bizarre romp through a market in the Gagarinsky District was just one stop in his tour of Russia earlier this year. His two-hour interview with Russian president Vladimir Putin, much of which consisted of an irredentist retelling of Russia’s premodern history, drew international headlines. Less so his sit-down with the neofascist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, which Carlson released in late April on his website and X. In it, Dugin waxed philosophical about action movies like The Matrixand favorably characterized Putin as an existential threat to “progressives.” Carlson, for his part, said the Russian thinker was so dangerous that he claimed, without evidence, that Dugin’s books “have been banned by the Biden administration.”

Since Putin first established himself as “defending traditional values” at the start of his third presidential turn in 2012, a growing array of right-wing groups within the United States have looked to Russia as an ally in their war against the disastrous moral excesses of liberalism. Pat Buchanan, a thrice-failed presidential candidate, lauded the Russian leader in 2013 for “seeing the future with more clarity than Americans still caught in a Cold War paradigm.” Numerous prominent anti-LGBTQ+ organizations, including the World Congress of Families and the Alliance Defending Freedom, have turned to Russia in search of compatriots and allies. Even prior to Putin’s conservative pivot, Holocaust deniers, white supremacists, and other members of the U.S. radical right have linked arms with Russian nationalists, including Dugin.

But until Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, groveling to Putin and other Russian leaders was more or less beyond the pale within the mainstream Republican Party. (George W. Bush once described Putin as “very straightforward and trustworthy,” but later admitted that he regretted saying so.) Things have shifted considerably since then. With Ukraine now fending off the largest attack on a European country since World War II, Trump has promised to permit Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO country that fails to meet the alliance’s spending guidelines. Earlier this year, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, Trump’s pick for vice president, sought to quash military aid to Ukraine, calling it the “new crusade” of the same “experts” that invaded Iraq in 2003 after falsifying intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction. (Strangely, Vance’s paleoconservative invocation has not stopped him from endorsing robust aid to Israel.)

The institutional right, however, has at times been slower to ensconce itself in Russophilia. When several conservative hardliners challenged Ukraine aid, they found themselves at odds with other Republicans who accused them of blocking their own Speaker’s agenda. Even Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s nine-hundred-plus-page authoritarian manifesto intended to lay the groundwork for Trump’s second term, begrudgingly admits that “one issue today that starkly divides conservatives is the Russia-Ukraine conflict.” The movement may not be united on the issue, but this increasingly vocal camp of Russia-sympathizing agitators is a sincere expression of an ever-growing sense of victimization that afflicts the right writ large.

Weeks after storming the U.S. Capitol during the January 6 insurrection, the pro-Russian propagandist Charles Bausman and his family left their home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, for a trip to Moscow. “Seems like he ran out of town in a big hurry,” one of Bausman’s neighbors told a colleague of mine, referring in part to a string of Christmas lights that the family had left hanging on the porch. Over three years later, Bausman still hasn’t returned.

Even among the assortment of figures that I, and others, have covered on the radical right, Bausman represents something of an enigma. A former businessman and a Connecticut native, Bausman lived on-and-off in Russia for decades. In 2014, shortly after Russia illegally occupied and annexed Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine, he founded a website called Russia Insider, where he and a mostly volunteer staff reprinted a mixture of pro-Russia content in English, as well as original stories with headlines like “Backfiring Sanctions Boost Russian Global Influence” and “John McCain’s Latest Op-Ed More Brain Damaging Than Huffing Glue.” Over the following years, he built Russia Insider into a network of sites, including one called “Russian Faith” that focused on Christianity in particular.

At some point in 2016, Bausman pivoted to the right, publishing multiple articles praising then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, as well as the so-called “alt-right,” arguing the movement offered a “unique perspective” on U.S.-Russia relations. From 2016 to 2020, Bausman promoted or collaborated with an assortment of radical right-wing activists. He allowed a pro-Trump, gun-loving religious group, the Rod of Iron Ministries, and a pro-Hitler political party, the National Justice Party, to hold events at one of the properties that he owns in Pennsylvania. In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential contest, Bausman went all in on election denial. A December 2022 memorandum from staff with the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack, which focused on possible foreign influence around the 2020 election, described Bausman as “energetically promoting President Trump’s fraudulent election litany.” In addition to organizing multiple “Stop the Steal” events in Lancaster County, investigators found that Bausman posted nearly three hundred times between November and early January in a “Stop the Steal” Facebook group that he created. Even so, Bausman continues to describe himself as a “political journalist.”

If all this sounds a bit strange, it is. Leaked emails from 2014 show that Bausman appealed to a pro-Kremlin oligarch after his site’s launch for funding. I reported last year that he cohosted a show in 2023 with a man U.S. intelligence services have identified as acting on behalf of Russia’s Federal Security Services to manipulate public opinion. “Bausman’s actions were indistinguishable from those of a proxy for the Russian government purveying disinformation narratives to an American audience,” the staff of the Select Committee wrote. “What makes him remarkable is that what he did and how he did it were completely consistent with the Russian government’s long-term strategic disinformation campaign targeting the United States.”

