Bullying Russia?

 All week long I've been complaining on this blog about leftists who strangely feel the need to make excuses for Putin—even though the Russian autocrat does not himself identify in any visible way with the Left, and even though the global far-right (viz. Tucker, e.g.) have meanwhile embraced Putin's regime as one of their own. 

And lo, as soon as I was ranting about this phenomenon, it was back in the headlines yesterday. The victory of Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York's House Democratic primaries has drawn attention to some of her old controversial Tweets. One of them, which was still raising eyebrows this week, came from the start of the 2022 Ukraine war. 

Someone had asked why the U.S. government was bothering to support Ukraine. Chevalier apparently replied to the effect that it was because the United States just couldn't stop "bullying Russia." 

I was quoting Arthur Koestler's Yogi and the Commissar yesterday, and I here quote it again as perennially relevant. The West's anti-Bolshevik policies, he wrote, "invested Russia with an aura of martyrdom which was to persist even after she had become the greatest military power of Europe and swallowed half Poland and the Baltic States." 

We may make the same observation today, albeit with just a few of these countries' names changed. Leftists like Chevalier still seem to embrace the fiction of "Russia as martyr," even when it is bombing Kiev in the most flagrant act of aggression since the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia or the 1956 invasion of Hungary. 

To be sure, there are valid criticisms to be made of U.S. policy in Russia after the end of the Soviet period (just as there were of post-1917 Western policies toward the USSR). But just how many of his neighbors does Putin have to invade before he stops being seen as the underdog of Europe and starts being recognized as an imperialist overdog? 

Throughout his book, Koestler was trying to diagnose exactly why the Left could not shake its quasi-mystical adoration of Stalinist Russia—even as its policies in practice diverged further and further away from actual socialism, and it revealed itself to be just the latest incarnation of the classic Russian Empire in its expansionist policies across its borders. 

The same bizarre pattern is happening today—except, as we've seen, with even less excuse. Now, we have a Russian dictator in power who does not even pretend to be a communist or a socialist, and who openly embraces all the trappings of Russian nationalism, speaks with nostalgia about the Russian empire, and courts religious arch-conservatives. 

But this too, actually, was true of the Stalinist period, as Koestler shows. Stalin too rehabilitated Czars and imperialists as his historical exemplars. He restored the Orthodox Church as a symbol of Russian nationalism. And the ostensible Western "Left" went along with this as well; trapped in the same outdated framework of "Russia as underdog." 

The Leftist fellow travelers continue, Koestler writes, to "joyously sacrifice themselves in the name of Socialism for the Orthodox Church, for Panslavism, red millionaires, and the glorified traditions of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great." 

This remains every bit the unforced "self-own" for the Left today as it was in Koestler's era. The Left does not have to feel the slightest affinity for a government that does not even pretend to court them. The white nationalists and Euroskeptic neo-fascists who adore Putin have gotten much closer to a real evaluation of the character of his regime.

Yet, the "tankies" are still among us. The Stalinists outlasted Stalin. The Soviet fellow travelers outlasted the Soviets. They are still making excuses for Russian imperialism, still seeing it as a bullied "martyr" and underdog, "even after she had become the greatest military power of Europe and swallowed half [Ukraine/Crimea/Georgia]."