Everyone who is everyone – within a certain political and social fragment – has been in Russia this past week. Conservative American conspiracy theorist Candace Owens; Errol Musk, father of Elon; toxic “manosphere” influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate; and Tommy Robinson, the far-right activist.
Robinson told the Guardian that he had travelled to Moscow “to see how this country got itself so well on to the straight and narrow and see the beauty of a civilised society here.” In the process, he was walking a well-trodden path of westerners heading to Russia to see exactly what they want to see. Once it was socialists like Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who found Stalin’s regime “the very opposite of a dictatorship.” In the 1990s, free-marketeers hailed the plunder of Russia as the apotheosis of liberal capitalism. These days, it is conservatives rhapsodising about Putin’s Russia being the antidote to degenerate western wokeness.
These days, it is conservatives rhapsodising about Putin’s Russia being the antidote to degenerate western wokeness
Of course, it is easy to accuse them of being taken in by Kremlin propaganda, and not seeing the “real Russia.” Yes, but only so far. Those advancing this argument tend to suggest that, outside the privileged environs of Moscow and St Petersburg, Russia is some backward hellscape. This is no more accurate than assuming everywhere in the country is as advanced and manicured as Moscow, and often rests on many assumptions and little real knowledge of that “real Russia.”