Despite the ideological incongruities in Bausman’s activism through the years, one thread has remained consistent: the belief that there are a variety of forces attacking and oppressing Russia, as well as the international coalition of ostensibly traditionalist-minded sycophants that supports it. “Our Western media’s hunch is based on Putin as the bad guy. . . . He’s regularly portrayed as a nasty dictator,” Bausman told the Connecticut newspaper Greenwich Timein 2015. The purpose of Russia Insider, Bausman added, was to provide “a different point of view.”

As U.S.-Russia relations have deteriorated, culminating with the diplomatic fallout from Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine that has left the country cut off from much of the Western world, the content on Bausman’s network of sites became increasingly paranoid and bleak. In a five-thousand-word antisemitic screed that Bausman published in January 2018, Bausman wrote that “hostility towards Putin’s Russia . . . is largely a Jewish phenomenon, and has been for centuries.” Last December, Bausman declared that the Ukrainian government was “a Jewish globalist criminal enterprise” that “disposes it to hate all things Christian and Russian.”

Later that same month, Bausman went further, writing that “Zelensky is squarely on the side of his predecessors in persecuting the Russian people, the Bolsheviks.” The comment appears to refer to a controversial law that the Ukrainian parliament passed in October that would prohibit religious groups “affiliated with the centers of influence” of an enemy state. Critics of the law have said that it could prohibit a wing of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church that has had links to religious authorities in Moscow from operating within the country, though authorities have denied that its intent is to limit that church’s activities. The move arose out of concerns that the Russian government has been using the church to advance its own interests, though the primates of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church have denied this claim and point to a May 2022 announcement in which the church announced it cut ties with Moscow. “Both elements are Jewish, and both have an innate hatred for Christianity,” Bausman continued. “Zelensky’s neocon paymasters in DC and London hate Christianity no less than he does, demonstrated by their own domestic policies, whose example only eggs him on.”

The extent of Bausman’s ties to Russia, as well as his overt antisemitism, may set him apart from Carlson and other Putin enthusiasts. But the view that U.S. and Western European critics of Putin are driven almost entirely by some supposed animosity toward so-called “traditional Christianity” has found favor among much more prominent and influential conservative voices. In response to the October law targeting the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Carlson ran a segment on his Fox News show accusing Zelensky of being “a very dark force” for having “banned a Christian faith in his country.” More recently, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose refusal to support Ukrainian aid earned her a spot on the New York Post’s front page as “Moscow Marjorie” earlier this year, said without evidence that the Ukrainian government was assassinating priests. “This is a war against Christianity,” Greene averred on the now imprisoned Steve Bannon’sWar Room. “The Ukrainian government is attacking Christians. The Ukrainian government is executing priests. Russia is not doing that. They’re not attacking Christianity. As a matter of fact, they seem to be protecting it.”

If Fyodor Dostoevsky was prone to falling under the spell of “Russian messianic national exclusiveness,” as Solzhenitsyn once wrote, then the far less talented propagandists of the American right are driven by fever dreams of its unceasing persecution at the hands of its perceived political enemies. From blaming anyone but Trump supporters for instigating the January 6 insurrection to implying that the constellation of felony charges facing the former president could happen to anyone, the modern right thrives off a sense of victimization. And it sees Christians, or at least Christians who adhere to the right’s rigid, conspiratorial worldview, as the primary target.

“Today we are in another struggle for survival of our nation,” Trump said in a speech earlier this year, during which he compared the 2024 election to D-Day and implied that divine intervention was required to save the country from itself. “The radical left is coming after all of us because they know that our allegiance is not to them,” he went on, “Our allegiance is to our country and our allegiance is to our creator.”

These perceived threats against conservative Christianity have driven the right’s cooperation with Russian governmental and nongovernmental entities for years. During a 1995 trip to Moscow, anti-LGBTQ+ activist and scholar Allan Carlson found common cause with his Russian counterparts over their shared concerns of demographic decline. Carlson, in collaboration with the conservative Russian intellectuals Anatoly Antonov and Viktor Medkov, would go on to form the World Congress of Families, a coalition of conservative activists who oppose LGBTQ+ rights and see the perceived demise of traditional, heterosexual marriage as the root cause of most social ailments. Though technically multifaith, the WCF has long served as a vessel for the global Christian right to network and collaborate on a variety of issues, including countering queer rights and supporting the homeschooling movement.

For years, WCF activists have described Christians as embroiled in a global holy war between those seeking to protect the “traditional” family and the various forces aiming to undermine it. “Like Christian nationalists in the U.S., the global holy warriors appear to enjoy nothing so much as tales of their own persecution,” Katherine Stewart wrote in The Power Worshippersof her own reporting trip to a 2019 WCF conference in Verona, Italy. In staving off this “imagined martyrdom,” as Stewart put it, some pointed to Russia as a model. “I think this collaboration, cooperation, this synergy between the church and the state in Russia, is the key to the defense of traditional family values,” she quoted Alexey Komov, WCF’s representative in Russia, as saying at the same event.

