![]() For a few years, Germany, at least, seemed to be on the brink of following in the Bolsheviks’ footsteps, with Lenin himself anticipating that it would happen any day.Ĭompared to Lenin’s project, Putin’s has been reactive and intellectually incoherent. During the first Red Scare, Western leaders feared that reports from the newly formed Soviet Union would spark a chain reaction of workers’ revolts across Europe and America. ![]() In 1917, Western Europeans and Americans were shocked by the Bolsheviks’ abolition of private property and proclamation of universal equality. ![]() Like the Bolsheviks a century ago, Putin has been openly challenging European and American notions of what the future is supposed to look like. As Europeans, Russians are supposed to be like us, but following a different script. The Western IDīut Russia poses a different kind of challenge, rooted in Putin’s claims to represent an alternative vision for the West. Moreover, Turkey has a unique capacity to destabilize Europe by creating a thoroughfare for undocumented migrants and refugees from Syria and other parts of the region. Since the failed coup there in July 2016, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government has imprisoned thousands of journalists, civil servants, and opposition figures. Even Turkey, a member of NATO, is a more flagrant abuser of human rights than Russia. And now that he has consolidated his power, Chinese President Xi Jinping enjoys a level of global influence that Putin can only dream of.īeyond China, Saudi Arabia is crueler and more erratic than Russia and Pakistan is more volatile. China is a far wealthier authoritarian power than Russia. The fact is that modern Russia does not pose a great threat to the US, the European Union, or the West generally. From what we know, the Kremlin’s main objective in the 2016 election was merely to embarrass a rival politician – Clinton – and buttress Trump, with whom it hoped to forge a working relationship. But, given that Soviet communism collapsed more than a quarter-century ago, it is worth asking what threat the Kremlin really poses to the US. And still others suggest that Russia has sought to destabilize the US through the mobile game Pokémon Go.Īll of these claims are focused strictly on US politics, rather than on larger geopolitical considerations. Other commentators have pointed to links between the National Rifle Association and Russia, as if Russian President Vladimir Putin is somehow responsible for America’s many mass shootings. At a congressional hearing in September, Representative Gwen Moore of Wisconsin complained that, during the 2016 presidential election, she received a robocall from a speaker with “clearly a Slavic voice” urging her to vote against Hillary Clinton. The danger now is that valid concerns about Russian interference in the US political system will give way to conspiracy theories, as in past Red Scares. But, while those trolls certainly aimed to mock Western democracy, suggesting that they meaningfully subverted either of those votes is to give them far too much credit. ![]() Mueller having begun to unearth substantive links between members of the Trump presidential campaign and official Russian circles, a sense of Russia-centered paranoia is setting revelations that hundreds of malignant Russian social media trolls were active during the US election, as well as the Brexit referendum campaign, has helped to elevate this fear even more. Just when we are marking the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, another Red Scare seems to be underway, owing to revelations that Russia interfered in the 2016 US presidential election. The paranoid style in American Kremlinology As in 1920, the Red Scare of the early 1950s faded almost as quickly as it had begun. And yet, soon enough, congressional hearings and a television documentary exposed McCarthy as a liar and a demagogue. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin – whose henchman, Roy Cohn, would later mentor Donald Trump – established such a lasting legacy of calumny that his methods still bear his name: McCarthyism. Marshall to Secretary of State Dean Acheson as communist stooges. In Washington, DC, proceedings in the US Congress indiscriminately labeled renowned figures from General George C. American companies, particularly Hollywood film studios, created blacklists of suspected leftists, ruining countless lives. The Soviet Union’s development of its own atomic bomb, together with the “loss” of China to Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communists, fueled a febrile terror within the US that, in retrospect, hardly seems believable. The US suffered another Red Scare following World War II.
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