Sanctions and travel restrictions have placed limits on the ability of U.S. and Russian radical right activists to co-organize events like WCF. Still, the mutual fondness remained. A 2023 article in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion found that “Americans who subscribe to Christian nationalism in 2018, 2021, and 2022 were warmer toward Putin, in part because they subscribe to certain views about America’s mythic Christian past and a vision for its future.” The same authors found that in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, proponents of Christian nationalism were more likely to say they respected Putin as a leader, even if they viewed Russia itself as a threat to U.S. power.

In his 1996 book, Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, political scientist Samuel P. Huntington argued that “in the post–Cold War world, the most important distinctions among peoples are not ideological, political, or economic. They are cultural.” Huntington divided the world into several competing “major civilizations.” Russia, along with several other Orthodox-majority countries and most of the former Soviet Union, constituted “Orthodox civilization.” The United States, unsurprisingly, is part of “Western civilization.”

Ten years into the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Huntington’s thesis has continued to demonstrate profound, irreconcilable flaws. “Orthodox civilization,” for one, is no more. In 2018, the pro-Kremlin Russian Orthodox Church broke communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, whose leadership is considered first among equals in the Orthodox world, over the latter signaling its intent to grant self-governorship, or “autocephaly,” to a church independent from Moscow known as the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. The move arose from a long history of Ukrainian Orthodox Christians vying for autonomy from Moscow’s influence—one that has gained additional traction as Russian church leadership has supported and lent spiritual depth to Putin’s invasion to an extent that is theologically indefensible.

Yet the urgency and existential depth that comes from seeing conflicts as rooted in irrevocable civilizational differences remains a core aspect of the U.S. right, guiding its defense of an imagined past Christian civilization. Here, Putin is an ally in a spiritual war against the amorphous enemy of “wokeness” that has allegedly infected Western civilization from within; he is, as Bannon said at the start of the full-scale invasion, someone the movement should praise for being “anti-woke.”

“Putin has effectively galvanized not just the whole of the non-Western world against the ‘woke’ West, but he’s galvanizing 21 percent of the American people to take his side against wokeness,” Steve Turley, a YouTuber and former contributor to one of Aleksander Dugin’s websites, said in 2023. The “21 percent” is a reference to polling data from YouGov earlier that year, which tracks whether respondents have positive, negative, or neutral views of various politicians. “All this goes to show how much civilizational language is resonating with more and more people today. The clash between the re-traditionalist world and the waning ‘woke’ world is for Putin . . . a thoroughly civilizationalist clash,” Turley continued. “It’s a clash between two mutually exclusive civilizations. One that promises to be a brave, new progressive world, guided by absurdity and insanity, versus the thousand-year-old religious-based civilizations like Holy Russia, guided by the bedrock of conservative tradition.”

Russia’s war may have religious motivations, but it is far from “holy.” The Russian military has damaged or destroyed hundreds of religious buildings, including churches, since early 2022. In Russia, authorities have punished priests who challenged the church’s pro-Kremlin, pro-war stance. Perhaps to Turley’s point, the concept of “wokeness” does not translate easily in Russian. You can talk about vouk-ideologiya(“woke ideology”) and vokizm (“wokeism”), but outside of a niche U.S. political context, these strings of letters in Cyrillic are largely meaningless.

The Republican Party is not yet dominated by its pro-Putin wing. Despite the best efforts of lawmakers like Greene, in April Speaker Mike Johnson—whose reactionary bona fides are hardly up for debate—forced through $61 billion in aid to Ukraine and partners in the region. What does unite the Party is its peculiar insistence that the left has conscripted an array of phantom menaces, such as blue-haired trans college students, to foil their political plans. In other words, if “wokeness” forms a civilizational ethos, it is only because the right has imagined it as doing so. It feeds the frenzied friend-enemy distinction it has embraced in an effort to eradicate a “fifth column” (to borrow Putin’s parlance) or enemies “within our country” (to borrow Trump’s).

Far from being a means of re-sanctifying the West in defense of “traditional values,” this offense against the perceived enemies of Christian civilization can still have a powerful political impact. It has served as an underpinning for a slew of repressive policies, particularly targeting LGBTQ+ people, in the United States and Russia. Throughout 2023, state legislatures throughout the United States introduced more than five hundred anti-LGBTQ+ bills, according to data from the American Civil Liberties Union. In addition to a pile of preexisting draconian laws targeting Russia’s LGBTQ+ community, in 2023 Putin signed a bill banning gender-affirming surgeries and preventing transgendered Russians from obtaining new identity papers. Then, in November, Russia’s Supreme Court banned what it referred to as the “international LGBT public movement,” declaring it an extremist organization. In March, journalist Alexey Kovalev reported that the ruling has already led to multiple cases targeting “people for rainbow-colored items.”

Ideas cannot be exterminated. People can, as Putin has demonstrated time and time again, most recently with Alexei Navalny’s death. No matter. For an increasingly authoritarian-minded right, the distinction is an impractical one on a strategic level. It may seek to tame its Russophile wing on account of petty interpersonal grievances, but it will never quash the resentment that drove that fanbase to fall in love with Putin’s brand of authoritarianism to begin with.